Fort Apache (1948)
Fort Apache (1948), first of the director’s cavalry trilogy, marks a stark shift in tone and attitude for Ford. It is from this film onwards that Ford’s view of the west becomes progressively unromantic. For one, the central protagonist, Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda), is gradually alienated from us. His actions seem increasingly misguided and the only force of sanity comes in the form of captain York (John Wayne) who acts as our mouthpiece in the film. Colonel Thursday is a prisoner of his own position in the army. He’s the first of Ford’s many men to show loyalty to external ideologies than to his conscience (“Tell them they’re not talking to me, but to the United States government” says Thursday). These men abandon what is essentially human for some vaguely defined concepts of glory and martyrdom (One can imagine how much Ford would have admired Stanley Kubrick’s first masterpiece). These are also invariably the men who believe in establishing hierarchies and locking people into rigidly defined categories that could systematically be manipulated and deployed (Ford’s reaction to such men would move from fascination to ambivalence to utter contempt, as is evident in his last Western). Consequently, the film, like most of Ford’s subsequent works, is full of petty rituals – ball room dances (compare this mechanical waltz with the divine dance sequence in The Grapes of Wrath), coldly worded field orders, automated salutations and bookish sentences. Ford would take a decade and a half to convert the cynicism of this film to a monumental tragedy.
3 Godfathers (1948)
To borrow Manny Farber’s terminology, 3 Godfathers (1948) is a very powerful termite that gradually grows into a giant white elephant (Compare John Wayne’s blue moon laughter in the first scene with his laboured theatrics towards the end). Yet another remake of a story filmed multiple times before, 3 Godfathers is the kind of movie that can pass off as a Sunday school lesson. Technically, Ford is at the top of his game here, walking through the film with ease, conjuring up one larger-than-life image after the other. But the film feels more like a showcase of Ford’s directorial skills than a coherent work driven by a vision. One also gets the feeling that Ford made this film more as an obligation and as a tribute to his one-time collaborator Harry Carey Sr. who starred in the film Three Godfathers (1916), which Ford himself remade three years later. Hence, the film seems more like a launching vehicle for Harry Carey Jr. that Ford was able to slip in between his cavalry trilogy. Complaints aside, it should also be noted how Ford manages to leave his fingerprints all over the film. At least, the first half hour is a complete throwback to Ford’s prewar Westerns. Glorious landscapes all over and even more glorious men cutting through them, mutually respecting lawmen and bandits of very high moral standards and the psychological tug-of-war they indulge in – one would think that the film just can’t go wrong from here. Sadly, it does. The last half hour is Ford sleepwalking though his material.
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949)
She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949) is the best film in the director’s cavalry trilogy and, with the probable exception of The Quiet Man (1952), has to be his most personal work as well. Here we have John Wayne playing the old Captain Brittles, who’s just about John Ford’s age, ready to retire from the army in a few days. Like Ford, he’s a man who throws his weight around just to show how rough and demanding he is and within, he is a child. He’s like Colonel Thursday of Fort Apache on the outside (“I’m ordering you to volunteer” he says – a phrase that would recur in Ford’s later films) and Colonel Marlowe of The Horse Soldiers on the inside. Like Kane of High Noon (1952), he’s a man who feels responsible for the lives of his men even though he’ll become a complete stranger to them in a few hours. Moreover, the film is also about ageing, about giving up one’s game. Captain Brittles is a man who’s seen enough bloodshed in his life. His fervent wish is to save his men from sure death rather than to achieve glory or exhibit heroism (“Old men should stop wars” he says to the old Indian chief who wants to stay indifferent). One can’t help but think Ford might have intended this film to be a swansong of some sort. The most significant scenes in the film are shot at (artificial, accentuated) twilight that so directly registers the dread of being left alone. Brittles speaking to his deceased wife at her grave might be more than a sign of affection. It might be of desperation.
