This Sunday’s issue of Arts and Leisure in the New York Times is devoted to the upcoming season, so there’s no DVD column from me — though I do have an interview with the redoubtable Lars von Trier on the subject of his upcoming “Antichrist,” as well as a scrupulously unopinionated list of all the theatrical releases coming up between now and the end of the year.
I’m back from the Venice Film Festival, where Samuel Maoz’s Isreali film “Lebanon” won the Golden Lion, and Todd Solondz had to content himself with a best screenplay prize for his excellent “Life During Wartime.” For me, most of the revelations in the festival came in the series of recently restored Italian films curated by Sergio Toffetti of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a program that ranged from such curiosities as Giorgio Simonelli’s “Accidenti alla guerra! . . .,” a 1948 slapstick comedy that takes a look at the lighter side of the Nazi eugenics program, to a handsome new print of Luciano Emmer’s 1961 masterpiece “La ragazza in vetrina.” The true jaw-dropper was Raffaello Matarazzo’s long lost “La nave delle donne maldette” (“The Ship of Damned Women”) of 1953, now pieced together from various fragmentary prints and digitally restored to an approximation of its original color. Reportedly the most radical work of a filmmaker sometimes described as the Italian Douglas Sirk, it’s a period melodrama that moves with impressive formal precision toward an orgiastic climax: a mid-Atlantic mutiny led by a legion of female prisoners who use the only weapons available to them — their bodies — to convince the crew to support their cause. Astonishing stuff from a filmmaker who clearly merits further investigation.
And speaking of ratios, Fox movie channel does show THE RAID from time to time, so if you keep an eye you could see it, and in the right ratio.
I add that note becaus Fox spliced in the Cinemascope logo, at least in the version I taped, but the film is not in ‘Scope. Panoramic Pictures (Leonard Goldstein’s production company) was kind of a Fox subsidiary and even when Fox mandated ‘Scope for its own studio production, it wasn’t the case for these, at least initially. THE RAID is not in ‘Scope, in case anyone sees this and wonders about it. I can vouch for that from seeing it in 1954 as well.
There’s a scene in APACHE DRUMS which was later copied, virtually shot for shot, by Cyril Endfield in ZULU.
Might not Sydney Boehm’ script for the 1954 BLACK TUESDAY have drawn on Davis Grubb’s 1953 NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (a best seller)?
In what formats is BLACK TUESDAY available?
Great Ford cinematographers: Joe August, Gregg Toland,
Arthur Miller, George Schneiderman, Bert Glennon, Winton Hoch, William Clothier, Joseph LaShelle. Ford once described himself
as the best cameraman in the business, so it’s no
accident that his DPs always did good work!
Stephen -
With the Spanish DVDs it depends on the company, although some stuff has been put out by the majors themselves like “Way of a Gaucho” (Fox) or “Shockproof” (Sony). Two specialized companies that license movies from majors for their territory which I’ve found reliable are Manga (e.g. much 40s RKO) and Suevia (e.g. “Wichita”).
Thanks, Christoph. Actually, I forgot — I do have Suevia’s DVD of ANNE OF THE INDIES, and it looks nice.
It´s funny that Spain is probably the worst country in the world to see a film in a theatre (because they don´t release anything) and one of the best to buy dvd´s. There are incredible boxes and terrific editions.
I don´t know if we are too lazy or too incompetent
However, for those who prefer seeing films at home rather than in the theaters (re: discussion of a few weeks ago), Spain becomes the vanguard place to be.
Is spainish Dvd productivity similar to its CD productivity because of a looser interpretation of copyright law or why do the conglomerates not care?
I did a bad thing and put some screen caps of the new “Wagon Master” up on my blog, I think they tell a delightful story.
http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2009/09/wagon-master-john-ford-1950.html#more
I found the Editions Montparnasse version dreadful, full of combing. This version’s just…a dream, really.
In his review of JENNIFER’S BODY, A.O. Scott observes, “coherence has never been a significant criterion for horror movies. If it were, we could forget about Dario Argento and Brian De Palma, half of Hitchcock and most of the entries in the ‘Friday the 13th’ series.” I have have all of Hitchcock’s extant work, most of them several times, and have never noticed this incoherence to which Tony alludes. Can anyone enlighten me about this until-now-undetected flaw in the master’s oeuvre?
