May 26, 2020

John Wayne: Towards Decrepitude

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[From Luc Moullet’s Politique des acteurs (1993, Cahiers du cinéma). See Table of Contents]

The first real appearance (Stagecoach, 1938)

Stagecoach (1938) is distinct in its sobriety and simplicity. There are effects but they aren’t visible. They are perfectly integrated into the continuity of editing. It’s the ideal stylistic exercise for film schools to take note of.

Even so, John Ford went for a flashy effect—just one—which is completely incongruent with the rest of film. It occurs in the first shot John Wayne appears in. Here is the film that will rescue him from oblivion and make him world famous. And how is he introduced? Firstly, notice that we see him eighteen minutes after the film has begun. A delayed entrance that is quite useful and well-planned: we have already heard much about Ringo Kid in the preceding conversation. This delay could seem normal: after all, Wayne’s is only the second name in the credits behind Claire Trevor, and as we have seen, it’s a good strategy to delay the entrance of the second protagonist.

But what an entrance! Everything has been smooth so far. Suddenly, without any narrative reason, there is a tight shot of the unknown Wayne all by himself, with the tracking camera culminating in a closeup, and the Monument Valley in the background, overlaid on a thunderous score. All this for a gentleman who stops the stagecoach with a hand signal, not for a holdup but simply to use the public service: to alert the driver…

We can’t think of a better beginning for a mythification. What’s curious is that it’s for a square almost unknown to the big studios, a handsome, scrappy giant, a sharpshooter trapped in Z movies of Republic Pictures where he had made forty mid-length features in six years. Ford seems to have wanted to create a star, his star, since they were to make fifteen films together in twenty-five years. The most faithful duo in the history of cinema. Amazing intuition, when none of the earlier films helped foresee Wayne’s abilities.

Ford places Wayne in the shadows—mythicizing darkness—as much as possible, while his partner Claire Trevor is frequently in full light in the preceding shot. One wonders if this doesn’t reflect a certain lack of confidence of Ford in the dramatic capabilities of his new protégé. Testimonies confirm this: Ford had asked Wayne to emote as little as possible, to stay impassive. Whatever the case, even if it was necessitated by fortuitous reasons, the mythification is no less present, and will continue to shape Wayne’s future work in a very perverse way.

At the end of the film, Wayne kills two villains within a few seconds. We don’t have time to see anything. As Wayne joins Claire Trevor, he is seen from behind. It’s only when he is very far in the background that he turns and lets us see his face.

(more…)

 

March 1, 2020

Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

Classical Hollywood didn’t need a reason to make a film on Abraham Lincoln, a national icon revered across the political spectrum. By the time John Ford made Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) for Twentieth Century Fox, dozens of movies were already produced about him. Ford’s own brother, Francis, had played Lincoln seven times on screen. But Young Mr. Lincoln, featuring Henry Fonda in the titular role, isn’t a prestigious biopic about the 16th American president. It’s the story of Abraham the inexperienced lawyer trying to find his footing in small-town Illinois.

There’s a dual perspective at work in Lamar Trotter’s script. On one hand, for the film’s 20th century audience, Abraham Lincoln is already part of the collective consciousness as one of the greatest political figures of all time. The film plays on this awareness by hinting at foreordained nature of young Abraham’s destiny. Abe decides to become a lawyer by the toss of a stick at the grave of his first sweetheart Ann Rutledge (Pauline Moore). He frequently stares at the ice-laden Sangamon river in the distance, as though heeding the call of a higher power. In the film’s final moments, he advances as a silhouette into the sunset. As he exits the frame, he walks into an approaching storm, the wind and the lightning suggesting the political tumult that awaits America in the coming decades.

On the other hand, Young Mr. Lincoln assures that it’s simply the story of a callow lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, in the 1830s. To this end, it minimizes the figure of Lincoln and instead presents him as an everyman unaware of what lies in wait. We see him judging a cooking contest, alternately chomping on an apple and a peach pie. He splits a piece of wood in record time. He plays ridiculous tunes on a Jew’s harp. At the first pangs of romance, he tosses a rock into the river. He has an awkward dance session at a ball with his wife-to-be, Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver). Before his first trial, he polishes his shoes and cuts his own hair. The Lincoln of Ford’s film is not the solemn orator of history books, but an entertainer with a self-deprecatory sense of humour. This minimization, in fact, only adds to the legend-building project of the film.

The film contrasts Lincoln’s straightforward persona with the pompous airs of those around him. In the first scene of the film, Lincoln’s co-legislator in New Salem delivers a harangue in which he promises to chase out corrupt elements from politics like “dogs from a meat house”. His speech, full of sound and fury, is followed by Lincoln’s. His head lowered and hands in the pocket, Abe delivers a short and heartfelt speech in sinking intonations, suggesting an honest language very different from the painted words of his peers. Similarly, the words of the prosecutor (Donald Meek) at his first trial, leaning on Biblical references and thunderous exhortations, is followed by Abe’s jovial argumentation, which is evidently on the level.

At the same time, the film subtly reinforces Lincoln’s essential integrity and rectitude. In his first address to the people, Abe is framed tightly, centred, head-on, and from a low angle. Sunlight seeping through gaps between wooden planks forms a vertical, striated pattern in the background to evoke a notion of uprightness. Abe interacts plainly with plain folks of the New Salem village. He trusts them to pay for their purchase later. He doffs his hat when pioneers of the 1776 revolution pass by in a parade. Ford’s Lincoln is the son of the soil, a herculean figure as adept at working an axe as debating in a courtroom. Throughout, Abe is associated with nature, the trees and the river, his understanding of law deriving from the intuitive understanding of right and wrong.