Rio Grande (1950)
The extremely eloquent and moving Rio Grande (1950) is evidently a thematic extension of the previous couple of films in the trilogy. If professional authority blinded Colonel Thursday of conscience and protected Captain Brittles from baring it, it prevents Colonel Kirby Yorke (John Wayne, perhaps reprising his role from Fort Apache) from bonding with his son. But there is also a sense of inevitability that permeates Rio Grande. Colonel York burns down his wife’s nursery as a part of his duty and pays the price for it. He also stays aloof from his son for he is his supervising officer. He keeps demoralizing his son and tries to siphon off any pride that the boy may have in his new profession. The question here is if one could really break such a barrier, giving in to emotionality or humanism. This idea of free will being overridden by man-made hierarchies echoes throughout in the film. Soldiers exhibit comradeship and honor among themselves whereas they stand stiff and unresponsive while dealing with higher officials (“I refuse to answer sir… respectfully” goes the reply, as it would elsewhere in Ford’s films). Rio Grande is gloriously lit and photographed and each of its images looks like a painting, a moment frozen in time. In this film too, it appears as if Ford is expressing something that is utmost personal in purely generic terms. And Wayne brings such honesty to the character that, when he comes in all white, for once, with a bouquet in his hand, you wish the film ends right there.
Wagon Master (1950)
Wagon Master is what one might call a “minor Ford” (shot in black and white with no stars), but that doesn’t do any justice to this superb Western. Less a story and more a journey, the film follows a pair of ranchers (Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr.) who agree to escort a community of Mormons on their way to establish a new settlement. The crew on the road entirely consists of people relegated to live on the fringes of the society, the latter being just an arbitrary, prejudiced crowd anyway in most of Ford’s westerns. Ford’s most optimistic film, Wagon Master can be seen as the director’s vision of an ideal West – a place where all races and religions can coexist peacefully, a place where real joy comes from not amassing wealth, but by building a healthy and closely-knit community and a place where the only gold to be found is in the fertility of the soil. Ford counterpoints this vision of utopia by introducing the Cleggs family (which is sort of carried over from My Darling Clementine) that embodies everything that is lamentable about the frontier – racism, hooliganism and intolerance. Watching Wagon Master, one gets the feeling that Ford would have made some very great films (as if he hasn’t already!) had he taken to documentaries. Ford builds the film upon moments of commonplace magic, dwelling considerably on the everyday activities of the Mormons and upon shots of people travelling, moving ahead against nature’s odds and exhibiting a sheer desire to live.
The Searchers (1956)
Everything significant about The Searchers (1956) is off-screen, in its untold passages, unfilmed spaces and undiscussed possibilities. It is as if Ford was commenting upon the genre, and on his own brand of cinema, without ever breaking it down, as if he was repudiating the racist falsities hitherto bestowed upon the Indians by showing how much the white community shares those traits with them and as if normalizing the “demonic” acts of the Natives by presenting them as justified if done by the whites. The Searchers is a film with a mass of unresolvable tensions at the core, each of which threatens to take the film apart. “He’s got to kill me”, says Ethan (John Wayne) about Scar (Henry Brandon). He knows as much about Scar as he does about himself. What are Scar and Ethan are but the same person born on either side of the frontier? Both are old timers who prefer revenge over justice and who believe that each of them has complete justification to kill the other. When they look at each other in the eye, what they are staring at is, in fact, the abyss within each of them. It’s not just Ethan and Martin who are the titular searchers, it is Scar too. That’s why The Searchers is, at heart, a tragedy. Somehow, Ethan seems to know his condition and that his choice of an artificial racist ideology over his conscience (unlike Martin) has done him more harm than good. Consequently, the journey, like the film itself, becomes a quest to define, once and for all, what Ethan is.