Have seen, he meant to say.
Michael. I’m still working on how Hitchcock’s films qualify as horror movies. But then again, coherence has never been a signifcant criterion in Scott’s thinking.
Michael, Barry — I’m not so comfortable with discussing A.O. Scott’s reviews as long as he’s not around to join the conversation. Maybe we should stick to abusing present company.
Glenn, ALL the Editions Montparnasse I own are interlaced and full of combing, and edge enhanced from analogue sources. Possibly their very worst offender is The Big Sky – a real pity as the elements for the basic “cut” version look quite good – the Bill Krohn “long” version added footage is from 16mm of course but it looks cleaner!
Mr. McBride forgot to mention Gabriel Figueroa who worked with Ford on THE FUGITIVE and who Ford himself called at one time, the best DP he worked with.
Glad to see that someone else recalls “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.” Not quite the movie it could have been, but there are some great scenes: Cagney’s encounter with the milk bottle in the supermarket, the entrapment of crooked cop Ward Bond, etc. IIRC, a good deal of the madness of the Horace McCoy novel is captured.
Barry, Steve… if Spain were a great place for cinema (e.g.) Victor Erice´s filmography wouldn´t be so scarce and we couldn´t find so many bad Spanish films released in theaters granted by administration funds thanks to a “curious” law that defends “native talents” even if that talent is exactly zero and remember cinephiles that look in the internet for foreigner films – that French or German or Swedish people can perfectly find (belatedly or not) – that we are doing something illegal and really bad.
You’re right, Arthur, THE FUGITIVE is a beautifully-photographed film. One can almost make a case for it as a visual essay on totalitarianism. If you can overlook the egregious miscasting of Henry Fonda as a Mexican priest, etc. Ford once said he thought his best-photographed film was CHEYENNE AUTUMN (William Clothier). It’s stunning in 35mm widescreen, with images that are almost three-dimensional in their depth; I can only imagine it in 70mm (there’s supposed to be a print in Sweden). Winton Hoch’s work in 3 GODFATHERS is probably the best color work in a Ford film, though THE QUIET MAN and THE SEARCHERS are also sublime. I’m fond of the textured, layered way HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (Miller) looks, and as Ford said of THE GRAPES OF WRATH (Toland), it’s great photography with nothing beautiful to shoot. LaShelle’s work in 7 WOMEN is powerfully expressionistic; and the blocking in that film is breathtakingly graceful and eloquent.
I think Charlton Heston as a Mexican in Touch of Evil worked, so I give a pass to Henry Fonda as a Mexican in The Fugitive, figuring the directors picked them for certain qualities (Heston’s straight-shooter cluelessness, Fonda’s noble passivity) along with their marquee name value.
The Fugitive I thought was a lovely film, even if it is a watered down version of the Greene novel.
Joseph, according to The Swedish Film Institute’s website http://www.sfi.se they have a 70 mm print of CHEYENNE AUTUMN. I haven’t seen it myself (and didn’t know about it until I read your post), so I just emailed a request to the Cinematheque in Stockholm to show it. This may not do the rest of the world a lot of good, but it seems like the SFI print has been screened in Germany, so maybe it could be made available to other countries as well. Maybe Fredrik Gustafsson could shed more light on this if he’s still reading this blog.
And did not Charlton pass as a “drunken Mexican” in MAJOR DUNDEE sufficiently to escape the notice of the French?
I saw CHEYENNE AUTUMN in 70 on first release. It indeed look stunning, and that may be one reason that I took the movie more to heart then a lot of people did at the time. But also, when I went, the studio had, in all its dubious wisdom, just cut the last part of the Dodge City sequence out (though I know it had been released complete in U.K. because I knewe someone who saw it then), and this was pretty obvious–it arbitarily faded on in the middle of a scene (James Stewart walking to the back of the saloon) and then there was an intermission. So that hurt the experience a little, and eventually got used to the film that way until they finally restored the whole sequence (though home video and DVD is the only way we’ve had it).
There is some excellent commentary by Joseph McBride on the disc of this by the way.
