Sarah / Mary

The Shepherd of the Hills (Henry Hathaway, 1941)

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford, 1949)

*********************************************

 Speaking of non-Ford Fordian movies (which Shepherd is most definitely; in addition to the above, Harry Carey plays Wayne's father (!), and Wayne and Ward Bond have an all-out brawl in front of everyone), I'll throw a quick plug in for another fine example that's found reason to be brought up in certain cinephile corners lately, George Marshall's Pillars of the Sky (1956). It's one of five films on the recently released TCM DVD box set Western Horizons: Universal Westerns of the 1950's, surely one of the essential home video releases of the year. I was initially attracted to the set due to the presence of George Sherman's Dawn at Socorro (1954) - I've been watching lately as much of Sherman's marvelous Universal-International output as I've been able to get my hands on and this was one of his most obscure and highly thought of from the period - but every one here is great, with maybe the biggest surprise for me being John Sturges' tough, taut, cerebral Backlash (1956), a truly incredible western. A highly recommended purchase.

The Last Hurrah

If death is always felt most strongly in Ford around the edges, then The Last Hurrah earns its reputation as something fundamentally and uncharacteristically disengaged in the late deathbed sequence where the director finds himself confronting mortality in the most overtly conventional of dramatic terms. So many of Ford's endings are one or another kind of final goodbye, endings that bloom with melancholic force because of everything that's left unsaid and the way that this shapes the emotional timbres of the moment(s), so the necessity here to have it all verbally expressed in pat phrasing (Tracy to his doc: "Let's stop kiddin', we both know the score") instills a certain parched effect upon the event, and the stuffy, studio-imposed editing of the unusually ascetic b&w compositions tips everything over into a somewhat stilted variant on the type of frigid rigor one tends to associate with a Dreyer (and is there any argument that this isn't the most Dreyer-esque of Ford?)

But the grace notes survive - watch how Tracy holds on just a fraction of a second too long to Edward Brophy's finger as Brophy is leaving his side for the final time - and the last shot is just one of the most beautiful things ever filmed, a mournful ascent of shadows suggesting that all of these dear, authentic men in Frank Skeffington's life/death themselves already have one foot out the door. If it's not quite as devastating as the final moments of The Sun Shines Bright (and really, what is?), it at least affirms the world of The Last Hurrah as the twilight zone of the former film dragged onerously into the present, with more dust and less to hold onto.

w/o

Men Without Women - survival tale or ghost story? At the very least a lot of both, but above all most certainly a Ford film: the first quarter of the 70+ minute running time is spent in a Shanghai bar that resembles some kind of Fordian afterlife, with deep space stretching back into eternity filled with sailors and officers in spanking uniforms guzzling booze and playing pranks and breaking out into song and referring to the bartender as 'undertaker' and to themselves as ghosts and running into old acquaintances and spotting others thought to be dead. Precisely nothing of consequence occurs in this opening sequence, yet everything pertinent is felt - this world of thick fog and alcohol and the sea and death is clearly a step towards what would be expressed so profoundly a decade later in The Long Voyage Home - and the desperate situation that fills out the remaining movie becomes infused with this eeriness and vague sense of hyperphysicality and is thus rendered with maybe something less than the appropriate intensity of desperation, even if it does at times quite nimbly reach the fevered pitches of claustrophobia and dread that Ford struggles towards in The Lost Patrol (on that note, was there any other major director experimenting with violent strobing in 1930?). "S.O.S...SAVE OUR SOULS!!!" one sailor gone mad screeches towards the end; it's probably the most sane line spoken in the entire thing.

The Little Things

It's funny how sometimes a little moment will sneak itself into a movie and completely change the way we experience it. The film in question: Wellman's Across the Wide Missouri (1951), a visually stunning frontier tale shot almost entirely in the Rocky Mountains. The spectacle of the backdrop outsizes and upstages the drama at pretty much every turn, but this is undoubtedly more to do with the studio's butchery - they not only chopped an hour off Wellman's original cut, but retrofitted a voice-over narration that turns everything into a flashback - than it does with any paltriness of directorial vision. As is, at a mere 78 minutes, it's an interesting enough movie, and aside from the gorgeous photography, there is an unusual amount of careful attention paid to depicting the richness of Indian culture, and no less than three languages spoken at regularity throughout. There's also a bit of a playful streak present (uncharacteristic for later Wellman in my experience) punctuated by moments of stark cruelty: it contains without a doubt one of the most cold-blooded, out-of-left-field murders of a major character I've ever seen.