The Horse Soldiers (1959)
The Horse Soldiers (1959) is set during the American Civil War and unfolds primarily from the point of view of Colonel Marlowe (John Wayne), an officer in the union army who plans to blow up a key railway line to disrupt supplies to the Confederate forces. Locating the story within civil war helps Ford to comment on the war without taking sides, unlike the earlier films. Also in Colonel Marlowe’s cavalry is surgeon Kendall (William Holden), whose mere presence irritates Marlowe to no end, and a prisoner Miss Hunter (Constance Towers). As in My Darling Clementine, the Fordian male bonding is between a doctor and an army man. Hunter sees the doctor’s profession as one that saves lives and the army man’s as one that kills. Marlowe, on the other hand, considers doctors as parasites who want people to be sick and, perhaps, his kind as those who want then to be healthy. It is only towards the end of the film that Marlowe comes to realize that his grief of losing his wife after a failed operation is no more sorrowful than the doctor’s angst of not being able to save a patient who has come to him for help. This sense of empathizing with the ‘other’ forms the backbone of the morally complex work that is The Horse Soldiers. When the confederate army is, actually, made of school kids and old men, it’s hard not to see the futility of a war that is fought just for the sake of wiping out one side.
Sergeant Rutledge (1960)
If The Horse Soldiers was Ford empathizing with the Tories and Cheyenne Autumn would be him empathizing with the Native Americans, Sergeant Rutledge (1960) is Ford making amends for the under-representation of the African-Americans in his Westerns (This near total absence of African-Americans is startling given that Ford has made more than one film dealing with the Civil War). Basically a courtroom drama uniformed as a Western, but also historically particularized, Sergeant Rutledge is Ford tackling the issue of racism head on. The film unfolds piecewise, moving from one incomplete perspective to another while keeping the truth at an arm’s distance, so that the audience is never completely allowed to vindicate and sympathize with protagonist Rutledge (Woody Strode, ironically given the 4th place in the title credits!). It is interesting to imagine how the audience would have reacted to this kind of a narrative structure in the pre-PC era in which the film was made, especially given that the central drama involves a young black man and a white adolescent woman – arguably the most scandalizing combination of them all. Despite the fact that the film has some pointed writing (“What does it all add up to, sir?” Rutledge asks an edgy Tom Cantrell (Jeffery Hunter), who is not entirely free of racial prejudices and acts himself as one might be led to believe, coldly exposing the latter’s disbelief in him), Sergeant Rutledge suffers from Ford’s heavy-handed direction. Ford attempts earnestly to develop a mythical African-American hero in Rutledge, but the effort seems more like calculated posturing than genuine legend building.
Two Rode Together (1961)
Two Rode Together (1961) could be seen as an unequivocally liberalist reworking of The Searchers that resolves the irreconcilable tensions of the earlier film and takes a clear cut political stand. One could say that this is the film The Searchers would have been had there been no man called Ethan Edwards. Ford makes this clear by resorting to a plot that resembles that of the previous work (There is much intertextuality in the film, with characters, actors and lines being directly borrowed from the previous film) and commenting very strongly on the racist tendency espoused by some people of the white community at the frontier. A white boy who was captured and raised by Indians is traded back for some weapons by corrupt antihero sheriff Guthrie “Guth” MacCabe (James Stewart). The white community is asked to identify the boy and claim him back. The scenario has all the uneasy trappings of a slave market and that may just be the point of the film. And the sharp character arc that Guthrie undergoes could well apply for the whole of Ford’s cinema. Despite its occasional flourishes of melodrama, there is much left unanswered in the film and its take on mob mentality, fear of miscegenation and domestic racism leaves one very agitated. And yes, Two Rode Together has the greatest dialogues in all of Ford’s Westerns that are delivered with such panache that the film feels almost Hawksian. The conversation between Stewart and Widmark at the riverbank, spanning several minutes, is a sheer joy to watch.