As long as Ford cinematographers are still being considered here, I’ll point out Joe MacDonald has also not beeen named. But he really came into his own with Ford and MY DARLING CLEMENTINE–which, in a tough choice, I’d name as my favorite for the cinematography. He hadn’t done much that was that great before (though THE DARK CORNER was excellent film noir work), but after CLEMENTINE he has many outstanding credits through the years. So I think working with Ford took him up a notch and brought him to what he was capable of.
And speaking of the great Victor Erice, it’s indeed one of the sadnesses of modern cinema that he has made so few films. Is there any reason why his great EL SUR/THE SOUTH is not on DVD? This seems like one of the best candidates for a nice Criterion release there could possibly be. It’s a masterpiece, yet few people seem to have seen it.
Will also share an anecdote about William Clothier. In the 70s the AFI hosted a series of cinematographer seminars and Clothier was one of them and chose CHEYENNE AUTUMN for the occasion.
In Q & A, Clothier said that when he worked with Andrew V. McLaglen (which he had fairly often), McLaglen would use a zoom lens for some shots, but if it was Clothier’s own choice, the zoom lens would never come out of the box. And of course, as he also pointed out, on a Ford film it
did just stay in the box.
Everything Joseph McBride write about Ford’s great cinematography and cinematographers is spot on, including acknowledgment of Ford/Figueroa’s “beautifully-photographed” FUGITIVE, so rich that one can enjoy the film again and again on what it offer the eye, though overall the film is pretty bad. Every dramatic psychological and tension of Greene’s novel is dissipated in stereotype or melodrama. The tension between Catholicism and Communism, Graham two ideological inclinations, is reduced the oppression of a callow bad cop villainy. (Cardenas’ Mexico is fogged by proto-Cold War lenses; and Pedro Armendariz’s policeman is less nuanced and than Fonda’s Mexican priest ). The values at stake are conveyed via the beaver-Cleaver aplomb of Mexican children and the ridiculous vamp Madonna heroism of Dolores del Rio and her entourage. The triptych’s of cacti and sombero’s remain worthy of the exotic splendor of Tisse’s work for ¡QUE VIVA MEXICO!, but sapped by Ford’s botched work on theme and character.
It’s as if Ford had never gotten any closer to Catholicism than pastoral paternalism or to Mexico than commonplace icons; and, of course, he never had a chance with Greene’s ironies at all.
The censorship at the time didn’t allow Ford to deal with the iconoclastic nature of THE POWER AND THE GLORY. What was Ford supposed to do, wait for censorship to lift and than do the film or do the best I can.
THE FUGITIVE is about the tragedy of being a passive man who serves God to the best of his duties and this is heightened in the film and not in the book where you have a whiskey priest who becomes a Christ figure. Here he is a noble priest and the film displays the horror and futility of that nobility. He is someone who has to protect and serve people and offer others hope but it’s the other way, people provide him the service of comefort and hope and protection.
I can’t call any film a failure which includes a scene of as much pain as the one where the Priest is in the bar trying to protect his holy water only to stand and see it being wasted on sinners and not be able to do anything about it. It’s one of the cruelest scenes in all of Ford. Heck it’s closer to Bunuel than Graham Greene. And of course Gabriel Figueroa worked for Bunuel.
I meant “do the best he can”.
Well, if one is to defend THE FUGITVE from charges of two dimensional characterizations, Cold war simplifications of early 1930s Tabasco politics and the sentimental Catholicism that marks Ford when he turns from Irish parishlife to spiritual struggle (recall the maudlin inner struggle of THE INFORMER), the Fonda dramatization of the priest is the way to go, but attributing Ford a more nuanced characterization than Greene is a bit much.
I didn’t say it was more nuanced, just different.
I’m a big fan of both John Ford and Graham Greene, but I think we have two very different temperaments here. If I remember this correctly it was the lawsuit over Greene’s review in The Spectator of Ford’s (brilliant, if you ask me) WEE WILLIE WINKIE, where Greene had some harsh tings to say about middle aged clergymen who liked Shirley Temple, that made Greene go to Mexico to avoid the risk of being jailed in the UK. While in Mexico he got the material for THE POWER AND THE GLORY, about a middle aged clergyman. Not a match made in Heaven (catholic or otherwise).