Like various figures representing the law in John Ford’s westerns, Abraham of Young Mr. Lincoln is a man of the book intervening in a society that believes in mob justice. When two young men from a neighbouring village are accused of murdering a local ruffian, the whole town tries to barge into the prison to capture the men and lynch them. To stop them, Abe poses himself between the crowd and the prison. He wields his imposing physique as his first weapon, forcefully pushing back the barging pole with his foot. He assures the crazed men he’s not there to make a speech, but he slowly segues into a monologue in which he appeals to the good will of individuals over the wisdom of the mob. A while earlier, when the prisoner’s mother Mrs. Clay (Alice Brady, in her last screen role) asks Abe who he is to help them, he says, “I’m your lawyer, ma’am”.

This double signification of Abe as a greenhorn as well as a master rhetorician also manifests in the figure of Henry Fonda, who excelled at conveying good-to-the-bone innocence without making it seem boyish. His blank stares often serve as a clean slate on which viewers project their own emotions. Fonda is self-effacing in several sequences of the film. For most part of the final trial scene, his Abe is merely a dark silhouette seen from behind. He sits on the floor, refers to books at the corner of the courtroom, and stands at the judge’s desk with his head buried in his hands. It is not until he wins the case, when the familiar figure in a top hat walks transfixed towards cheering, off-screen crowds, that his character assumes a mythical aura, that his Abe finally becomes Lincoln.

Henry Fonda was a tall man, 187 centimetres in height, six less than the real Lincoln. Few directors understood as well as Ford that he was a great actor of the legs. The filmmaker accentuates Abraham’s clumsiness by focusing on Fonda’s long legs, which seem even longer the way he wears his trousers up over his navel. When we first see Fonda, he’s on a chair, with his legs crossed over a barrel. This horizontal position—made iconic in Fonda’s later collaboration with Ford, My Darling Clementine (1946)—will appear several times in the film, most strikingly in the final courtroom scene. When Abe is reading a book in the woods, his head rests on a log and his legs are posed against a tree. He then sits up, leans against the tree and works the log with his left leg. He scratches his right shin as he mulls over the words of the law. When Ann shows up shortly on the other side of a fence, he approaches her and hops over the high rail with an ungainly leap. Ford captures the actor in many such unflattering poses, making the legendary stateman feel more human, one among the people.

John Ford’s film exhibit great pictorial beauty and the director had the uncanny knack of finding the most powerful yet unobtrusive camera angles and movements. More crucially, he had the ability to infuse his stories—none of which he wrote himself—with an eternal, transcendental quality. A sense of the supernatural marks his death-touched Lincoln. A poem by Rosemary Benet describing the maternal yearnings of Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother, opens the film. The spectres of his mother, his sister Sarah and his beloved Ann loom large over Abraham, who can’t but see them reincarnated in Mrs. Clay and her daughters. As he leans at Ann’s grave, whose demise is conveyed via a heart-breaking ellipse, the Sangamon river flows by in the background. This too shall pass.

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

January 10, 2020

Stagecoach (1939)

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[From my column on studio-era Hollywood films for Firstpost]

In a meeting of the members of the Screen Directors Guild in 1950, one filmmaker introduced himself thus: “My name is John Ford. I make Westerns.” This extreme understatement, coming from a director who had already won three Academy Awards, also aptly describes Ford’s modest, pragmatic filmmaking style. Despite making over a hundred films in a variety of genres, John Ford is most remembered as the maker of Western pictures, especially ones starring John Wayne.

Made in 1939, Stagecoach was not just Ford’s first talking Western, but also his first prominent collaboration with Wayne and his first film shot in the Monument Valley, an iconic location in Southwest America that will feature regularly in the director’s future work. In fact, the film begins with shots of the Monument Valley in which a group of cavalrymen ride towards the camera. They inform the commander at their outpost that Geronimo, a notorious Apache figure intent on burning white settler ranches, is on the loose. Meanwhile, a public stagecoach carrying nine people makes its way to Lordsburg through Apache territory.

            The literary quality of this simple premise—a group of people move from point A to B under great risk—is reinforced by the trope-like characters. The nine people aboard the stagecoach are all broadly outlined: the bumbling driver Buck (Andy Devine), the marshal Curley (George Bancroft) who has the authority to call the shots, the perpetually-drunk doctor Boone (Thomas Mitchell) who has hidden profundities, the timid whisky salesman Peacock (Donald Meek) who struggles in vain to protect his liquor from the doc, Dallas (Claire Trevor) the hooker with the heart of gold, Mrs. Mallory (Louise Platt) the wife of an army officer who is dismayed by the idea of traveling with Dallas, the suave gambler Hatfield (John Carradine) who has unclear designs involving Mrs. Mallory, and the scheming banker Gatewood (Berton Churchill) who has embezzled a large sum of money from miners. They are joined en route by a sharpshooter Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who has broken out of jail seeking to avenge his murdered brother.

            As with any story of people confined in a space, Stagecoach depicts the changing group dynamics, shifting allegiances and the formation of a chain of command among the passengers. In their own way, the nine represent a microcosm of America, their eventual cooperation demonstrating that it takes all kinds to make a world. In one early scene, the upper-class Hatfield, Gatewood and Mrs. Mallory are shocked at having to share table with the likes of Dallas, who was thrown out by the respectable people of her town for her loose morals. The morally upright Ringo, on the other hand, constantly accords her equal respect and stands in for Ford, for whom the shared dinner is a vital sign of the community.