How The West Was Won (1962)
An omnibus film directed by John Ford, Henry Hathaway and George Marshall and starring just about every living actor that you would associate with Westerns, How The West Was Won (1962) is the kind of film that cries out: “Look at me. I’m epic. Worship me”. Indeed. Made for Cinerama and shot in such spectacular fashion (that it might have well set the trend for present day epic cinema), I can imagine how viscerally enthralling it would have been to see it in its original projection. John Ford apparently directed the segment on civil war that comes halfway into the film. With the trappings of an episode from late Kurosawa, Ford’s segment is an uninspired piece of filmmaking starring John Wayne, who could easily have been replaced by a John Wayne impersonator here. The film, likewise, could have been titled “How the Western Was Won” for the work seems more like a reverent pastiche of great Westerns through the ages than a conglomeration of myths about the Wild West. Conservative to the point of being laughable (and this might have really turned off Ford, given the kind of films he was making at that time), the film has two well made segments that hold it together. The first is the charming interlude involving Gregory Peck and Debbie Raynolds which is actually a romance dressed up as a Western. The second redeeming section is the strikingly directed final half hour, which plays out in a High Noon-esque, traditional fashion that infuses the film with a spirit that is missing in the first two hours.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The proper place for John Ford’s greatest Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), is not among Ford’s other westerns but among films like The Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Ordet (1955) and Winter Light (1962), for it is a spiritual work of the highest order. By the time the film ends, you almost get the feeling that all that you saw was a pair of eyes piercing the pristine screen. In the film, Ford examines what essentially comprise the soul the Western – Law and Morality – through three different embodiments of these entities – the good legal Ransom (James Stewart), the bad illegal Valance (Lee Marvin) and the good illegal Doniphon (John Wayne, a Farber termite, delivers the performance of a lifetime). The Fordian dialectic between tradition and modernity is at its most intense here, with Ransom’s civilization making way for Doniphon’s way of the gun. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a textbook for genre filmmakers on how to light, stage, shoot and cut a film. Every second of the film, you feel you are there, in the midst of the action, living with the characters. The film is like a stretched rubber band, ready to snap any moment, with every character pulling the film’s moral center towards himself/herself. A tragedy of monumental proportions (It is from this film that The Dark Knight (2008) borrows heavily from), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is perhaps the one film that Ford should be remembered by. “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend” says a newsman in the film. His voice might just be of John Ford.
Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
Cheyenne Autumn (1964) has widely been labeled as Ford’s official apology letter to the Native Americans for having usually cast them as bloodthirsty savages. If one follows all of Ford’s Westerns from The Searchers onwards, one would see that the film is also a logical conclusion of a trajectory. Cheyenne Autumn is a highly liberalist film, but it does not present a primitivist’s view of the Native Americans. Sure, it portrays them as a proud and peace-loving race, but Ford is more interested in treating them as a group of individuals who may or may not conform to stereotypes and perceived cultural truisms (“He is your blood, but he is not you” says the new clan leader). Actually, Ford endorses individualism more than ever in this film. He underscores the need for individual decision making and the need to act according to conscience. Elegiac in tone, as if mourning national and cinematic mistakes of the past, the film is almost entirely defined by its harsh, godforsaken landscapes. The central comical segment with Stewart as Earp should be disregarded for that’s how the director’s cut of this film would have turned out to be, even if it serves both as a throwback to pre-war Ford and as a hilarious critique of the racist tendency commonplace at the frontier townships. From Americans hiding in a hut from an Indian onslaught in Straight Shooting to Indians being imprisoned in a barn by the Americans in Cheyenne Autumn, Ford’s Westerns, spanning nearly half a century, seal the filmmaker’s position as a chronicler of both the history of America and the history of American cinema. Rife with, well, Fordian compositions, Cheyenne Autumn is a fitting, if not the ideal, farewell to Westerns for Ford and to Ford for Westerns.
July 3, 2010 at 3:18 pm
[…] (To be continued…) […]
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July 3, 2010 at 4:03 pm
The Searchers and Samuel Fuller’s Forty Guns are possibly the only Westerns I have really enjoyed.