Ford told Bogdanovich: “Along with THE FUGITIVE and THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, I think WAGON MASTER comes closest to being what I had wanted to achieve.” THE FUGITIVE and WAGON MASTER may seen to be at the antipodes to each other yet share a common, ruling concern for visual composition. FUGITIVE is usually praised for its cinematography and universally blasted for everything else (for many it’s one of Ford’s worst films, perhaps the worst). The “artiness” is much more delicate and subdued in the wonderful WAGON MASTER, but each shot bears the director’s unmistakable signature. This is more obvious than ever in the superb DVD that just came out.
I saw WAGON MASTER for the first time about ten years ago on TV (TCM? AMC? Can’t remember) and it became instantly my favorite Ford. I taped it, but strangely the print — or at least what I taped — started with the credits and I didn’t even know for a while that there was a pre-credit sequence, the bank holdup by the Cleggs. Had the print been shorn of the pre-credit footage or did I start taping too late? I’ll never know. Incidentally, I can’t think of any other Ford film that has a pre-credit sequence. And this one starts very abruptly indeed, without even a “WB presents” card.
Nice conversation between Bogdanovich and Harry Carey Jr. as a bonus.
I couldn’t say which is my favorite Ford movie. But I will not argue with anyone who picks WAGON MASTER as the best. One of the many things I admire in Ford is the way he picks the music for his films and the contribution that the music of The Sons of the Pioneers make to WAGON MASTER can’t be overestimated.
The use of music in WAGONMASTER anticipates Robert Altman’s use of Leonard Cohen in McCabe & Mrs.Miller. Not in content but the idea of scoring an entire film with non-diegetic songs.
If I were to choose a favourite Ford it would be JUDGE PRIEST and STEAMBOAT ‘ROUND THE BEND simply for the sake of Will Rogers Jr. whose performance as Billy Priest is one of the greatest in film history.
I can’t see how THE FUGITIVE is worse than MARY OF SCOTLAND(which I like for what it’s worth) or THE HURRICANE or RIO GRANDE. It’s not by any reasonable standards a bad film at all. It’s not the first unfaithful adaptation of a great novel and it won’t be the last.
“If I were to choose a favourite Ford it would be JUDGE PRIEST and STEAMBOAT ‘ROUND THE BEND simply for the sake of Will Rogers Jr. whose performance as Billy Priest is one of the greatest in film history.”
No love for DOCTOR BULL? (or perhaps you haven’t seen it). I love all three Will Rogers movies (and by the way it’s his son who was Jr., not
Will himself), but DOCTOR BULL is my favorite, a rich weave of drama and comedy of a small New England town–it is a very special film and Rogers is just fabulous (and how many films have Andy Devine as a hypochondriac ladies’ man).
Though I care a a lot about a number of Ford silents, especially 3 BAD MEN, and early sound films, especially SALUTE and AIR MAIL, I believe
he flowered into maturity in 1933, and that both PILGRIMAGE and DOCTOR BULL are masterpieces, the first of many.
Ford is so supreme a visual artist that it may seem like his silents should lack nothing, but on second reflection, even though they are already great in that respect, his use of music once sound comes in seems essential to his full expressiveness, and it does reach a peak in WAGON MASTER. So of course I strongly support what Johann said on this point.
In fact, rare is the actual musical that uses music, including singing and dancing, as well as Ford does.
Without taking anything away from the great Sons of the Pioneers, I thought somebody should give props to Stan Jones, who wrote the songs in Wagon Master, Rio Grande and The Horse Soldiers (he also appeared in the last two — he was U. S. Grant in The Horse Soldiers). His most famous song is the immortal “Riders in the Sky” (usually referred to as “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” He died in 1963 at the age of 49.
