John Ford - S/D

The Quiet Man has too much ruddy Irish blarney for my taste, and would be my choice to destroy.

http://melbotis.blogspot.com/uploaded_images/quiet_man_kiss-799335.jpg

In the last shot of "The Searchers," the camera, from deep inside the cozy recesses of a frontier homestead, peers out though an open doorway into the bright sunshine. The contrast between the dim interior and the daylight outside creates a second frame within the wide expanse of the screen. Inside that smaller space, the desert glare highlights the shape and darkens the features of the man who lingers just beyond the threshold. Everyone else has come inside: the other surviving characters, who have endured grief, violence, the loss of kin and the agony of waiting, and also, implicitly, the audience, which has anxiously anticipated this homecoming. But the hero, whose ruthlessness and obstinacy have made it possible, is excluded, and our last glimpse of him emphasizes his solitude, his separateness, his alienation — from his friends and family, and also from us.

Even if you are watching "The Searchers" for the first time — perhaps on the beautiful new DVD that Warner Home Video has just released to mark the film's 50th anniversary — this final shot may look familiar. For one thing, it deliberately replicates the first image you see after the opening titles — a view of a nearly identical vista from a very similar perspective. Indeed, the frame-within-the-frame created by shooting through relative darkness into a sliver of intense natural light is a notable motif in this movie, and elsewhere in the work of its director, John Ford. Especially in his westerns, Ford loved to create bustling, busy interiors full of life and feeling, and he was equally fond of positioning human figures, alone or in small, vulnerable groups, against vast, obliterating landscapes. Shooting from the indoors out is his way of yoking together these two realms of experience — the domestic and the wild, the social and the natural — and also of acknowledging the almost metaphysical gap between them, the threshold that cannot be crossed.

But that image of John Wayne's shadow in the doorway — he plays the solitary hero, Ethan Edwards — does not just pick up on other such moments in "The Searchers." Perhaps because the shot is thematically rich as well as visually arresting — because it so perfectly unites showing and telling — it has become a touchstone, promiscuously quoted, consciously or not, by filmmakers whose debt to Ford might not be otherwise apparent. Ernest Hemingway once said that all of American literature could be traced back to one book, Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn," and something similar might be said of American cinema and "The Searchers." It has become one of those movies that you see, in part, through the movies that came after it and that show traces of its influence. "Apocalypse Now," "Punch-Drunk Love," "Kill Bill," "Brokeback Mountain": those were the titles that flickered in my consciousness in the final seconds of a recent screening in Cannes of Ford's masterwork, all because, at crucial moments, they seem to pay homage to that single, signature shot.

At the end of "Brokeback Mountain," for instance, we are inside Ennis Del Mar's trailer, looking out the window onto the Wyoming rangeland, from a domestic space into the wilderness, as in "The Searchers." But in this case, the interior, rather than a warm, buzzing home, is barren, the scene of Ennis's desolation. The outside, insofar as it recalls the mountain where he and Jack Twist spent their youthful summer of love together, is an unattainable place of freedom and companionship, rather than a zone of danger and loneliness as it was in the earlier film. Ennis is severed from those he loves, and from his own nature, by the strictures of civilization, while Ethan's violent nature renders him an exile from civilized life, condemned to wander on the margins of law, stability and order.

Of course, "Brokeback Mountain" is a western by virtue of its setting rather than its themes, which recall the forbidden-love mid-1950's melodramas of Douglas Sirk more than anything Ford was doing at the time. But just about any movie that ventures into the territory of the western — and a great many that do not — has a way of bumping up against not only Ford's images but also his ideas.

He did not invent the genre, of course, and hardly restricted himself to it in the course of a career that began in the silent era and lasted more than 50 years. There will always be those who find the frontier visions of Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann, Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks more complex, more authentic or more varied than Ford's, as well as those who seek out western heroes less obvious than John Wayne. But like it or not, Wayne and Ford, whose long association is sampled in a new eight-movie boxed set and examined in a recent PBS documentary, "John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend," directed by Sam Pollard, have long since come to represent the classic, canonical idea of the American West on film.