Anyway, the alluded to moment occurs around two-thirds of the way through the running time, during a scene between the fur-trapper played by Clark Gable and his wife (María Elena Marqués), a Blackfoot Indian he originally married to gain access to bountiful beaver land, but has since fallen in love with. He is telling her about the land he comes from (Kentucky), and teaching her how to say "bluegrass", and at the end of the scene he bends over the table she's sitting at to deliver a kiss. Wellman cuts to a shot from behind this kiss, placing the elbow of Gable (who was 50 when Across the Wide Missouri was shot) near the center of the frame as it bears the brunt of his body weight. As Gable is coming up from the kiss, his arm slightly but very noticeably begins to tremble under the strain. It's tough to tell whether or not Wellman intended to have a visual signifier of the aging process be the star of this scene, nonetheless the effect of the moment is undeniable: Gable's character, who up until this moment had been portrayed as nothing short of the essence of bluster and opportunism on two feet, becomes a bit rickety, a bit vulnerable, much more human. A few scenes later, after his wife tells him of her pregnancy, we can't help now but detect more than a hint of poignant desperation as he races around his little community feverishly delivering the news. And because he has from this moment become, in a way, a much different character, so too does the movie becomes a different movie, one not so much about a poacher who discovers tolerance and love, but about a man who can sense his own mortality, and who slowly begins giving into the quiet, vital impulse of ensuring that his house is in order for everything that will remain and come after him. It gives moments like the one below, with Gable staring at his wife and newborn through the doorway, a very sad, almost Fordian resonance - moments concerning everything but the moments themselves:

Capsule Reviews 12/2/11

Up the River (John Ford, 1930) - This early sound Fox comedy finds its strengths in leisurely pacing and breezy tone, and features entertaining early performances from both Tracy and Bogart (in their first and second film roles, respectively) as a pair of cons from very different backgrounds who befriend one another in the hoosegow and loosely glide around a plot involving love, scams and baseball. As was often the case with Ford comedies of the era, it relies heavily on vignette technique and is generally less concerned with matters of landscape and atmosphere, though dabs of expressionism seep through occasionally, such as in the excellent opening prison break sequence. The result is pleasingly winsome, loony comedy, far from Ford's forte but more than adequately rendered here, interspersed with the usual reflective Fordian touches, including a melancholic neighborhood hay ride (the best scene in the film), as well as heavy and affecting use of the parade-style music the director would return to so often throughout his career.


The Lost Patrol (John Ford, 1934) - A meager British patrol traipse aimlessly about the Mesopotamian desert during World War I after their commander is killed by an Arab sniper. The troop eventually reaches shelter in the form of a desolate oasis, setting into motion their slow, methodical eradication by the faceless death that surrounds them from seemingly every direction. Ford's vision for the material is lean, dreadful and hallucinatory; he clearly conceives of this increasingly unhinged community as a portrait of terror, and in everything from the rhythmic pattern of deaths to the arc of McGlaglen's "final girl"-esque character, the film can pretty accurately be labeled a proto-slasher, and it's easily the closest thing to a true horror film Ford ever made (the casting of Bela Lugosi in a particularly maniacal role is not happenstance). But the actual Fordian moments are few and far between, and writer Dudley Nichols' deathly banal dialogue and schematic scenarios hold it back from every really taking off. To top it all, Ford had wanted the movie completely musicless, but at the eleventh hour Max Steiner was commissioned by the studio to compose one of his truly abysmal Mickey Mousing scores; it completely saps the images and sequences of their emotional tension, and for that it was awarded the Oscar.