I don’t know if it’s an instinctive, arational dislike of the genre or a failure in the film-making itself. I think Westerns rely too heavily on two things: the pull of macho dynamics and large-scale scenery. They hang flimsy generic storylines on to them without much subtlety.
‘3 Godfathers’ must have been used (I don’t know for sure) for Satoshi Kon’s ‘Tokyo Godfathers’
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July 3, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Ah, Stephen, but I love this genre. The macho dynamics of the genre itself has been deconstructed in films such as Red River and Shane. And you can see how Ford has used his landscapes for many different purposes. I feel you should give the genre another try (and specifically films such as Liberty Valance)
Cheers!
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July 7, 2010 at 7:31 pm
I have heard much praise for THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE.
I’ll be sure to watch it and report back.
Thanks.
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July 3, 2010 at 10:39 pm
In my opinion, Ford’s most personal work isn’t She Wore A Yellow Ribbon or The Quiet Man but The Sun Shines Bright, with Judge Priest as Ford’s conception of himself, but they’re all great films. Really wonderful work here (and I would add that I’m not sure why macho dynamics are a negative attribute in and of itself). I disagree pretty strongly with your characterization of ritual in Fort Apache as “petty,” what makes it such a revealing film is that it’s one of the first times Ford seems to be coming to terms with the fact that ritual and tradition won’t save him, or his characters. But I don’t think he looks down on these practices at all; in a way it’s all he and his characters have to hold on to.
And my God do I love Wagon Master. It may be one of my ten favorite films. It’s hard for me to define what I find so stirring about it, but there’s something so accidental and beyond us going on in the film. I’d like to imagine it’s what Heaven looks like. I really love how you characterize The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as a spiritual work too; it reminds me of Dreyer’s Gertrud more than anything. Wagon Master remains my favorite, but I’d have no problem if he was remembered for Valance. It’s a film that haunts.
I really love the way you write about Ford, at least in the States he is often discussed as somewhat archaic and idiosyncratic; his critical reputation ain’t what it used to be. It’s so refreshing reading someone trying to make sense of the poetry in such an open way.
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July 4, 2010 at 10:05 am
Thank you so much, Doniphon. I’m yet to see The Sun Shines Bright, but I do see it is one of Ford’s most cherished films.
I really like and am intrigued when you say “…it’s all he and his characters have to hold on to.” I could see this unresolvable tension between tradition and modernity in Rio Grande and onwards. But I always felt that he was critical of Thursday for not doing what was right and sticking to what his employers say is right. The slightly cynical coda to the Fort Apache felt very convincing in this regard.
And I feel Wagon Master is the kind of work filmmakers today should be attempting to emulate. This film is the perfect antidote to the nihilism of modern day industrial cinema.
Cheers!
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July 4, 2010 at 2:35 am
Yet another incomparable multi-part consideration of one of America’s pre-eminent artists. I am most assuredly in a Western sort of mood as of late for various reasons, and reading through this exquisitely penned and authoritative capsules, I think both McBride and Gallagher have some competition. I won’t get in the middle of what is Ford’s most “personal” film (as an argument could convincingly be made for any of the three discuss here by you and Donophon, though I think THE QUIET MAN would be the one I would favor) but I am especially intrigued by teh spiritual discussion in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERT VALANCE, where you discuss Bresson’s DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST and Dreyer as thematic companion pieces.
I also love WAGON MASTER, (another deeply personal film of Ford’s) which is distinctly poetic, and I favor RIO GRANDE as the best of the trilogy, though I can’t blame you for going with YELLOW RIBBON.
I’m trying to establish parallels between the use of landscape (in both Ford and Anthony Mann pictures–as I’m attending every film in an Mann festical in NYC for three weeks) but of course Ford’s aims aren’t quite as pyshological as Mann’s, but rather more overtly mythical, political and historical.
