John Ford - S/D

This fella with some quality early-Ford-at-Fox bloggery:

http://videoarcadia.blogspot.com/2008/01/shadow-play-in-early-john-ford.html

so Drums Along The Mohawk. Yes?

It's nice but his 3rd-best film of '39.

They Were Expendable. Yes?

Been a long time, I remember liking it. Lindsay Anderson loved it.

If I had to vote for anything it would be Ford's segment in How The West Was Won if only for that Cinerama shot of the blood being washed off the table right at you.

super deluxo ultraultra restoration blu-ray of how the west was won coming in september
http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2006/apr-jun/film-restoration/frame1_large.jpg

also with a second disc presenting the film in "Smilebox"
http://www.mindspring.com/~lizap/smilebox.jpg
(shot is from a different movie)

I'm looking fwd to West, never saw

I did rent TWE.

If I had to vote for anything it would be Ford's segment in How The West Was Won if only for that Cinerama shot of the blood being washed off the table right at you.

-- Elvis Telecom

this sounds fantastic.

the spielberg story upthread is the source of a song on the new drive-by truckers album. hum.

Cheyenne Autumn – yes?

Saw that once a long time ago, liked it but suffers from a lotta stars in redface (see way up above).

have you seen The Sun Shines Bright or Wagonmaster?

anyone wanna defend fort apache? the ending, in particular.

i've read various critical appreciations, but they all end up sounding like excuses to me. the only things that make sense to me are either a huge failure of nerve or an actual conviction about the social necessity of military heroism, no matter how fictional. either way, leaves a bad taste to me.

(and it's a well made movie with plenty of good scenes and henry fonda's very good, i'm not arguing any of that.)

ok so thinking about it more i realize that what the movie was really up to was trying to validate the experience and class resentments of wwii vets (many of whom no doubt had less than glowing thoughts about the officer corps), but then at the end pivoting to say, "yes, but what's really important is the big picture -- honor, duty, country." the reason nobody rebels against fonda is that the movie does not want to endorse rebellion. it basically and more or less sincerely argues for respecting hierarchies and obeying orders, even bad ones, because it works out best for everyone.

Does it really, though? Does the end really undo the two hours that came before it? Maybe it does, depending on the viewer. Or maybe it elicits a more complex response since as with Liberty Valance, Ford prints both the fact and the legend at the end of Fort Apache. York's homage to Thursday builds some distance into the film (as does the casting against type with Henry Fonda playing a role typically associated with John Wayne* and vice-versa) so that we CAN look back at what's just transpired and assess - did Thursday's genocidal racism serve any good? It certainly propagated the world Ford so assiduously delineated for us. But is there any positive in that? If not, then in what ways are we benefiting from these murderous actions today and should we therefore look upon our own world with disdain (or distance at least)?

I think the individual vs. community tensions characteristic of so many westerns is really complicated here in that there are so many different individuals that Thursday takes along with him in his suicidal run (and to whom York also pays homage at the end, successfully or not) which again complicates our response. Did some cavalry men have better reasons than others for sacrificing themselves to a greater good? And what does it mean to even ask such a question?

This is the benefit of Ford's "rambling," non-linear, three-act-structure-eschewing narrative - following so many characters, going off on so many different tangents, etc. ensures that the fact/legend ending does not impinge upon one character/narrative trajectory.

And speaking of assiduously delineated worlds, Wagon Master, Ford's very best western, is out on DVD and looking as gorgeous as it has every right to be.

* And then check out the even odder role Ford carves out for Wayne in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

but fort apache is really about upholding the sanctity of the army hierarchy (and by extension the social hierarchy) at all costs. it's complex and savvy enough to acknowledge the injustices in the system (which, again, after wwii were freshly revealed to millions of working-class americans), but the "good" characters -- york and sgt. o'rourke especially -- always ultimately defer to authority. they register their objections, but then they fall in line -- and they make sure everyone else does the same. the only act of rebellion in the whole movie is the four sergeants drinking the whiskey they're supposed to dispose of -- and they are roundly punished. i think people who want to read the movie as morally complex or ambiguous are giving both it and ford too much credit. i think it's more like morally repugnant. it's a postwar movie on the cusp of the mccarthy era, and its real aim is to sell the idea that maintaining the established order is best for everyone, even if it means tolerating the jackasses who happen to be in charge.

i think people who want to read the movie as morally complex or ambiguous

People like me, you mean?

I'm not denying that the ending upholds the sanctity of the army hierarchy or even that such an ending is morally repugnant. But everything you've written above assumes that the ending (and perhaps all endings?) is/are binding, i.e. the entire film and/or Ford upholds the sanctity of the army hierarchy and/or is morally repugnant. I think it's difficult to argue that there are no critiques of Thursday and maybe even the entire world of the cavalry all throughout the film. The question is whether or not the ending undoes all of that. For you, it clearly has. For others (myself included), it hasn't (and makes me think about the things I talked about above). Plus it helps to situate this film in the context of Ford's oeuvre in that Fort Apache marks the beginning of an increasing suspicion of authority figures and upholding tradition.