            Stagecoach is set somewhere in the aftermath of the American Civil War. A former soldier in the Union army, the doctor is a man with forward-looking ideals. His ideas run up against Hatfield the gambler, a true-blue Southerner and a major in the Confederate army still hurting from the loss of the war. He even tries to kill Mrs. Mallory to save her honour when he suspects the Apache will lay their hands on her.

But Stagecoach is a film reacting to its own times as well. Ford was not a committed progressive, but he is responding here to the socialist spirit of the New Deal in the air. This is most apparent in the character of the banker, a figure looked down upon in the thirties as one of the factors behind the Great Depression. Gatewood is a libertarian railing against government intrusion into business and auditing of banks. “What’s good for the banks is good for the country”, he declares. While all the other characters have redeeming qualities about them, Gatewood, with his interminable whining and hypocrisy, never appeals to our sympathy.

            The film is adapted from a short story by Ernest Haycox, but there’s something European, particularly French, about its suspicion of mainstream society. It might have to do with the fact that Stagecoach traces its lineage partly to Guy de Maupassant’s short story “Boule de Suif”. Ford’s cinema isn’t particularly known for its affection for outsider figures, but Stagecoach exhibits a deep affinity for outcasts and deadbeats, conventionally unsuccessful characters who are “victims of social prejudice”. Perhaps Ford the Catholic saw in Dallas the fallen woman, Ringo the orphan, Boone the drunk and Peacock the unmanly a kingdom of the meek. In contrast, the Law and Order League, the group of society women that kicks Dallas and the doctor out of the town, is presented as a bunch of busybodies scandalized at the smallest gesture of nonconformity. When Dallas and Ringo drive away from the town at the end, the doc cries out, “saved from the blessings of civilization”.

            The critique of an exclusionary community is conveyed primarily through the character of Dallas, who is the heart of the narrative. All through the film, Ford emphasizes her pain of not belonging and her gratefulness at those treating her with dignity. Everyone, except the banker, eventually comes to respect her, yet she can’t become a part of them. Towards the end, when the group reaches its destination, Mrs. Mallory and company are taken indoors by the townsfolk, Dallas left standing at the doorstep. A contemplative moment finds her alone gathering her belongings from the coach. It’s a direct predecessor to the last shot of Ford’s The Searchers (1956) where it’s John Wayne standing alone at the entrance, incapable of taking part in the community.  

            Although Claire Trevor as Dallas gets top billing in the credits, history has deemed Stagecoach a John Wayne vehicle, and the actor has a veritable star-making turn as Ringo. He is introduced with an emphatic combination of zoom and track shots, the brief defocusing of the camera adding to the dreamlike texture of this introduction. But Ford mostly photographs Wayne in long shots underscoring his then-lanky frame. Ford’s characteristic low-level indoor camera positioning and use of architectural elements of the west produces a strong sense of space. With a large part of the film set inside the limited confines of the coach, Ford chains together closeups in tight shot-reverse shot configurations, creating intimate connections or oppositions between characters.

            These close-grained conversation scenes are set against two grandiose action set-pieces. In the first, the stagecoach is pursued by a team of armed Apaches. Filmed in extremely wide shots, the scene is thrilling in its action choreography, with stunt doubles getting in and out of the moving vehicle, jumping on and off horses running at top speed. There’s a shot from the wheel of the speeding wagon that has become a staple in chase sequences ever since.

Even more impressive is the final showdown, in which Ringo takes down his brother’s three killers. Firstly, the lead-up to the sequence is a masterful tonal mix that intertwines an episode of anguished romance between Ringo and Dallas and a tense, wordless passage of the villains waiting at the saloon, punctuated by a muffled piano melody. The shootout itself is nothing short of mythical. Unfolding in the deserted main street of the town and lit by harsh side lights that produce tall shadows, the actual shooting is suggested by the gunshots Dallas hears. The villain trudges back into the saloon, now full of anxious faces, and collapses, signaling Ringo’s triumph. It’s a striking example of high stylization in the genre that is a precursor to the baroque formalism of the Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s.   

 

[Originally published at Firstpost]

 

October 7, 2019

John Ford

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The Slide of the Admiral

Cahiers du cinéma John Ford special; 1990

7 Women

My article championing The Rising of the Moon was rejected in 1957 by Cahiers, who asked me for an article on Ford in 1990…

—

The first impression upon contact with the John Ford phenomenon is that of immensity: hundred and twelve feature films and about twenty short films. No other great filmmaker has been able to compete with such abundance. No one ever can. Indeed, Ford’s extreme productivity is related to, among other things, his activity in the silent era. Talkies demand more time.

While it doesn’t rule out familiarity, this high productivity seems to refuse the possibility of a synthesis. It takes four months for a necessarily incomplete retrospective since about thirty movies from the 1920s were never found. By the time the last work is screened, the memories of the first ones have already dimmed. Forty years have passed between my first contact—The Informer—and North of Hudson Bay, which I could see a few days ago. Forty years, almost as long as Ford’s working life. The abundance becomes a handicap here: you don’t dare to write on something that overwhelms you, you don’t dare to speak about it. From there to oblivion…

It’s true that this concern for thorough knowledge is a relatively recent demand. Should we go back to the principles of old criticism which based itself only on the most noteworthy works? The first John Ford fanboy, Jean Mitry, used to say that it’s stupid to want to watch all the films of a director. All the more so for Ford… Should we dream, like we do for writers, of a “portable Ford”? The hiccup is that no one agrees on the choices. It’s possible to imagine two books on Ford having no common title in their table of contents. In fact, the books by Jean Roy and Lindsay Anderson aren’t far from this this extreme hypothesis.