THE SEARCHERS is indeed the greatest western of all-time, and CHEYANNE AUTUMN, which no masterpiece by a stretch, is often unfairly maligned.
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July 4, 2010 at 2:57 am
Sam, have you ever seen Gold Of The Seven Saints? It’s one of the great westerns (although criminally unseen), and I think you’d find it particularly interesting because Douglas uses the landscape like Mann did, except the landscape in the film is Monument Valley.
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July 4, 2010 at 10:13 am
Aha, had never heard of Gold Of The Seven Saints. I’m adding it to my Western queue right now. Thanks, Doniphon.
P.S: Also in the queue is Sweetgrass. It sounds a bit like Wagon Master. Doniphon, I think you’ll love it (and we will too). Let’s see if it gets a home video release soon.
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July 5, 2010 at 9:07 am
Alas Donophon, I have not seen the film, though I’ve read about it. You make it most appetizing and I will most assuredly seek it out.
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July 4, 2010 at 10:08 am
You’re too generous, Sam. I am yet to read the books by McBride and Gallagher, but I think I’ll put them on hold until I see some more fo Ford’s films.
I did see that you’re enjoying the Mann retro to no end. To say that I’m jealous is an understatement. I’m yet to see a single Western by Mann or Peckinpah (Heck, I haven’t seen a single film of theirs!), but I’m hoping I can correct that soon.
Thanks and Cheers!
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July 4, 2010 at 2:39 am
Oh and I do love Manny Farber’s terminology for 3 GODFATHERS! Ha!
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July 4, 2010 at 3:18 am
Incisive as usual – Ford was a genius because the system let him become one. Not many film makers would be capable of directing 4-5 films a year these days – most struggle to direct one every two to three years. Ford’s output was prolific yet he showed a consistency which is indicative of how he learned to become good at what he loved – directing westerns. As for The Searchers, an out and out masterpiece and for me personally it still has one of the great end shots to a movie; I have always admired how Ford used the doorway to frame the shot and the closing of the door, well, one only needs to look at The final shot of Coppola’s The Godfather to see the striking similarities; a master in awe of another master I guess. Excellent work JAFB.
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July 4, 2010 at 10:19 am
Omar, excellent comparison there. Had never occurred to me. The influence is highly likely. One excludes the protagonist from a new world while the other seals him into it.
Yes, so prolific. It’s as if filmmaking was a natural instinct for Ford. I think like Eastwood, he liked to make one film for the studio and one for himself, in tandem. Only that Ford’s seems more successful in the process than Eastwood. As I said, even if a film fails on the whole, there are passages that stun you.
Cheers!
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July 6, 2010 at 8:03 am
[…] Just Another Film Buff has followed up his magisterial treatment of John Ford’s earlier films with yet another brilliant multi-part post on the middle to later films. It includes of course most of the seminal director’s masterpieces. Is as essential a post as you’re likely to find anywhere by anyone: https://theseventhart.info/2010/07/03/the-westerns-of-john-ford-part-22/ […]
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July 12, 2010 at 7:37 am
[…] Just Another Film Buff has followed up his magisterial treatment of John Ford’s earlier films with yet another brilliant multi-part post on the middle to later films. It includes of course most of the seminal director’s masterpieces. Is as essential a post as you’re likely to find anywhere by anyone: https://theseventhart.info/2010/07/03/the-westerns-of-john-ford-part-22/ […]
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January 6, 2011 at 3:17 am
astute observations as I’ve ever read…over half a century ago, as a kid, saw Searchers in the theater and knew it was special; about 7 years later went to the movies to see Mickey and Roger in “Safe At Home” but the second feature, “Valance,” made me forget about baseball and Mantle. I think Bogdonovich claimed that at the end of Valance when we see the steam locomotive, it marks the end of the golden age of cinema.
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January 6, 2011 at 7:31 am
Thank you Ken. What a wonderful quote by PB! There are a few films that move me beyond words. VALENCE is one of them. Thanks for sharing it.
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