Fred Camper has influenced me a lot here. Check out his fantastic review of Mizoguchi's The Loyal 47 Ronin (quite similar films in many ways).

stagecoach!!!

the searchers looks so good on blu-ray. like even though the middle section is a bunch of generic western hokum, it's some amazing looking hokum.

stagecoach!!!

― truffle fries are not a meme. truffle fries are not a meme is a meme (Lamp), Thursday, June 3, 2010 10:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

previously lost ford silent film discovered in new zealand (along w/ a trailer for another lost ford film, amongst other treasures):

http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/new-zealand-project-films-highlights

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962)

Great moments and scenes.

Wonderful performance from Wayne, but what a sad ending. Stewart's character has been a good man throughout the film, yet is left with a sense of unfulfilment.

being a Man of Civilization has its price

Jeff Wells in Monument Valley:

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/08/changeup_settle.php

apparently sergio leone hasnt seen 3 bad men:

With John Ford, people look out of the window with hope. Me, I show people who are scared to even open the door. And if they do, they tend to get a bullet right between the eyes.

Jonathan Lethem on his cinematic influences and Ford in particular:

I came to film in a backward way. Thanks to my parents’ cosmopolitan/bohemian appetites, with the exception of [Alfred] Hitchcock, I watched a lot of European cinema before I watched a lot of classical Hollywood cinema. I really knew [Jean-Luc] Godard and [Francois] Truffaut and [Michelangelo] Antonioni and a bunch of other stuff. Then, of course, I was aware of contemporary English language films that were exciting to my parents and me. Films by [Stanley] Kubrick and [Robert] Altman. I knew all the stuff that you’d see in a New York art house environment as a teenager. Then, in my twenties, I had to go back and figured out how the body of American classical cinema was terrifically important to me. It was really film noir that drew me back. That was when I watched [Howard] Hawks and Ford and [Orson] Welles. The American Fritz Lang films and all these things became really, really powerful and defining for me. I didn’t grow up with them, mostly. Ford was a great discovery of my twenties and I became consumingly interested in him. He’s a counterpoint, in a way, to the narrower stylistic and emotional intensity of film noir or even of someone like Hawks or Welles. He had more of literary amplitude. He’s like a [Charles] Dickens. He puts all of life into the story and he’s not afraid of sentiment in certain ways that the others have to ‘hard boil’ it in order to tolerate it. The Searchers meant a lot to me, in some ways, as an embarrassing but really compelling antidote to the cool of film noir. It probably helped lead me through Girl in Landscape then into the more diverse and sprawling canvas of something like Fortress of Solitude and what I’m working on now. It becomes excruciating hearing myself have to claim the influence, exactly. What mattered was that I loved the movies. I just started to want to devour every Ford film I could see. I probably, to this day, can’t even say why it mattered so much to me then or why they continue to matter to me in retrospect. He just became really moving to me. Someone who I wanted to be around. His voice and his sensibility, even though, obviously, there are great variations. They’re not all as paradoxical. You could study The Searchers forever. You can study The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance forever. Or you can go back to something like Long Voyage Home or Wagon Master and just breathe it in endlessly because it’s so perfect. Then there are a lot of really homely or strange or incomplete pieces like Two Rode Together. This is a movie I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, necessarily. But it all mattered to me at one point.

http://www.fandor.com/blog/spontaneous-similitude-jonathan-lethem

RIP Harry Carey Jr

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-harry-carey-jr-1921-2012

RIP.

In (Three Godfathers), Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and Carey Jr, as the Abilene Kid, are three "wise" bank-robbing bandits on the run in the desert, who rescue a baby after the death of his mother. Carey sings Streets of Laredo as a lullaby and has a moving death scene in which he lapses back into childhood to recite the Lord's Prayer. According to Carey, after the first take of the death scene, which he fluffed, Ford left him to bake in the scorching heat of Death Valley for 30 minutes. When the director returned, a near delirious Carey delivered his speech, his mouth so dry he could not swallow and with a voice that resembled the croaking of a dying man. "Why didn't you do that the first time?" a grinning Ford asked Carey. "See how easy it was? You done good! That's a wrap!"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/30/harry-carey-jr

Saw Cheyenne Autumn again, had to tell laughing 'hipsters' at Lincoln Center to shut up when they lol'd at Dolores del Rio wailing over corpses.

Watch it, then read this by Toshi Fujiwara:

http://www.fipresci.org/undercurrent/issue_0509/cheyenne.htm

The centerpiece sequence with James Stewart as Wyatt Earp is a slapstick sketch of white settlement as an amok devolution: Manifest Idiocy.

Dave Kehr on the new Blu-rays of How Green Was My Valley & The Quiet Man:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/movies/homevideo/new-dvds-how-green-was-my-valley-and-quiet-man.html

The scene where the brothers confront Crisp about unionizing is a marvel.