High productivity is an important part of the body of work that we can’t ignore or hide.

Even though, at certain times, Steamboat Round the Bend or Tobacco Road get preference in my estimation, I think that my favourite Ford is Seven Women, the last of the hundred and twelve films. Not only do I prefer Seven Women but I what I like the most in the film is its last minute, the triumphant suicide, Ford’s coda leading up to an aggressive, brutal laconism unheard of in his body of work and open to multiple meanings.

I fell in love when I saw Seven Women during its release, when I didn’t know it would be his last film. And I also think Ford (who had other projects at the time and wasn’t the kind that thought of retirement) didn’t conceive it as a testamentary film. It’s thus at once a natural expression—for Ford—and a natural emotion—for me—entirely related to the film and unrelated to the context.

But that it’s the last hour of the longest filmography in the entire history of cinema past and future, the very last minute of some ten thousand minutes of film (work of an old gentleman of flagging health) that moves me the most is something altogether stunning.

I wonder if I could ever, in life like in art, find an occurrence that propels me more towards optimism, a pure optimism free of dross since it’s produced by one of the most tragic scenes.

You’ll tell me it’s a choice peculiar to me. But it’s close to the current critical norm: the referendum organized by the Brussels Cinematheque in 1977 revealed the pre-eminence of The Searchers, the 108th Ford picture, over all others. It established the clear lead of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, number 109, over The Informer, once a central pillar, now dispensable.

There is also a very surprising trend in Hollywood cinema, where the late career of “greats” is always a little disappointing or withdrawn (Hawks, Hitchcock, Vidor, Griffith, Borzage, Capra, Chaplin, Mann, Preminger, DeMille etc.) I can think of only Mankiewicz who overcame this challenge, thanks to a somewhat anticipated retirement.

 

Though it would be adventurous to define the silent period about which we know little, it’s permissible to think of it as the break-in period, with some titles more notable than others (Hell Bent), and to say that Ford’s body of work really begins towards his fiftieth film, somewhere near Three Bad Men or Four Sons or Arrowsmith.

It’s the opposite of modern European careers, where the first feature is generally among the best, if not the best, and where one barely reaches twenty or thirty films at the end of the career.

This abundance has produced an experience, an incomparable self-assurance. In his early talkies, Ford seems to be a master of all situations when he takes on the most ambitious projects. It’s hard to imagine him anxious on the eve of a shoot, or during takes, or during the release date. Shooting becomes an everyday reality and loses its importance. Ford makes films like a baker makes bread. The notion of a body of work doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for him. He never lingers on the editing table. He never wastes time at the launch of a film. The pleasure of getting back with his shooting crew can become the primary motivation.

One could evoke Walsh in this regard. But he pushes this laidback quality too far: he doesn’t always come to the shoot. Reading his memoirs, it seems that screwing an actress or fighting with a rival was more important for him that the final product. There isn’t a thematic unity in his work.

Only Mizoguchi—a little less productive—can be compared to Ford. Moreover, it would be very instructive to see Oyuki the Virgin (1935) and Stagecoach (1938), its remake of sorts, one after the other since both films take off from Boule de Suif. Sansho the Bailiff shares the perspective of The Grapes of Wrath. The difference between the two men lies in the great care Mizoguchi demonstrated towards his scripts. On the other hand, Ford sometimes took them as they came, days before the shoot for which he was assigned at the last moment. I think he made no fundamental distinction between his films and those by others for which he shot some difficult shots.

Other differences relate to the pre-eminence of the individual—and women—in the Japanese filmmaker and the small group—and men—in the American. And then Ford was more a raconteur and Mizoguchi a storyteller.

 

Ford’s laid-back nature, which can account for his power, also makes for his weakness. The politique des auteurs found it rather hard to assimilate him since it postulates that great filmmakers manage to ennoble everything they touch. Now if, after the early years, we find practically no false notes in Hawks and Hitchcock, it must be admitted that Ford is something of a concern. He is successful with one in every two films. At sixty, he still finds a way to churn out three insipid works one after the other: Mogambo, The Long Gray Line, and Mister Roberts. Not to mention duds like The Black Watch, Wee Willie Winkie or Gideon’s Day: films that had no chance of success owing to the mediocrity of their raw material, made for money, the desire to travel and work as a team, the presence of a mascot or a pet cause.

We often speak about Ford’s eclecticism on account of the variety of genres he handled. But this eclecticism turns out to be illusory: no musical, no horror film. There is no crime movie except the mediocre Gideon’s Day. Clearly, Ford doesn’t like the detective genre. On two other occasions (Up the River, The Whole Town’s Talking), he dissolves into comedy. Admiral Ford is fascinated only by the navy. If he encounters the army (What Price Glory) or the air force (Air Mail), he diverts everything into comedy.

To distinguish the Westerns from the Irish films is vain: Indians and Irishmen are similar minorities, just like Mormons (Wagon Master) or Jews (Little Miss Smiles), and he sometimes pits Irishmen or Mexicans against Indians.

In fact, the eclectic quality of the scripts is almost always nullified by the polarization along some well-known principles: small groups, mothers, families, comical sidekicks, the ball scene, twilight figures from the last decade. Always the great outdoors, or the small town. New York almost never appears. With a little exaggeration, I could say that Ford has only ever made one film. We are far from the bulimia of a Duvivier or a Tavernier.

