User Reviews

. . . of NBC's DAV!D BRINKLEY JOURNAL, included as a "Bonus Feature" on Criterion's definitive 2014 DVD set for director John Ford's Classic Western, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE. Besides Brinkley, this eight-minute piece gives voice to a History Professor of the American West from England's University of Birmingham, whose name sounds something like "John A. Hogath" (there are no close-captions available here, and TODAY did not print any attributions on the TV screen back in 1963). This prof tours the town of Tombstone in the 1960s with members of Brinkley's staff in a convertible, then spends the final three minutes of his jaunt wandering through Tombstone's Boot Hill Cemetery. Several interesting and a few funny epitaphs are shown (such as "Here lies Lester Moore, Four slugs from a .44, No Les No More"). Three of the men buried here were police informants "murdered on city streets" (that's what contemporaries carved in the 1880s) by the Earp Family White Slavery Boys (or the Earp Prostitution & Card Cheat Gang), which is where all this ties in with the wildly inaccurate MY DARLING CLEMENTINE.