I'm glad Kent Jones was the one to administer this scholarly spanking:

The Searchers is about the toll of vengeance on actual human beings, while Tarantino’s recent work is about the celebration of orgiastic vengeance as a symbolic correction of history. Ford’s film has had a vast and long-lasting effect on American cinema, while the impact of Tarantino’s film has, I suspect, already come and gone.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/intolerance-quentin-tarantino-john-ford

yeah, QT is really full of shit there.

yeah that's one of jones's best essays IMO

quentin, racism in movies is like tap-dancing in movies

it's like anything else, quentin

it's cinema

a lovely paragraph:

The idea of the American West was always more a matter of solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest. Along with the city as theater of life in the Thirties or bourgeois existence as genteel prison in the Fifties, the idea belonged to no director or writer, and the culture breathed it long before the movies began. That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous Americans who were, in Ford’s own words, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies—albeit never quite as comfortably as is now imagined. It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

however:

yet another revenge fantasy—that makes five in a row.

dunno if Jackie Brown is a revenge fantasy. It strikes me as a suburban California picture.

suburban California fantasy

seems dlh is volunteering for Jones's "fool's errand"

i am parodying qt on violence; it is not a fair equivalency but on the other hand fuck him

think the general stuff about view-of-history here (as in alfred's graf or the one right after it) is rly important

ok, I admit I avoid the Q's words whenever I can.

caught how green was my valley for like the third time a couple weeks back but for some reason it really hit me on a emotional level this time, also the cinematography was just stunning. kudos, arthur c miller

A well written piece, and this guy is mostly right on in his defence of Ford, but his apologetic stance towards Birth of a Nation bothers me far more than the fact that he obviously hasn't seen Jackie Brown.

yet another revenge fantasy—that makes five in a row.

dunno if Jackie Brown is a revenge fantasy. It strikes me as a suburban California picture.

― A deeper shade of lol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 3, 2013 8:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

1. kill bill 1
2. kill bill 2
3. death proof
4. inglorious basterds
5. django unchained

caught how green was my valley for like the third time a couple weeks back but for some reason it really hit me on a emotional level this time, also the cinematography was just stunning. kudos, arthur c miller

― buzza, Friday, May 3, 2013 8:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a slept-on ford/miller collab is wee willie winkie. it's an awesome movie, and it is stunningly shot. i've seen a 35mm print twice (one tinted, the other not) and I can't imagine the DVD provides the same effect but it should probably still be pretty impressive.

sarris says it's a better move than the informer and he's right

i have to admit i didn't quite follow some of jones's stuff about BoaN not being "propaganda." not in the strictest sense, no, but it does essentially advocate race war. and i think it's unfair to griffith if we think he was somehow unaware of or indifferent to that. i also think it's important to remember that many people in 1915 felt the film was an abomination (notably the emergent NAACP, which published a pamphlet against it). so it's at as though condemning it is simply holding it to an anachronistic standard, not that jones makes this argument.

anyway i do think he acknowledges the vile racism in BoaN, but it seems like he's distancing that from griffith a little bit. i wouldn't call him an apologist for BoaN, maybe a _slight_ apologist for DWG.

i also think he understates the extent to which indian/white encounters (and violence) were central to the western genre in literature and film. it's right there, in much of its complexity, in last of the mohicans.

Aw, thanks for the kind words!

Yeah, I am a fan of yours as well.

Aw, thanks James!

Screening The Horse Soldiers rn, and I really want a wacky caper film centering on the Confederate deserters played by Denver Pyle & Strother Martin in that one scene.

I've never seen The Whole Town's Talking, or Hangman's House. I *have* seen Bucking Broadway, and that is a pip.

I have it in that box set Indicator put out several years ago. It's very good.

I just watched it last night and this morning and enjoyed every moment of it from beginning to end.

Apparently it was Jean Arthur's breakout role, before Capra.

I can believe it, she's definitely great in that movie and so many others. If I had to pick a favorite film with her, it would probably be Howard Hawks's Only Angels Have Wings.

Heh, Scott Eyman is very dismissive of the film in question but Joseph McBride seems to have a higher opinion of it.

John Arthur on John Ford:
"He's got this handkerchief in his mouth and chews on it while he's talking to you. And Eddie Robinson always has a pipe in his mouth. Between the two of them I couldn't understand a word. I finally said would you please take that stuff out of your mouths so I can know what you're talking about."

And:
“Ford always had a handkerchief or a pipe hangin’ out of his mouth,” she recalled. “He chewed on it and you never knew what he said. And Robinson had a pipe that he’d chew. They’d stand there, these two guys, and never give you any directions at all or anything much. I’d say, ‘How do I know what I’m gonna do if you don’t talk?’ And they said, ‘Well, we talk with our brains. We don’t need to verbalize things.’”