 

If one likes Ford, one could be shocked that the filmmaker had no political leaning except those of his clients, or whatever was fashionable. One would’ve loved to find something constantly, deeply moral, to trace anti-racist seeds much before Sergeant Rutledge or Cheyenne Autumn, in the first Westerns or in Stagecoach, to uncover a common thread between the generosity of The Grapes of Wrath or the sectarianism of This is Korea! or Seven Women. Notwithstanding some brilliant theses on this topic—Ford’s bonhomie softening the harshest features of almost all his characters—opportunism appears to be the sole truth. But is it really opportunism? Isn’t it rather a somewhat systematic acceptance, with no ulterior motive, of whatever the era has to offer? A concurrence with the silent majority, which sometimes he precedes by a little (Fort Apache)? Ford, like many first- and second-generation immigrants, has a principled respect for his country of adoption and its beliefs. The very fact of having taken the surname of one of capitalism’s greatest henchmen as his alias is revealing.

 

Ford’s power resides firstly in a dialectic between the presentation of mythologies and familiarity, the absolute and the relative, the thought-over and the lived, the moral and the picturesque, heavy clouds of Fate and hands on the ass. It’s the vigour and spontaneity of McLaglen, Fitzgerald or Ward Bond that help the spectral compositions of August or Toland push through. Not always: monotony looms large, and so does vulgarity.

The picturesque aspect has to do with the abundance of living beings (hence the small group), the multiplicity of their actions in the shot or in the sequence. Ford is perhaps the American filmmaker who has worked the most on the difference in dialects and accents (Doctor Bull).

The expression of mythologies is carried out either through the meaning of actions or through the photography: shadows, back lights, immense settings that diminish man. Mythologies in Ford become extremely dangerous when they are limited to themselves (cf. the clear failures of The Fugitive and The Informer). Photographic overload and second-hand expressionism make the films go around in circles, while most often, the image skilfully serves as the lyrical amplification of realistic everyday details.

We could, however, invert the proposition and assert that the picturesque leads nowhere without the help of mythologies. We have for proof the success of Tobacco Road. But that was an exception. Dialectic nevertheless makes for the greatest part of Ford’s body of work. Its two components can be found in the same instant or be linked by a pan shot or a cut. What counts is the variety of links Ford finds between them.

There are other related forms of contradictory balance within a film, or across films. It could be said that Ford takes wicked pleasure in doing the opposite of what he has just done. His greatest quality is concision, but in The Searchers, he does his best to make us feel the long passage of time involved in a hunt spanning many years, rendering the ideas of revenge and racism ridiculous. In The Rising of the Moon, from one sketch to another, he alternates the impression of rapidity and slowness for both characters and viewers. This probably explains his political fickleness better. Ford, the champion of the macho movie, the maker of two films without women—Men without Women and The Lost Patrol—that were perhaps the first of their kind, also made hymns to mothers and ended his career on a film almost entirely without men (Seven Women), the two male characters being a weakling and a monster.

 

We could define Ford’s art as an art of “sliding between notes”. Hence, the importance of dissolves and other transitions (The World Moves On, The Grapes of Wrath). The viewer shouldn’t realize he’s watching a movie and that the movie has already started. Often, moreover, nothing of importance really happens (Judge Priest, Doctor Bull, Tobacco Road, The Long Gray Line etc.). We wonder what we can say about the films, which sometimes leads to a negative judgment. All very classical values. After all, isn’t Ford the only classicist in the history of cinema worthy of interest? And our critical armada isn’t up to the task to deal with this exceptional case.

One problem remains: this precious sense of “sliding” seems to be the same in both the masterpieces and the failures of Ford. We nevertheless sense a huge difference in quality between them. We could point out the customary concision of a scene in Gideon’s Day or The Long Gray Line, but we could also wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better had he dropped the entire scene, or had he not made the film at all.

Ford’s art seems elusive, impossible to pin down. It’s in the method, but it surfaces only when the material is rich. It takes us back to a very old rule of thumb: to make a good film, you need a good script and then good direction. Isn’t it symptomatic that three of his best films (The Grapes of Wrath, Tobacco Road and, more obliquely, Stagecoach) were adapted from high-profile literary works? Isn’t The Grapes of Wrath better than How Green Was My Valley simply because Steinbeck is a better writer than Llewellyn? Ford is the opposite of Hitchcock, who often needed a terrible, totally unbelievable script (Psycho, North by Northwest) to be able to rise above its faults and outdo himself.

 

Why is it that the film version of The Grapes of Wrath has survived in people’s minds more than the book, while there’s no big difference between the two? Is cinema so weak an art that a solid adaptation of a good book can pass for a masterpiece? In contrast, there’s much higher competition in literature. Even so, there are more concessions in Ford’s film, such as the inversion that pushes the most optimistic episode at the government camp to the end of the film; and this immaculate, smooth-talking Fonda (Fonda is outstanding, but that is not the problem) who is clearly a reflection of the Hollywood hero, absent in the original.

The difference is that agricultural migration was dealt with more often in writing and almost never on film. But isn’t all this to the credit of the very idea of filmmaking?

The difference is that Steinbeck rubs it in, harnesses all the possibilities of every scene, while the film skims over the facts, taking their essence and moving quickly to the next scene. It has become the first road movie, a succession of signposts producing an unquestionable, objective curtness that limits pathos. But weren’t these omissions made in order to cut the film down to two hours from six? And isn’t it the scriptwriter Nunnally Johnson who’s primarily responsible for that?

Ford succeeds when he appears to efface himself behind others, behind the material of his films. Might his role simply be that of a supervisor, a mediator? And might not our concern for analysing Ford’s specificity go against the grain of his body of work?