Which is to say that their movies, however deeply revered and frequently imitated, have also been attacked, mocked, dismissed and misunderstood. If, from the late 1930's to the early 1960's, they defined the classic western — a tableau involving marauding Indians, fearless gunslingers, ruthless outlaws and the occasional high-spirited gal in a calico dress — they also begat the countertendency that came to be known as the revisionist western, with its nihilism, its brutality and its harsh demystification of the threadbare legends of the old West. Thus, after Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, after "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" and "Unforgiven," after "Dead Man" and "Deadwood," the brightly colored black-and-white world of "The Searchers" might look quaint, simplistic and not a little retrograde.

It certainly looked that way at Bennington College in 1982, when the novelist Jonathan Lethem saw the film for the first time. He recalls the laughter of his fellow undergraduates in an essay called "Defending 'The Searchers,' " which also recalls his own earnest intellectual obsession with the film. His first attempt to appreciate it ends in defeat — " 'The Searchers' was only a camp opportunity after all. I was a fool" — but he keeps returning to contend with the sneers and shrugs of academic and bohemian friends and acquaintances, who can't see what he's so excited about. "Come on, Jonathan," one of them says, "it's a Hollywood western."

So it is, which means that it's open to the usual accusations of racism, sentimentality and wishful thinking. David Thomson, in his "Biographical Dictionary of Film," tips his hat to "The Searchers," but only in the midst of a thorough ideological demolition of its director, whose "male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candor, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), a gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity and the elevation of these random prejudices into a near-political attitude." The idea that Ford is an apologist for violence and a falsifier of history, as Mr. Thomson insists, dovetails with a longstanding liberal suspicion (articulated most fully by Garry Wills in his book "John Wayne's America") of Wayne, one of Hollywood's most outspoken conservatives for most of his career. And of course, the presumed attitudes that make Wayne and Ford anathema at one end of the spectrum turn them into heroes at the other.

But as the PBS documentary makes clear, the two men did not always march in political lockstep. And in any case, the closer you look at the movies themselves, the less comfortably they fit within any neat political scheme. Even the portrayal of Indian and Mexican characters, once you get past the accents and the face paint, cannot quite be reduced to caricature.

And Wayne himself, from his star-making entrance as the Ringo Kid in "Stagecoach" (1939) to his valedictory performance in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962), his last western with Ford, is hardly the simple personification of manly virtue his critics disdain and his admirers long for. Even when he drifts toward playing a John Wayne type rather than a fully formed character, there is enough unacknowledged sorrow in his broad features, and enough uncontrolled anger in that slow, hesitant phrasing, to make him seem dangerous, unpredictable: someone to watch. He is never quite who you think he will be.

And this is never truer than in "The Searchers," where much about Ethan's personality and personal history remains in the shadows. A former soldier in the Confederate Army, he arrives in Texas (though the film was shot in Monument Valley in Utah) three years after the end of the Civil War, with no way of accounting for the time lag apart from the angry insistence that he didn't spend it in California. Wherever he was, he acquired both a virulent hatred of Indians and an intimate understanding of their ways. When his two young nieces are kidnapped by Comanches — their parents and brothers are scalped and the farmstead burned — he sets out on a search that will last for years and that will blur the distinction between rescue and vengeance. It becomes clear toward the end that he wants to find the surviving niece (now played by Natalie Wood) so that he can kill her.

This impulse points to a terrifying, pathological conception of honor, sexual and racial, and for much of "The Searchers" Ethan's heroism is inseparable from his mania. To the horror and bafflement of his companions (one of whom is both a preacher and a Texas Ranger, and thus a perfect embodiment of civilized order), Ethan shoots out the eyes of a dead Comanche, and exults that this posthumous blinding will prevent this enemy from finding his way to paradise. But when you think about it, Ethan's ability to commit such an atrocity rests on a form of respect, since unlike the others he not only knows something about Comanche beliefs but is also willing to accept their reality. And the film, for its part (the script is by Frank S. Nugent, who was once a film critic for The New York Times before he took up screenwriting), acknowledges the reality of Ethan's prejudices and blind spots, which is not the same as sharing or condoning them.