Spanish Films The local art museum here is playing host to a traveling series called Contemporary Spanish Cinema. The films include Deprofundis: The Sound of the Sea by a Spanish graphic novelist, The Shame, A Fiance for Yasmina, Camino, Ramirez, One-Armed Trick, and Crazy, also known as Desperate Women. I haven’t seen them all yet, but the catalog descriptions give the impression that they are second tier Spanish films, though Camino won several Goyas (probably because it is about a the imaginative life of a dying child), as did One-Armed Trick for best first feature. In fact, several of the films are first features. None of the directors are familiar to me – which isn’t saying much. Crazy is directed by Juan Luis Iborra, and is something of a sub-Almodovar tale about a young woman (the kittenish Silvia Abascal) trying to hook back up with her “true love,” whom she thinks is the reincarnation of her dead lover. She solicits the help of her nutty aunt and their adventures take them into the hands of a grand dame of the theater who is starring in a long running play, a suspicious old couple who own an apartment at the center of some kind of dispute, and to a sex fair where they end up having to escape disguised as a dominatrix and as Catwoman. The film won an award for its costumes. It is light if occasionally amusing material, but is a pasteurized version of early Almodovar that filmmakers must think is marketable.
I remain an agnostic where John Fordolatry is concerned. His importance is undeniable. But I value the work of many other American filmmakers (Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray) more than his, despite admiring several Ford pictures (“3 Bad Men,” “Just Pals,” “Stagecoach,” “The Long Voyage Home,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “My Darling Clementine,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” and “7 Women” being my favorites).
So it may seem blasphemous to call “Wagon Master” — on the occasion of its justly praised new DVD from Warner Bros. — “good” rather than “great” or “a masterpiece” (two terms that I wish would be used a bit more sparingly).
Everything purely visual in the film is magisterial. But (for example), the attempt to generate an elegy for the covered wagon settlers of old (via, especially, a Stan Jones song crooned by The Sons of the Pioneers over a montage of details from the weary march of Mormons across the desert) seems to indicate ambition rather than achievement. Likewise, the presentation of tolerance (the Mormons, driven from a Western town by bigotry, reluctantly accept and bond with members of “a hootchie-kootchie show” and a band of Navajo) is admirable but by no means startling or unprecedented in Westerns (and not only Ford Westerns).
The performances also seem too full of actors’ schticks, especially the hammered-to-death cuts from Ward Bond almost erupting into what the Production Code woulod permit in 1950 as a sign of “cussing” and Russell Simpson doing his glare-of-disapproval number. This vein of what I will call cuteness runs, in a subdued way, throughout the picture, and I’m afraid this also applies to the crooning of The Sons Of The Pioneers.
But there is an exception: Charles Kemper as Uncle Shiloh, the leader of a psychotic outlaw band (himself and his dim-witted sons) who force their way into the Mormon party. Kemper is the one cast member who, it seems to me, found his way to genuine expressiveness throughout his performance. The way he handles every facet of Uncle Shiloh’s sly, mock-servile, coldly sociopathic greed, selfishness, and complete disregard for humanity deserves to be in the spotlight for once (as does his wearily humanistic cop — “To get anything out of this life, you have to put something into it, from the heart!” — in Nicholas Ray’s “On Dangerous Ground”). In “Wagon Master,” Uncle Shiloh is as riveting as Walter Brennan’s darker, more openly vicious Old Man Clanton, the leader of a comparable brood of familial killers in “My Darling Clementine.” The two performances, in fact, form a matched set study in the amorality that can be indulged under cover of the family ties that several Ford films, in other contexts, exalt.
As Harry Carey, Jr. points out on the DVD during his conversation/commentary with Peter Bogdanovich, Kemper died in a car crash before the film opened. Let’s not forget him when examining “Wagon Master” regardless of where we rank it artistically (and I’m certainly looking forward to our host’s comments about it).
The songs in WAGON MASTER are of course wonderful although anachronistic to the extent that they don’t sound at all like songs of the period (the 1870s). Of course the same could be said of most or all of the music or songs written for westerns. The voice-over introduces the movie as a nostalgic evocation of the distant past.. One song celebrates “the mighty wagon train”… The score here doesn’t hide its “modernism” — the memorable “Chuckawalla Swing” — perhaps Stan Jones’s masterpiece — even introduces a musical concept (“swing”) that is not exactly 1870s — although of course it’s also a reference to square dancing and “swing your partner.” Anyway, yes, Wagon Master is also a great musical of sorts.
Michael Dempsey: It’s always interesting to hear a dissenting voice but most of the objections seem rather irrelevant, although I realize they may spoil some people’s pleasure (I guess many critics reacted that way way back in 1950). But the film certainly didn’t intend to be in any way “startling or unprecedented” in the presentation of tolerance or anything else.