Carnival of Souls (Herk Harvey, 1962) - In this micro-budgeted cult horror fave (the sole feature from industrial filmmaker Herk Havey) a young church organist survives a fatal drag race crash and treks off to Salt Lake City for a new job, hounded by terrible visions at every step. What is lacking in direction and veneer is more than made up for with a genuine sense of desolation, and a particularly firm grasp of one simple but oft-overlooked Horror truth: that creepy architecture and atmosphere are almost entirely dependent on the human presence. Only in the compressed nightmare logic of its final sequences does the movie give form to its most scattershot impulses and begin to resemble something of an authentic vision, but as an overall mood piece its effectiveness and eeriness if difficult to deny. The striking on-location photography (in and around Salt Lake City, in particular the creepy Saltair Pavillion) and unconventional casting of non-professional locals go a long way towards instilling the movie with its distinct, lasting character, and its influence over a certain kind of low-budget horror filmmaking - beginning with and epitomized by Romero's Night of the Living Dead - can still be felt strongly today.


The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980) - The opening scene is in effect a litmus test of one's appreciation for what's to come: over Denny Brooks' bittersweet ballad 'San Antone', images of moons and spaceships and fog-shrouded gothic castles and grieving men fill the screen, a strangely stirring cornucopia of discordant emotions and tones that acts as a microcosm for the utterly unclassifiable two hours to come. Here Blatty adapts his novel Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane, the tale of a madman on a personal pilgrimage in an experimental military psychiatric residence, and it seems that for many critics the film stands as an exercise in the dangers of granting a writer privilege over the cinematic vision of his own material. However it is precisely Blatty's rough-hewn, personal urgency behind the camera that gives the movie so much of its mysterious power; one gets the sense that a more objective, surer hand would have resulted in a far less interesting result. A cast of formidable character actors and an award-winning screenplay have done nothing to salvage Configuration from obscurity over the years, and Blatty would go on to direct only one other feature, 1990's Exorcist III. If the latter stands as the more successful effort (indeed it's one of the better horror films of the 90s), it's because Blatty brought to it a more orderly, formalist approach that better served both his weighty concerns of faith and sacrifice, as well as his gestures toward the surreal. The seeds of a personal omniverse are scattered between the two movies, resulting in some interesting criss-crossing references, however they are united most prominently perhaps by Blatty's overt love for the patter of rain against a window.


The Killer Is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956) - After a single viewing I'm tempted to dub The Killer Is Loose both a small masterpiece, and perhaps the most undervalued entry in Boetticher's oeuvre. A cop (Joseph Cotton), while arresting a crooked bank clerk (Wendell Corey), accidentally kills the latter's wife. Years pass, and the psychopathic criminal escapes from prison to exact his revenge on Cotton and his wife, leaving behind a slew of bodies as he inches closer toward his ultimate targets. The thing that jumps out most is how harsh and tactile the violence here is: a prison driver is murdered by Corey for his vehicle, but his body isn't simply dumped out of the truck, the camera follows closely as it splashes raggedly, sloppily into a filthy ditch of mud; in the scene where Corey visits and eventually murders his former army sergeant (the best in the movie, a model of ominous, sustained tension), a body isn't simply shot and killed, it flails violently, with milk bottles shattering and kitchen cookware exploding. A fairly jarring depiction for its day, and one that clearly anticipates the stark, brutal mode of bloodshed found in Boetticher's later work. Corey is fantastic through all this as the deadpan, volatile killer, and in his possessed, post-murder proclamations of helplessness and his climactic excursion into cross-dressing, he acts as a walking perversion of the famous credo that proliferates the Ranown cycle: "A man can do that". There is also fascinating use of sound and off-screen space to heighten the ever-present sense of anxiety and to construct moments of pure portent: Corey staring up into the cloudless sky and being met with a large rumble of thunder after escaping prison is one of the most haunting moments in all of Boetticher. This was the last feature the great director would make before jumping into the Westerns that inarguably comprise the apex of his career, and if those films represent an unusually rarefied level of B-movie craftsmanship in the history of American cinema, The Killer Is Loose as their antecedent deserves at least a passing mention in the conversation. It's lean, expressive, gripping stuff, and I can't wait to sit down with it again.