The Indian wars of the post-Civil War era form a tragic backdrop in most of Ford's post-World War II westerns, much as the earlier conflicts between settlers and natives did in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. That the Indians are defending their land, and enacting their own vengeance for earlier attacks, is widely acknowledged, even insisted upon. The real subject, though, is not how the West was conquered, but how — according to what codes, values and customs — it will be governed. The real battles are internal, and they turn on the character of the society being forged, in violence, by the settlers. Where, in this new society, will the frontier be drawn between vengeance and justice? Between loyalty to one's kind and the more abstract obligations of human decency? Between the rule of law and the law of the jungle? Between virtue and power? Between — to paraphrase one of Ford's best-known and most controversial formulations — truth and legend?

Ford's way of posing these questions seems more urgent — and more subtle — now than it may have at the time, precisely because his films are so overtly concerned with the kind of moral argument that is, or should be, at the center of American political discourse at a time of war and terrorism. He is concerned not as much with the conflict between good and evil as with contradictory notions of right, with the contradictory tensions that bedevil people who are, in the larger scheme, on the same side. When should we fight? How should we conduct ourselves when we must? In "Fort Apache," for example, the elaborate codes of military duty, without which the intricate and closely observed society of the isolated fort would fall apart, are exactly what lead it toward catastrophe. Wayne, as a savvy and moderate-tempered officer, has no choice but to obey his headstrong and vainglorious commander, played by Henry Fonda, who provokes an unnecessary and disastrous confrontation with the Apaches. In the end, Wayne, smiling mysteriously, tells a group of eager journalists that Fonda's character was a brave and brilliant military tactician. It's a lie, but apparently the public does not require — or can't handle — the truth.

In telling it, Wayne is writing himself out of history, which is also his fate in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (not, unfortunately, one of the discs in the Warner box). That film — which contains the famous line "When legend becomes fact, print the legend!" —throws Wayne's man of action and James Stewart's man of principle into a wary, rivalrous alliance. Their common enemy is an almost cartoonish thug played by Lee Marvin, but the real conflict is between Stewart's lawyer and Wayne's mysterious gunman, one of whom will be remembered as the man who shot Liberty Valance.

What we learn, in the course of the film's long flashbacks, is that the triumph of civilization over barbarism is founded on a necessary lie, and that underneath its polished procedures and high-minded institutions is a buried legacy of bloodshed. The idea that virtue can exist without violence is as untenable, as unrealistic, as the belief — central to the revisionist tradition, and advanced with particular fervor in HBO's "Deadwood" — that human society is defined by gradations of brutality, raw power, cynicism and greed.

If only things were that simple. But everywhere you look in Ford's world — certainly in "Fort Apache," in "The Searchers," in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" — you see truth shading into lie, righteousness into brutality, high honor into blind obedience. You also see, in the boisterous emoting of the secondary characters, the society that these confused ideals and complicated heroes exist to preserve: a place where people can dance (frequently), drink (constantly), flirt (occasionally) and act silly.

And everywhere else — after Ford, beyond his movies — you find the same thing. The monomaniacal quest for vengeance, undertaken by a hero at odds with the society he is expected to protect: it's sometimes hard to think of a movie from the past 30 years, from "Taxi Driver" to "Batman Begins," that doesn't take up this theme. And the deeper question of where vengeance should stop, and how it can be distinguished from justice, surfaces in "Unforgiven" and "In the Bedroom," in "Mystic River" and "Munich."

In "Munich" the Mossad assassins spend most of the film in a limbo that Ethan Edwards would recognize, even though it takes place amid the man-made monuments of Europe rather than the wind-hewn rock formations of Monument Valley. The Israeli agents are far from home, exiled from the democratic, law-governed society in whose name they commit their acts of vengeance and pre-emption, and frighteningly close both to their enemies and to a state of pure, violent retaliatory anarchy. With more anguish, perhaps, than characters in a John Ford movie, they often find themselves arguing with one another, trying to overcome, or at least to rationalize, the contradictions of what they are doing. They appeal to various texts and traditions, but they might do better to pay attention to the television that is on in the background at one point in the movie: another frame within the frame, tuned, hardly by accident, to "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

funny you should mention cooper--he and ford were partners in an independent production company, but no, he didn't have a hand in this one.

how hot is grace kelly in this?