“Actors Schticks” are present in all of Ford films to a greater or lesser extent (and also in many films by the directors you admire more than you do Ford). The Ward Bond-Russell Simpson duet may seem mere “cuteness” to some, a delight to others. And there is so much good acting in the film, not just Charles Kemper’s great performance. Joanne Dru is nicely and very efficiently low key — think of her wonderful two-words line: “That rube…” with the little smile that says so much…
It’s not so much that the film is “great” (although I for one think it is) or “a masterpiece” (I for one didn’t call it that, just my favorite) but rather that it is so relaxed and laid back and simple-seeming and, I don’t know, pure, maybe. Too bad that the “cuteness” spoiled your enjoyment of it.
I’ll pass on commenting on most of your post, Michael, only because I didn’t relate to it too much (and in fact, heading your list of directors you prefer to Ford with Stanley Kubrick frankly startled me–remember I’ve expressed appreciation for your thoughtful posts in the past and I’m sure I will again).
However, I must express great appreciation for what you said about Charles Kemper. I too was especially aware of the two performances you mention, such very different characters, but I never looked him up and never knew he made these movies so near dying before his time. Once in awhile, I’ve wondered “Why didn’t we see more of Charles Kemper. What an excellent actor.” Now, I know…and I’m sure if he’d lived, we would have.
I haven’t seen DOCTOR BULL yet, Blake. But I will soon. And thanks for the correction vis-a-vis the downgrading of Mr. Rogers to the generation after him.
I didn’t get Ford at first. The first one I saw, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN was interesting to me and gorgeous in it’s use of black-and-white but I found the film…too laidback which is what Michael feels about WAGONMASTER. But the more you see Ford, the more you realise that the anecdote fashion of his storytelling and his appreciation for the small everyday pleasures sits alongside a critical spirit. That’s especially true of the two Will Rogers films and it’s true of YOUNG MR. LINCOLN. Especially in that all important line, “I may not know much about law, but I know what’s right and wrong.” It’s also one of the boldest anti-lynching movies of all time.
Other directors like Kubrick had to be bold and stylized to make their points, Ford could be bold and stylized(THE INFORMER) but he also had the freedom to realise that he didn’t have to be. And that simplicity of style is what made Ford so special and terrific. It’s something that you can’t easily learn or be influenced by.
The thing that I find interesting about WAGON MASTER is that the wagon train are peaceful non-violent travellers by nature but they still end up killing each and every one of the Cleggs. Ward Bond’s final expression after Charles Kemper dies is haunting in that respects. That’s what makes Ford’s films so unsettling because he makes the characters likable and nice but they still partake in the often-violent nation-building or community building process.
“I haven’t seen DOCTOR BULL yet, Blake. But I will soon.”
That explains it, and I thought it might be the case. I believe you are in for a treat, and there is plenty of the critical spirit you mention along with the laid-back charm. It’s very interesting about New England set movies–they easily take in a little melodrama, especially involving anything unorthodox in anyone’s sexual life that might shock the presumed values of the community. So if you can believe me, a movie like PEYTON PLACE actually comes late in a line with this one and has a few affinites with it, but even though I like it, it can’t compare in artfulness, especially in the shifts of tone of which Ford was such a master. And it’s just amazing all it has in a 75 minutes that still manage to seem kind of easygoing. Also, I really truly was not kidding that Andy Devine plays a hypochondriac ladies’ man as anyone who has seen it will know.
I like what you say about the violence at the end of WAGON MASTER. It is in truth a given that Ford’s villains are unredeemable, but before we score it against him for lack of shading, while also allowing the flavorful quality of these characters (in CLEMENTINE and LIBERTY VALANCE as well WAGON MASTER–and I find the Cleggs, especially Uncle Shiloh, disarmingly funny much of the time, even though they are lethal), let’s look at what he gains from this in a sequence like the final gunfight here. As bad as they are, killing is still seen as terrible–Ben Johnson’s Travis, who does most of it and seems pretty capable with a gun given the need, seems especially to take no pleasure at all in the necessity to kill anyone, and throws his gun away in a gesture of choking down the event. Violent action can be very cathartic in a Western, as it is here, but in a mature work, it’s nothing to celebrate, and that’s what’s great about it. One reason the genre coarsened later was frankly that filmmakers forgot this, and started to encourage the audience to enjoy anonymous villains being blown away in the manner of contemporary thrillers.