The Shamrock Handicap (John Ford, 1926)

John Ford's The Shamrock Handicap (1926) is a masterful silent film from the great director, one of many thought to have been lost for good before re-emerging sometime ago to the great delight and interest of film lovers everywhere. While the prospect of any John Ford film being permanently lost is a disheartening one, The Shamrock Handicap in particular would have been a travesty to lose, seeing as how it is the first film to deal with one of Ford's most personal themes, his Irish heritage. Similar to what was to become one of his most successful pictures, The Quiet Man, The Shamrock Handicap is a romantic comedy set in Ireland. The story concerns Sir Miles O'Hara (Louis Payne) and his daughter Sheila (Janet Gaynor), who rent out living quarters to a poor family, the O'Sheas, who cannot pay rent on time. Sir Miles, out of kindness, accepts sweets from the family as payment, however the tax collectors catch up with him, and so Sir Miles and the O'Sheas are forced to sell their stable of horses to a buyer named Finch (Willard Louis). Finch woos the family's jockey Neil Ross (Leslie Fenton), who is in love with Sheila, to return to America with him and try his hand at becoming a successful full-time jockey. Neil moves quickly up through the jockey ranks, before suffering a serious injury in a big race, unbeknownst to the O'Shea/O'Hara clan, who have made the trek to America with their sole remaining horse Dark Rosaleena, in hopes of entering the prestigious Shamrock Handicap, and claiming the $25,000 prize.

While Ford's visual style in the 30's was to be largely dominated by the expressionist influence of F.W. Murnau, the visuals in The Shamrock Handicap look forward to the more picturesque, spacious, classical compositional style that would come to define Ford's 1950's films. While much of the second half set in America is comprised of uncomplicated interiors, the first part of the movie set in Ireland is stunningly gorgeous, utilizing space and angles, as well as heavy foliage and the poetry of light and shadows to give many of the outdoor shots a heavy impressionist feel. Ford also flirts with the use of foreground objects as well as utilizing diagonal lines to bring out the dynamics of a shot and give it depth, techniques he would master and return to over and over in later films, and the result here is simply some of the most ravishing images I've seen from Ford's silent period work. The story itself is nothing that special of course, the mood is light and the pace brisk, with the heroes winning the race at the end and returning triumphant back to Ireland with money troubles alleviated and the Neil and Sheila characters ending up together. But the titular race is a genuinely exciting visual spectacle to watch, and gentle humor and slapstick (occasionally dicey territory for Ford) is used in measured doses to charming effect.

The most interesting character in The Shamrock Handicap is one named Virus Cakes (!), a black valet at the ritzy American horseracing club, played by an actor named Ely Reynolds, who according to IMDB has only two acting credits to his name*, this and another recently unearthed Ford silent, Upstream (1927). The character of Virus Cakes likely qualifies as one of Ford's "fool characters", or characters who reveal social values through comedy (see: Andy Devine in Stagecoach, Hank Worden in The Searchers, Francis Ford in almost everything). But, similar to another atypical Ford fool, the oft-misunderstood Stepin Fetchit, the Virus Cakes character is played for more than (or maybe not at all) simple laughs, and is consistently and compassionately given, throughout his surprisingly bulky amount of screentime, a subtle complexity and unique point of view. Take for instance the scene where the O'Hara clan first arrive in America: Neil and Sheila embrace on the dock after much time apart, yet Ford frames Virus in the left third of the screen, watching this loving act between two people as basically a complete alien, even guiltily looking away in moments as though he has no business observing such a thing. It is obvious from his framing that Ford is going for something beyond a simple, joyful reunion, and it's an incredibly sad little sequence. Also take as example the scene where Virus is instructed by the owner of a horse to exercise the animal in an area next to a cemetery. It's a sequence that gives the impression of being played merely for laughs - Virus fails in spectacular fashion - however Ford, through close-ups, seems to be unusually sympathetic to the effort made by Virus, while also highlighting the brusque treatment given to him by the horse's owner.

