John Ford - S/D

just payin it fwd, saddlebritches

When you do, it will be a magnificent obsession.

Sorry, wrong thread.

I broke into my F@F box last night and started with Up the River, a prison comedy (the "serio" elements are negligible) best known for the debuts of Tracy and Bogart, w/ a few genuine laughs, some knockabout action (Ward Bond surfaces just to take a KO punch from Tracy), and just for Alfred a closeup of inmates at a variety show while "M-O-T-H-E-R" is sung.

Bogart acts nothing like Bogart -- playing a rich New England kid a la his tennis-racket-carrying Broadway roles, apparently -- but Spence is in the wisecracking mode that would carry him through his other early Fox pictures. Also there's the indispensible palooka Warren Hymer as ST's sidekick.

ok, nobody reads my Spencer Tracy thread, but The Last Hurrah is worth it for the lead and its conviction as an old Irish machine-pol wake, in spite of Jeffrey Hunter and any scenes featuring actors born after 1905.

http://p7.storage.canalblog.com/70/45/110219/48200843.png

from TCM.com:

Pat O'Brien recalled that on the set... Ford "would never talk the part you were playing, he'd just tell you what he wanted. 'I hope you can get it,' he'd say, chewing on that handkerchief he always had. When you failed, he'd say, 'That wasn't what I wanted. Try to get what I wanted. We're going to take another whack at it and it better be good.' And after you finally got it he'd come over and put his arms around you. 'Why the hell didn't you get it in the first place?' he'd say. Ford was the genius of them all. He was an artist drawing a portrait in oil."

The only potentially disruptive incident that occurred during the filming was when someone showed up with a case of whiskey in celebration of St. Patrick's Day. Ford, who was a heavy drinker like most of the Irish cast and crew members, exploded in anger, "Jesus Christ, what do you want to do, shut down the picture?" and the booze was carted off.

top ten Fords

http://www.lafuriaumana.it/index.php/57-lfu-24/386-top-ten-john-ford-s-movies

and other stuff

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-the-essential-john-ford

http://www.movingimage.us/films/2015/07/03/detail/the-essential-john-ford/

suspect i will get to The Long Gray Line (hv never seen) and Sgt Rutledge (once) in 35mm this weekend.

Maureen O'Hara gives one of her best performance in The Long Gray Line as Tyrone Power's steadfast wife, and aside from the vaudeville brogue TP is better than usual. It has a much darker view of 50 years at West Point than you might expect from a '55 film made by veterans. Also enough blarney to make Alfred squirm in agony.

Sergeant Rutledge falls well short of masterpiece, thx to courtroom formula bits (esp the Perry Mason-style climax), but Woody Strode is iconically ideal throughout, esp his "I'm a man" outburst on the stand (the scene Ford made sure he was severely hung over for).

Maureen is 95 today

http://time.com/3996875/maureen-ohara-photos/

happy birthday beautiful!

quite a quintet in one of those Havana pics

http://cache3.asset-cache.net/gc/50706606-unidentified-alec-guinness-maureen-ohara-gettyimages.jpg?v=1&c=IWSAsset&k=2&d=OCUJ5gVf7YdJQI2Xhkc2QD0KZ08rggOL8PsqmULUGupnQkYg36wmfsUVIxQjxS7oQRFx181NR%2BGuglhd3Cgmsz0Q%2FuYLF0vcfVLe1a8yzY8%3D

of course, G Greene is in the shadows

RIP M O'H

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_noN7QdT3n8

Mo link roundup

https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-maureen-ohara-1920-2015

http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/01/22/john-ford-and-the-politics-of-the-western/

this article isn't very well written but some interesting points here

For example, in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON, Wayne ends the film as a disillusioned and disenchanted officer in the Calvary. He tells lies about a famous battle that featured a Custer-like military blowhard played by Henry Fonda but in his eyes you see how sickened he is by the lie.

