I TiVo'd My Darling Clementine on TCM or AMC or something, and watched it this morning. I've seen it twice or thrice before, but this is the first time I remember noticing that two fires get set in the course of Wyatt Earp stopping violent drunks... and nobody seems to notice. These fires get set, and seem to go up pretty quickly, and the scene just wraps up with nobody so much as grabbing a bucket of water or... saying anything.

Seems like a bad policy when your buildings are all made out of untreated, desert-parched timber.

I wrote a paper in a college film class about the use of fire in a later John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Fire was used as a sort of icon of the John Wayne character's violent courage, the smooth way he lit his cigarette in the chimney of a lantern while he held it in his mouth, and later it transformed into self-destructive fury. I can't decide whether there's a connection, or John Ford just decided it would be fun to put fire on film in a couple Clementine shots. At the time, it just seems like the chaos of the moment... but both instances in Clementine happen under nearly identical circumstances.

Ah well. Burn, baby, burn!