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One of my all time favorites.

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good start, but then it gets ruined

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

For seventy-one minutes the film manages to fit in the deteriorating security situation in Tombstone as the camera flashes to the street for all the shootouts and horseplay. Compared to My Darling Clementine, this one is more easy going. Cesar Romero captures best acting over Vic Mature in the role of Doc Holliday, IMHO if only because Mature's part seemed overwrought, and the part of Holliday seems to fit Romero in a decisively more real way. Even still, the script in Frontier Marshal still caricatures Holliday as overly emotional, especially in the scenes in the saloon where he's purposely drinking himself to death because ex-flame Nancy Kelly comes in on the stage. Still, Romero was a great actor, and his scenes with Randolph Scott as Earp are a nice mix of two actors who had real naturalness. The B&W photography (Charles Clarke) stands out throughout and all the scenes in this movie are well assembled. It is over before you know it.

There is no way but to compare Frontier Marshal with My Darling Clementine. Charles Stevens plays the same part of the drunken Indian in both films. The story in both films comes from Sam Hellman and Stuart N. Lake. I liked Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday more than Victor Mature. Eddie Foyt Jr playing his father adds to the film more than the Shakespeare of Clementine. As for the women, Nancy Kelly and Binnie Barnes seemed better than Cathy Downs and Linda Darnell in Clementine. Randolph Scott has one of his best performances as Wyatt Earp. John Ford and Henry Fonda had greatness in them, it is impossible for Scott and director Allan Dwan to compete with that, but they made quite a good western very enjoyable even nowadays. In his version Ford added a touch of poetry, also he was more technical in the sequence of the gunfight. Frontier Marshal is a must for all those who think they have already seen everything about Wyatt Earp and the O.K.Corral.

What's most interesting about Frontier Marshal is the fact that it is clearly the genesis of My Darling Clementine, directed by John Ford seven years later. It is hard to view this movie without automatically thinking of the parallel scenes in MDC, and Ford's film draws heavily on the inter-relationships of Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, Sarah(Clementine in Ford's film) and the saloon girl, Jerry(Chihuahua). Other scenes are reworked into Ford's film as well…the disarming of the drunken Indian, dunking of the saloon girl into the trough, Doc Holliday attempting to redeem himself by performing surgery on a gunshot victim(in this case, the son of the Mexican bartender(in Ford's film, it was Chihuahua, Doc's `girl'), and a wandering theatric (a comic here, a Shakespearian thespian in MDC). This film is much slighter, with fewer themes and subtexts than Ford's and concentrates mostly on the relationship between Earp and Holliday and Holliday's redemption at the end. It plays out like a programmer, running a mere 71 minutes, so granted there isn't much time to devote to anything else. The themes of chaos versus order, civilization versus wilderness are only hinted at, and Randolph Scott is adequate as Wyatt Earp but without the underlying vulnerability(and humor) of Fonda's performance. The same might be said of Cesar Romero as Doc Holliday (for some reason changed to Halliday). He doesn't have the depth of Victor Mature's tortured Doc, in what was perhaps his best performance in any film, but the same self-destructive streak is evident as he attempts to drink himself to death, only to be stopped by Earp. Clearly, MDC was the more thought provoking of the two, but it cannot be denied that without Frontier Marshal, there would have been no MDC, or at least the one I consider a true western classic. What a quirk of fate that Ward Bond is in both films--the ineffective town marshal here, and later promoted to the role of Morgan Earp in Ford's version.

This was the movie which John Ford remade as his classic My Darling Clementine. Here, Randolph Scott plays Wyatt Earp and Caesar Romero plays Doc Holiday, but there are no Clantons or Earp brothers. Instead, John Carradine plays a bad saloon owner heading a gang that is trying to take over Tombstone.Of course, this movie can't directly compare to My Darling Clementine, but it's a pretty good western in its own right. Its one of Randolph Scott's better early roles.Many of the classic scenes in My Darling Clementine were taken directly from this movie, and it's very interesting to compare the two. This version of Frontier Marshal was a remake of an earlier 1933 version, and, of course, this story has been told many times since.The Maltin Guide gives it three stars. Check it out if you're a western fan, or just a fan of My Darling Clementine.