this is fort apache, not yellow ribbon, but it's complicated: after wearily telling the ghouls what they want to hear wayne turns to the window and delivers an earnest paean to the Men Of The Cavalry. it plays enough like a good-men-bad-leaders thing to keep the movie patriotically untroubling if you want it that way but it's also easy to see wayne, obscurely, as trying to convince himself of something.

iirc both apache and ribbon have scenes where wayne parleys with a native american chief to avert bloodshed; in the former he's betrayed by henry fonda but in the latter he and the (similarly aging) chief just hang out comfortably a while talking, and we are meant i think to see them as parallel. imo there is a dark sense in this scene that both chiefs could lose control of the young men they command if they push too hard against the inertia of war -- that all the work the movie's done setting wayne up as an exemplary, compassionate, cautious commander is actually setting him up to be an abandoned one -- but then everything works out fine. often in ford there are these sort of dark possibilities that don't happen (let's go home, debbie) -- i used to think these were "pulled punches" or even hayes artifacts (hayes used here really as synecdoche for, like, america) but that's not really it.

oh hey there's quite a bit of good talk upthread about the end of apache.

3 GodFathers, which I saw a couple weeks ago, is bizarre, alternating from harrowing disaster drama (Wayne, Almendariz, Carey in the desert) to filmed realization of a children's Bible.

who's seen donovan's reef? (i haven't.) late wayne hangs out w lee marvin and jack warden on south pacific island governed by cesar romero and played by kauai. would like to see john ford shoot kauai.

Stagecoach is just as brilliant as iconic as its champions have said for 78 years. Key dialogue:

Thieving Banker: "What this country needs is a businessman for president!"

Drunken Doctor: "What this country needs is more fuddle."

The action sequence at the end is truly astonishing.

Spielberg swiped two of the Apache-battle stunts for Raiders.

The way he introduces the ten or so main characters (save for Ringo) in the first 13 minutes or so is a model of expressive and economical narrative. No Hollywood 'epic' would do it in less than 40 today.

intriguing Ford-Wayne book?

"Ford was terrified of his own feminine side, so he foisted a longed-for masculinity on Wayne. A much simpler creature than Ford, Wayne turned this into a cartoon, and then went further and politicized it. There was an awful pathos to their relationship—Wayne patterning himself on Ford, at the same time that Ford was turning Wayne into a paragon no man could live up to. . . . The invention of John Wayne—is there a more primal scene of masculinity being stripped of utility and endowed with dubious political karma?”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/12/john-wayne-john-ford/544113/

!

It was left to Maureen O’Hara, one of Ford’s favorite actresses, to be more direct. In her 2004 memoir, she speculates that Ford was gay. (She claims she walked in on the director kissing a leading man.)

The two of them playing a game of macho chicken. I want John Waters to adapt their story.

I see now we were already down this road back in '06.

rowr @ Wayne necking with Thomas Mitchell

We are talking about the director of Men Without Women. I leave it to others to comment on Air Male Mail.

Ford is the one Mo walked in on... most likely with Tyrone Power! UPI, 2004:

Recalling the incident on the set of the 1955 film, "The Long Gray Line," the 83-year-old screen legend writes: "I walked into his office without knocking and could hardly believe my eyes. Ford had his arms around another man and was kissing him. I was shocked and speechless. I quickly dropped the sketches on the floor, then knelt down to pick them up ...

"They were on opposite sides of the room in a flash," she said.

Identifying the man with Ford only as "one of the most famous leading men in the picture business," O'Hara said he later approached her and asked her why she had never mentioned Ford was gay.

"I answered, 'How could I tell you something I knew nothing about?'"

If there was a bigger male hoo'er in Hollywood in that era than Tyrone Power, I'm not sure who that person would be.

that Scotty Bowers guy wd know.

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.

I finally watched this on Blu last night; while it's borderline trivial aside from its technological significance as one of two Cinerama narrative features -- and JF's Civil War segment is only 20 minutes -- the bloody moments are shocking, including a PTSD-suffering George Peppard dashing through a red creek after a deadly encounter with Russ Tamblyn.