(I guess Jon Stewart's jokey Western clips re Brokeback were even more OTM than suspected)

http://desordre.blog.excite.it/img/johnandjohn.jpg

http://www.oasismag.com/Issues/0006/images/mann.jpg

Move over, Bogdanovich!

Eric, you sleek young ageist, that's mean; I'm sure they both looked tight and cruisy on the Stagecoach set.

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/tv/reviews/7352/directed-by-john-ford/

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.

plus his segment in How the West Was Won

TOBACCO ROAD! such a great B-side to Grapes. Amusing Gene Tierney performance as a very dirty, near feral young woman with only one line at the very end--"Yes, ma'am!"

Reader in the "Hey Bill" section of Bill James' website:

After the recent discussion here on "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," I wrote a letter to Vera Miles, who played Hallie, asking her about the points raised about her feelings for Tom Doniphon. She wrote back: "Never occurred to me to wonder if Hallie was going to hitch up with Tom in the absence of Ransom. In retrospect, I believe Tom (Duke) was the man of choice. (He didn’t care if she could read or not.)"

So if you have any questions on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, you can write Vera Miles directly. Actual letter, please--no e-mail.

Holy shit

Started Scott Nyman's massive PRINT THE LEGEND bio recently, trying to pace myself because it's so good (his SPEED OF SOUND is one of the best film books I've ever read).

I've been leafing thru the Ford bio for months now tho. I didn't know about April Morning, or the extent of his alcoholism, or the bucket he started having with him on set in his last years...

Thank you, Bill.

was coming here to post that

Young Mr. Lincoln - 7/10
Clouds of Sils Maria - 9/10
Leningrad Cowboys Go America - 10/10
Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses - 10/10

i'm not sure you get John Ford, flapp

― the ignatius rock of ignorance (Dr Morbius), Sunday, June 10, 2018 12:53 AM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

He was right. I'm glad I listened.

<3

Love ya 4ever, Morbs aka Pappy <3

Just watched Riley the Cop (1928). A slight farce heavily dependent on Irish-American stereotypes, but the slight farce of a master. RIP Morbz.

the best moment in Mister Roberts is the dolly in on Jack Lemmon as he's reading the letter that says that Fonda is dead--going in and out of focus--was directed by Mervyn Le Roy (a retake, requested by Lemmon. Ford upbraided him some months later: "Thought you could do it better, EHHHH??")

Only one of two movies he made in CinemaScope / 2:35:1. It doesn't look like a Ford film, unlike The Long Gray Line, although so much of it is stuck in that fucking ship, there isn't a lot to do, particularly with such a wide frame. Despite his dislike of the format, The Long Gray Line is a visually interesting and dynamic movie.

For a while, this was on MOVIES! everytime I had lunch. Still haven't seen all of it, but the liberty sequence is amazing, and above that, the stand off between Cagney and Fonda is two legends being legendary at each other in the best way.

A slight farce heavily dependent on Irish-American stereotype

One thing about Ford is that his embrace of all sorts of offensive ethnic caricatures for comic relief very much included his own ethnic background, which is weird considering how big of an issue it was for him.

my darling clementine great as ever but i can't stop scolding all the characters for standing too close to doc

ha! They'll be alright...

Got a nice poster of that in the mail the other day

Was shocked to realize, while reading Scott Eyman's Ford bio, that Walter Brennan only ever worked with Ford once, on My Darling Clementine. They did not get along...

Because Brennan keep asking Ford "you ever been bit by a dead bee?"

it’s a career performance too! his leaning thoughtfully over the reins in the first scene, framed so it’s just his head and the curve of a whip. his holding Walter Brennan Voice in quiet reserve until it’s time to say “marshal? in tombstone?!”

Lol, Aimless.