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

July 7, 2014

Hawks/Ford

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Only Angels Have Wings

Straight Shooting

Ball of Fire

The Iron Horse

To Have Or Have Not

3 Bad Men

The Big Sleep

Young Mr. Lincoln

A Song Is Born

They Were Expendable

Gentlement Prefer Blondes

My Darling Clementine

Rio Bravo

3 Godfathers

Hatari

She Wore A Yellow Ribbon

El Dorado

The Searchers

 

July 3, 2010

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 2/2]

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(Continued from Part 1)

Fort Apache (1948)

Fort ApacheFort 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)

3 GodfathersTo 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 RibbonShe 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)

Rio GrandeThe 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 MasterWagon 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 SoldiersThe 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)

Sergeant RutledgeIf 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 TogetherTwo 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)

How The West Was WonAn 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 Man Who Shot Liberty ValanceThe 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 AutumnCheyenne 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.

Directed by John Ford

 

June 26, 2010

The Westerns Of John Ford [Part 1/2]

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Filmmakers, Hollywood | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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John Ford

John Ford 
(1894-1973)

Maine-born John Ford (born Sean Aloysius O’Fearna) originally went to Hollywood in the shadow of his older brother, Francis, an actor/writer/director who had worked on Broadway. Originally a laborer, propman’s assistant, and occasional stuntman for his brother, he rose to became an assistant director and supporting actor before turning to directing in 1917. Ford became best known for his Westerns, of which he made dozens through the1920s, but he didn’t achieve status as a major director until the mid-’30s, when his films for RKO (The Lost Patrol [1934], The Informer [1935]), 20th Century Fox (Young Mr. Lincoln [1939], The Grapes of Wrath [1940]), and Walter Wanger (Stagecoach [1939]), won over the public, the critics, and earned various Oscars and Academy nominations. His 1940s films included one military-produced documentary co-directed by Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland, December 7th (1943), which creaks badly today (especially compared with Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series); a major war film (They Were Expendable [1945]); the historically-based drama My Darling Clementine (1946); and the “cavalry trilogy” of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), each of which starred John Wayne. My Darling Clementine and the cavalry trilogy contain some of the most powerful images of the American West ever shot, and are considered definitive examples of the Western. Ford was the recipient of the first Life Achievement Award bestowed by the American Film Institute, and was the subject of Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary, Directed by John Ford (1971). He died in 1973. [Bio Courtesy: All Movie Guide, Image Courtesy: Star Pulse]

 

Mythmaker extraordinaire John Ford made over a hundred films in his career that now spans half of cinema’s lifetime. Even though these works cover a number of genres, Ford’s name has become synonymous with the Western. The Western as a genre originally had a specific historical context, but, as Bazin elaborates, it went on to become a narrative template, with its own clichés, conventions and myths – a form that needed content. Interestingly, Ford’s Westerns are a mixture of both kinds. The events in his films are historically particularized while the emotions that drive them are universal. Likewise, Ford himself is a historian and a humanist, a documentarian and a poet, a reporter and a raconteur. His cinema is an encyclopedia of American history, but it is also a treatise on human goodness. The eternal conversation between the human and the political dimensions in Ford’s Westerns is ingrained in the director’s aesthetic itself, where human drama is often juxtaposed with historical events (The latter may have given birth to the director’s semi-static compositions that serve the purpose of both establishing a scene and letting an action unfold in the same shot). Furthermore, Ford’s Westerns are documents about the evolution of the genre itself. No other director apart from John Ford can claim to have witnessed the evolution of the Western in its entirety. Each of his films carries within itself the spirit of its age, its cultural norms and the ever changing ambitions of the genre (In one early silent Western, the word “damn” is graphically censored while the word “chink” is retained. In fact, the self-censorship – or a lack of it – in Ford’s films helps trace out the general outlook of Hollywood towards many social issues).

Godard once remarked that it is only in Hitchcock’s films that the viewer remembers specific objects in the story more than the story itself. Similarly, Ford’s is a cinema which consists of a number of gestures and glances and, in the most brilliant instances, is made of just those. In the best of such moments, these gestures attain such clarity, individuality and grace that a comparison to Bresson shouldn’t invite surprise at all (Here’s Glenn Kenny on transcendental style in the films of Ford. Go figure.). To borrow what Donald Richie said about the director’s protégé Kurosawa, the battle in a Ford film is always spiritual and is won even before the actual fight starts. There is also something implicitly Bressonian about the way Ford uses his actors. It is a known fact that Ford casts the same set of actors very often in his films. The reason might be purely logistical, but the effect is startling, to say the least. By having the same actors play similar kind of roles over and over again (a technique that stands in direct opposition to Bresson’s, but nonetheless achieves the same effect, amusingly), he converts them from Method actors to icons, from White Elephants to busy termites and from the “signified” to the “signifiers” (to open a new can of worms). Beyond a few films, John Wayne didn’t have to convince people that he was a man from the West. The very image of him prompts the audience to take that as a given and to expect the only variation possible from him through his gestures, quips and postures, which is what Ford’s cinema is all about. This effect is compounded by Ford’s occasional tendency to be intertextual and to refer to his previous films through repeated characters, lines and situations.