Well, compare 3:10 TO YUMA remake to the 1957 original and that also makes the point. But in my book, it was never done more effectively than in WAGON MASTER, in which Ford gives not a second more than he needs to this and it’s all the more powerful for it.
Tag Gallagher said something to the effect that in Ford, the heroes are more complex and interesting than the villains whereas in Hitchcock, the villains are bestowed with complexity. That may be a generalization but that’s part of the reason why Ford isn’t so readily accepted. He shows common people as complex and tragic and not villains and bad guys who are fetishized these days.
Ford associates villainy with stupidity and decadence especially Lee Marvin in the title role in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. The lone exception is Scar in THE SEARCHERS who is shown as this exotic beautiful violent creature who is Ethan Edwards’ double. And in that film the conflict between the hero and the villain ends in total absurdity, Ethan doesn’t kill Scar, it’s Jeffrey Hunter who wanted no part in the revenge who ends up doing it and he does it by reflex action not in a warrior’s duel that the film builds the audience to accept, only to deny.
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Violent action can be very cathartic in a Western, as it is here, but in a mature work, it’s nothing to celebrate, and that’s what’s great about it.
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In Ford, violence is always degrading to the victim as well as the perpetrator. The horrifying lynching scene at the end of TWO RODE TOGETHER is another bold and shocking example. Where the town band together to murder this boy and lynch him on a tree. And they come across as more monstrous then the cast of Lang’s FURY.
For a moment, you stopped me with the word “villain” for Scar, but then I realized that of course, technically, in terms of his place in the narrative, you are right, though the word “antagonist” might be more accurate in this case. The reason I hit this point is that Scar–Ethan’s double as you say–is motivated by exactly the same thing Ethan is (something Brian Henderson strangely forgot and misrepresents in a famous, but to me dubious article about the film): the killing of family members by the other race. By contrast, the Clantons, Cleggs and Valance are motivated only by their own innate malevolence.
The powerful, beautifully realized lynching sequence in TWO RODE TOGETHER you mention, made even better by the music box revelation, is a pretty bitter commentary on community. Ford celebrates groups and communities when they overcome intolerance but not when they don’t. That move toward a community of tolerance may seem obvious to Michael Dempsey in WAGON MASTER, and I don’t think it’s meant to be all that subtle (though I don’t think there’s any preachy dialogue), but it’s moving even so to see the mormons, horse traders and show people pull together the way they do. THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT is a kind of visionary work of a community reaching all the harmony it possibly could at that point in time–led by the moral example of Judge Priest. Though set in an integrationist South, it plainly looks ahead to something beyond that, and is spiritually not that far from it at the end.
The last shot of THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT has Stepin Fetchit sitting outside the house while Albert Winninger moves into the dark confines of his house. Quite prophetic in light of last year’s elections although it’s 55 years off the mark.
Of course, I did mean to say “segrationist South”
NOT “integrationist.” Just carried away with the film’s intimations of integration, I guess…
Has it been much commented that much more than in JUDGE PRIEST, where Priest and Jeff first meet, after years of living together, these two men are more friends who, in different ways, take care of each other and look out for each other, than master and servant. The easy way they share the house, as the last shot so well expresses, gets this over very well.
Now that WAGON MASTER is out, we can hope for the DVD of this one, hopefully that longer version (100 minutes) which does appear to be Ford’s cut.
“segregationist.” (not my day it seems–sorry).
I’m afraid there’s very little chance of a DVD of “The Sun Shines Bright” coming out. It’s one of the many Republic titles now owned by Paramount, which they seem determined to bury apart from occasional screenings on Encore Westerns.
Yes, I know the Paramount/Republic situation, Dave
(thank God for the Western channel, where you can still see a Joseph Kane movie once in awhile).
But as regards what I said about THE SUN SHINES BRIGHT, that was simply an expression of hope, that “someday” (a favorite, oft-repeated word in Ford) the situation might be different.
Couldn’t some enterprising person at Paramount be encouraged to put out a nice little set of three–the John Ford/Republic collection, throwing this in with two very popular movies, long out on DVD, with John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.