Walter Brennan plays the deputy BUGS in Fritz Lang's first US film, FURY (1936).

He's not a wicked character but his actions, arresting Spencer Tracy's protagonist, do lead to disaster.

got hold of that eyman bio on flappy's authority and lol @ this telegram from will rogers:

PUT THE NAME DR BULL ON OUR NEXT PICTURE. SOME HALFWIT SUGGESTED LIFE'S WORTH LIVING. NOW WE FIND THAT THEY HAVE TRIED TO HANG THAT TITLE ON EVERY FOX PICTURE SINCE OVER THE HILL. SO THEY FINALLY SAID GIVE IT TO ROGERS. LIFE'S WORTH LIVING SOUNDS LIKE A GRADUATION ESSAY. AS A MATTER OF FACT IF YOU DON'T MAKE SOME BETTER PICTURES LIFE WON'T BE WORTH LIVING

watched doctor bull the other day actually; ~resonance~ for sure

framed so it’s just his head and the curve of a whip

(subtle elegance of this moment in clementine compares v well to the late-career brechtian spectacle of lee marvin ripping jimmy stewart's law book literally in two and then dramatically hoisting a knout into its vacated position in the frame, not that both these modes don't have their pleasures)

So just read that Cheyenne Autumn was supposed to be a tribute to Native Americans and their abuse by the US govt and presumably also in Ford's earlier films. I was looking the film up since i heard teh book its partially based on and lifts its name from is actually an early book to be told from the indian perspective. I had thought on first seeing it come up in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's AN Indigienous People's History of the United States that it might be about to get criticised for being Eurocentirc. But looks like it is sympathetic . Not sure how well it stands up now but may give it a read.
Also hearing taht teh Navajos that replace the Cheyenne in the film were using their own native language and being very crude in what they were saying since it wouldn't be understood. There's apparently a treaty signing scene where the Indians are talking about the colonel having a very small penis throughout. & being able to get away with things like that in the film caused Native American scholars to talk further about misrepresentation in film, Ideas of not actually being remotely understood, probably teh extent to which they were played by European and Latin (or whatever the contemporary term would have been) actors portraying them to the exclusion of actual Indians. I think also that one tribe being used as another is extremely questionable.

Haven't seen the film i years. Did think it wasa bit questionable in who stood in for who in terms of ethnicity and think that had turned up in films or documehtaries on teh subject I'd seen. Possibly better to see it as a big budget came laden film of teh period possibly if it stands up at all.

The Quiet Man had been on my "haven't seen" list for so long that Morbs once gave me shit about it person. I had the same valid knee-jerk reasons the other Destroyers on this thread do: sentimentality, etc. that I'd just be echo chambering. A long ambling slog that felt way longer than two hours and mostly an adult Disney movie of stereotypes. Nevertheless, the flashback to Thornton in the ring and the aftermath might be one of the best scenes in American cinema. I've never seen Wayne become so haunted - he barely has any words and just acts with his face. Goddamn.

Anyway, I checked it off. My fave Ford is still Mister Roberts which IIRC Morbs said was a typical choice for someone like me.

Just watched Mister Roberts for the first time and enjoyed it. The Fonda/Powell/Lemmon axis was a thing of comedic beauty.

i love that one

IT IS I ENSIGN PULVER AND I JUST THREW YOUR STINKIN PALM TREE OVERBOARD

now whats all this crud about no movie tonight

The late, great David Bordwell writes some wonderful analysis on the physical acting during the scene where they concoct the booze (scroll down):

https://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/01/18/hand-jive/

That was one of my grandpa’s favorite movies, very very fond memories. Jack Lemmon just on fire.

My Dad was a big fan of Mister Roberts and the sequel Ensign Pulver.

The sequel had Robert Walker Jr in Lemmon's role as Pulver and had a good cast with Berl Ives, Walter Matthau and early appearances by Larry Hagman and Jack Nicholson.

birdistheword thanks for that link. I also love your posts in general.

Aw, thanks for the kind words!

Yeah, I am a fan of yours as well.

Aw, thanks James!