Kumar Shahani once commented that it was just impossible not to think of the Odessa Steps or Eisenstein while shooting scenes involving a mass of people. Likewise, it is near impossible not to think of Ford while shooting vast horizons, especially when they are adorned by people moving in a file (Bergman’s Dance of Death is one of the very few shots that could emulate its inspiration). The horizon, along with the dusty skies, misty atmospheres and imposing silhouettes, helped Ford create some of the most iconic images and awe-inspiring heroes that cinema has ever seen. Even if the films themselves aren’t entirely successful, there are frames, shots and scenes in them that stay with you forever. Ford uses his musical score to multiply, rather than manipulate, the effect that an image has. His camera always seems to be placed in a position where the audience feels the maximum impact of a particular shot. But apart from these static compositions, what is remarkable in Ford’s films is his dynamic use of screen space that clearly shows Ford’s preoccupation with the material nature of the medium. His choreography and blocking of actors and deployment of action on multiple planes are two practices that elucidate Ford’s incisive knowledge about the representation of three dimensional spaces. If Tati made great silent films in sound, Ford’s early films reveal that he made great “talkies” before the advent of the technology (Ford is not unlike Tati in his judicious use of the screen area). One could go on about Ford’s genius and influence, but I think it is best to end this brief summary here – on the topic of silent cinema and talkies – for Ford’s cinema, like Chaplin’s, could well be just about the dialectic between “the image” and “the word”. The image in Ford’s films serves to mystify, creating larger-than-life beings who are worthy of worship. The word demystifies them, bringing them back to ground to reveal that these demigods are merely humans, living among us.

 

[Note: Many of Ford’s numerous Westerns are either partially or completely lost. By my calculation, less than two dozen survive and are in circulation. The following couple of posts deal with all the “complete” Ford Westerns that I could get my hands on]

 

Straight Shooting (1917)

Straight ShootingStraight Shooting (1917), John Ford’s first feature length work, is a terrific Western that would rank among his best works. A number of things that would much later be deemed “Fordian” seem to have had their roots in this very film. The doorway shots and horse-rear compositions, which would eventually open and close a multitude of scenes in the director’s future works, are all present here in their utmost glory. The directness and economy of expression and the lived-in authenticity of the film (The acting in the film is strikingly naturalistic, revealing the schism between realist and theatrical filmmaking and even before the advent of sound) would later turn out to be features that define Ford’s cinema. Shooting outdoors sure does limit Ford’s depth of field, but the director already seems to be attempting to employ deep focus so that large chunks of action can unfold with their spatial tension intact. At the heart of the narrative is the trademark love triangle of Ford’s and, from here, he would only go on refining the relationships between its participants. The absence of multiplicative music is nearly compensated by visual underscoring techniques such as circles and ellipses that highlight the key moments of the film (this was probably the general studio trend). There are scenes taking place during a heavy downpour that could pass off as Kurosawa but for the costumes. But the icing of the film is surely the close-up shot-reverse shot of the hero and the villain before the showdown. Ford has already cracked the code: The secret’s in their eyes.

Bucking Broadway (1917)

Bucking BroadwayBucking Broadway (1917) is really a screwball comedy masquerading as a Western (The film appears to have been written entirely around its climactic action set piece!). Primarily a reworking of the country rat-city rat tale, Bucking Broadway follows a young ranch hand’s journey to the city of New York and his subsequent attempts to win back his girlfriend from a fraudster in the city. This film might be seen as Ford’s petition for a cinema with sound and the film virtually cries out for a voice (Ford actually throws in a scene with a piano in the film). However, most of the humour here is slapstick and some of the indoor sets look straight from a Sennett production. There is no real tension between the characters or within plot points and one always knows where the film is heading (the film itself has its tongue planted firmly in its cheek). But it is probably here that Ford is on his most experimental ground. For one, he dabbles in hypnotic chiaroscuro lighting, which he would only rarely use in the future (not considering the tinge of expressionism that graces his films now and then). Then there are the glorious horizons, that Ford frames off-center (almost always at the top of the frame here, as if pressing the characters down), as he would do very frequently in his Westerns. Finally and most importantly, there is the remarkably judicious use of all the three planes of the film image (The final brawl scene at Columbia Hotel toys with the focus of your eyes and presages the breakfast scene in The Searchers by about four decades).

Just Pals (1920)

Just PalsJust Pals (1920) was apparently the first film Ford made for Fox Studios and the change is palpable. While the earlier couple of Westerns were transparent about their motives, with their trump cards being grand action set pieces, Just Pals leans more towards the sentimentalism and innocence epitomized by the films of Chaplin. In fact, Just Pals has a striking resemblance to The Kid (1921), where too a happy-go-lucky tramp is deeply transformed after he takes in an orphan – a scenario that would recur in many Ford films. As a result, the film is closer to the works of Capra than of Ford, with a preference for disarming emotionality over awe-inspiring grandeur. Given that the film plays hardly for an hour, it is commendable how much drama is packed into these precious minutes (There are at least three major concurrent conflicts in the film). Also noteworthy is how the film is more in line with the aesthetics of silent cinema than with those that Ford had developed so far. There are probably more close-ups than Ford would have liked. However, what both of them have in common is the strong sense of morality that would become the calling card for both Ford’s cinema and silent cinema at large. The film is fairly liberal and as inclusive as it can be. The love and contempt that Ford respectively has for socially marginal characters and the coterie that shuns it would echo in almost all of Ford’s Westerns that follow, where the conflict is translated to one between conscience and the law.

The Iron Horse (1924)

The Iron HorseSelf-proclaimed chronicle of the construction of railroad in the heartlands of America, The Iron Horse (1924) is a film that wears its epic nature on its sleeve. This is perhaps the film that the famed poetry of John Ford comes to the fore for the first time. This is perhaps also the first John Ford Western to recognize the often conflicting relationship between personal and national histories. An old man dies at a makeshift camp, two labourers dig his grave as the old man’s daughter stands mourning, the train carrying the rest of the company begins to leave, the two men quit working and join the train (“The old soak’s deep enough”), the girl watches on. The film contains many such instances of juxtaposition of personal anxieties with national ambitions – a theme that would permeate every substructure of the director’s Westerns. Other would-be Fordian elements that are present in this film are vignettes depicting camaraderie among the working class and sequences of barroom humour that implicitly comment on what law and order mean in these ever expanding, never clearly defined frontiers. The Iron Horse takes a sharp detour from the politics of the previous film with its text book conservatism and plausible xenophobia. Immigrant workers from Asia and Europe are the cause of most of the problems but they eventually unite when there’s a raid by the savage Indians! And all’s rosy once the national objective is accomplished. Ford would take a few decades to fully grow out of this world view.