Also, that buffalo stampede in one of the later (Henry Hathaway) reels, wow.

http://images.static-bluray.com/reviews/624_5.jpg

Rewatched Young Mr. Lincoln yesterday, right after first viewing of The Prisoner of Shark Island (which is fine but no lost classic, though the characterization of the fairly large contingent of black men guarding the prison is fascinating).

YML might've been the first Ford movie I saw as a kid, multiple times. I enjoy the Fonda story about him being dressed down by Ford when he initially rejected the role -- "Do you think you're playing the fucking Great Emancipator? He's a goddamn jackleg lawyer!" The Criterion commentary reveals that one of Ford's fave TV shows was Perry Mason, hilarious given that Ward Bond's climactic breakdown in the courtroom could've been in any PM episode.

Also hadn't known that Alice Brady, who plays the illiterate mother of the two young men on trial, was dying of cancer during production (she looks way older than 46).

Boy do I love that movie (YML).

Tag Gallagher:

At the time of my first book, much conventional opinion (outside California) held that Ford the epitome of everything despicable: racist, sexist, militarist, chauvinist, boring. My effort was to refute such nonsense, not by debating it, but by putting forth an alternate vision of Ford as the profoundly anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-militarist, anti-chauvinist, and the most inventive and imaginative of American moviemakers. At a time when Hollywood movies were rarely taken seriously, I said he was our greatest native-born artist.

Others joined this effort, and I believe that today we have largely succeeded.

Finally, why John Ford? Well, to paraphrase Bertolucci, because we cannot live without Ford.

http://filmint.nu/?p=25553

Saw Young Mr. Lincoln at a theater a couple weeks ago, small crowd gave a standing ovation at the end. I was surprised how riveting it was, I watched it at home less than a year ago, and it went way up in my estimation. Saw The Magician at the same theater a week later and Ford's influence on Bergman was clear, especially in the opening when they're in a horse-driven carriage in foggy woods.

Beyond these, what are the gems to see before Liberty Valance?

Stagecoach
Young Mr. Lincoln
My Darling Clementine
Fort Apache
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Rio Grande
The Quiet Man
The Searchers

imho,

The Iron Horse
at least one of the Will Rogers films (Judge Priest)
The Prisoner of Shark Island
How Green Was My Valley
Wagonmaster
The Sun Shines Bright
The Long Gray Line

and

3 Godfathers (or 3 Bad Men, silent)
Sergeant Rutledge

I'll second The Prisoner of Shark Island and How Green Was My Valley and add The Grapes of Wrath and Cheyenne Autumn.

of course Grapes. Cheyenne is after Liberty Valance, so i'd suggest flappy save that one.

Wagonmaster definitely.

found Cheyenne Autumn oddly inert. appreciated it simply from a historical perspective in terms of seeing actual Navajos onscreen (standing in for the Cheyenne) and speaking their own language (albeit mostly for lolz: Dialogue that is supposed to be the "Cheyenne language" is actually Navajo. This made little differences to white audiences, but for Navajo communities, the film became very popular because the Navajo actors openly were using ribald and crude language that had nothing to do with the film. For example, during the scene where the treaty is signed, the chief's solemn speech just pokes fun at the size of the colonel's penis. Academics now consider this an important moment in the development of Native Americans' identity because they are able to mock Hollywood's historical interpretation of the American West.)

And of course it looked great, but the story seemed poorly formed, Widmark is irritating, the Dodge City interlude is nonsensical, the narration is bad, etc.

also watched Stagecoach, which was great. I like my Westerns strewn with memorable character bits.

rio bravo

Hawks always said he was extremely flattered when people thought Red River was a John Ford movie.

Yeah, I've heard Hawks sing Ford's praises. Welles did, too.

flip thought i was on the john wayne thread didni

How Green Was My Valley