3 Bad Men (1926)

3 Bad MenMenI’m going to go out on a limb and proclaim that 3 Bad Men (1926) is Ford’s first Western masterpiece. Here’s where Ford the filmmaker truly meets Ford the epic poet and Ford the painter. Set during a gold rush in Dakota, in the lands previously belonging to the Sioux, the film charts the attempts of the three titular bandits to escort the daughter of the decently deceased mayor across the plains and away from the scheming mind of the local Sheriff. Hilarious, eloquent, tragic, grand and moving all at once, 3 Bad Men is a fitting farewell to silent Westerns for Ford (sadly, it bombed at the box office) that embodies both the innocence of silent cinema and the splendour of Ford’s brand of filmmaking. One could almost swear that this film was a talkie, for the dialogue (much deadpan comedy and lots of sarcasm!) and acting here is highly naturalistic and it seems as if the director was all set for the sound revolution. But then, being silent is also the best part of the film because it prevents it from flaunting its biblical overtones and its themes of sin and redemption – a temptation that a few of the director’s talkies give in to. Rife with iconic shots, including one stunning two-way dolly that could sit alongside the legendary tracking shot that Murnau would pull off next year, and backed by a terrific 2007 score by Dana Kaproff, 3 Bad Men is Ford at his mythmaking best.

Drums Along The Mohawk (1939)

Drums Along The MohawkDrums Along The Mohawk (1939), the first talking Western by Ford and the first of the director’s Westerns to be shot in Technicolor, is also arguably the first failure for the director in this genre. The failure is especially pronounced given the fact that the film was made during Ford’s most fertile period. The film is set during the American War of Independence (earliest time frame of all the director’s films) and follows the life of a newly wed couple (Claudette Colbert and Henry Fonda) that’s expecting a child. With all its flaws and flourishes, Drums Along The Mohawk serves to demonstrate why Clint Eastwood is the most Fordian of all directors working in Hollywood today (followed by Spielberg who has been consistently revealing his indebtedness to Ford in his movies). One of Ford’s most cherished beliefs, as is apparently Eastwood’s and Spielberg’s as well, is the idea that the United States is a nation built upon great sacrifices and heroic acts of its founding fathers. That might explain why there are so many father figures (and, to a lesser extent, pregnant women and mother figures) in Ford’s films. However, here, the spiritual center of the film – the most critical component of Ford’s filmmaking – is almost completely hollow and the characters, somehow, seem to be sacrificed to uphold a vague, romantic ideology. But it is the Native American community that gets the rawest deal of them all, having been portrayed as unreasonable barbarians and regressive patriarchs. The shot of a bunch of women rejoicing, while pouring boiling water over an invading group of Indians, marks the nadir for Ford’s cinema.

Stagecoach (1939)

StagecoachTo say that Stagecoach (1939) makes up for the folly called Drums Along The Mohawk would be a gross understatement. It is one of Ford’s finest films and some might even call it the director’s greatest Western. It has been said that Stagecoach changed the way Westerns were made. I don’t know about that, but the film sure does take both the genre and the director to the next evolutionary level. An incisive sociocultural examination of frontier settlements, Stagecoach unfolds as a study of a bunch of characters, each of which would go on to become a genre cliché and the sum of which embodies a whole society. The motley crew is a mixture of marginalized people and bourgeoisie (a la Just Pals) the most striking of whom is a negatively shaded banker – a move that exemplifies Ford’s admiration for FDR and which presages the socialist spirit of The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Ford apparently told Wayne once that the actor just needs to stare at infinity and that the audience, equipped with full knowledge about the character he is playing, would fill in the emotions themselves. That idea is manifest in this very film. We know nothing about this utterly fascinating, almost otherworldly, being played by John Wayne. But, along the film, we also have this feeling of having known him for a long time. It is perhaps for the first time that a Ford Western utilizes what lies beyond its narrative to enrich its story – a technique that would be taken to the extreme in the films to come.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

My Darling ClementineMy Darling Clementine (1946) was made after the end of the Second World War and at a time when Hollywood was bitten by the Film Noir bug. As a result, My Darling Clementine is the first of Ford’s Westerns to go beyond the boundaries of a traditional Western to embrace other genres. Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday is a character straight out of film noir. It is revealed to us that he is a surgeon disillusioned by the uncertainty and brutality that marks his profession. He assumes a false identity, that of a rugged gun wielding gambler (!), to escape this existential angst and resorts to chronic drinking to forget his past (Kurosawa, influenced by Ford as ever, would resolve this duality into two separate characters in Drunken Angel (1948)). Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) himself is the quintessential existential hero, taking up the role of the judge, the jury and the executioner upon realizing that there is neither an established law to provide justice not a divine force to punish his brother’s killers (This character would be resolved into two by Ford himself, in his greatest Western). When Earp throws the drunken Indian out of the bar, he may have been acting out a historical truth, but it is also his way of imposing order upon a world that seems to have gone astray like his cattle. That is, of course, till he meets Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), who is the film’s binding force and its sole symbol of moral purity and progress.

 

(To be continued…)