Easily the craziest sequence involving this character, and indeed one of the most surreal sequences I've stumbled across in the entire Ford corpus, involves Virus Cakes becoming lost in a hospital during a trip all of the jocks make to visit an ailing Neil after his injury. He roams aimlessly around the hallways with his sad bouquet of flowers, bleakly watching as nurses roll covered bodies by him repeatedly. Virus stops at a random door, decides to enter it, and views (as the camera takes his POV) three surgeons raising their heads slowly and simultaneously, much like monsters in a monster movie. Ford cuts to a reverse shot of Cakes appearing hypnotized as his bowler hat slowly begins sliding over the top of his head all by itself. Another shot of the surgeons sees their forms slowly become unfocused and warbled and twisted into three ominous, amorphous white figures (they might as well be wearing hoods). Ford then slowly (and I mean in extreme slow motion) shows Cakes turn and run out of the door, giving one last caustic glance back behind him. It is such an utterly bizarre and disconcerting scene, one that manages to conjure up racial anxiety in a wholly unique and impactful manner, while also giving off the vague impression that this story is as much about Virus Cakes as it is the O'Hara family, Neil the jockey, or any other character.

The Shamrock Handicap was based off of a story from American author Peter B. Kyne (who Ford also adapted for his 1948 picture 3 Godfathers) and shot by cinematographer George Schneiderman, (one of Ford's most essential collaborators in his early years, who also shot the classic Ford silents 3 Bad Men and The Iron Horse, as well as the Will Rodgers starring Judge Priest and Steamboat Round the Bend), and it is often as visually impressive as any Ford that I've seen. Also of note in this picture is the deft manner in which Ford juggles the fairly sizable cast, who is introduced in rapid fire with (typically) little exposition. A charming and occasionally mysterious work of great visual beauty and subtle complexity, The Shamrock Handicap is the product of a master near the peak of his profession, and sees Ford both working out personal themes and fine tuning his visual craft to a typically fascinating end, one that makes me mournful to think of all the great Ford films (and films in general) that have been lost forever, and thankful for those that have been found and saved.

* Since writing this I have also identified Reynolds in a bit part as a shoeshiner in Ford's 1928 silent Riley the Cop. Hopefully more will be discovered and written about this interesting early Ford regular at some point.

Ford & Faces

Lately I've been working on filling in some holes in my John Ford viewing, which there are sadly way too many of, and one of my most pleasant discoveries yet is his 1933 film Pilgrimage, starring Henrietta Crosman as a crotchety and bitter small town Gold Star mother who makes the titular trek to France to visit the grave of her son who died during combat. It's quite a nifty and frequently enthralling piece of filmmaking, switching modes often and at the drop of a hat, morphing from domestic chamber drama to tragic love story to an overseas comedy of manners to finally becoming a redemption piece, Ford's deft touch and Crosman's endlessly witty performance giving the whole thing a remarkably cogent feel. Aside from the motley narrative, there are plenty of interesting things going on visually in the movie, and in particular I found the opening 15 or so minutes, taking place on Crosman and her son Jim's (Norman Foster) Arkansas farm home, to be the most arresting. Aside from the evident riffs on Murnau that take place, there is an incredibly odd, almost insular bubble-type quality to the way Ford shoots the pair and their neighbors working on the land, as if they are the only humans left on the planet or something.

Anyway, my favorite moment in the film, the one that struck me the most and the one that the three shots above are from, takes place about 20 or so minutes in. Jim, after having already been shipped to war, gets a quick visit with his girlfriend Mary (Marian Nixon) during a brief stop at a train station. Mary reveals that she's pregnant, and Jim pleads with his superiors to give him additional time to go and quickly get married, which he is denied before promptly being wrestled back onto the train. And here the camera cuts to Mary's face as she stands alone on the platform, anxiously watching her lover board the train. He screams out that he's sorry, she screams back not to worry and to write when he can. Neither of them know it will be their last time seeing the other. The camera continues to stay on Mary's face as the commotion reaches a pinnacle, and the train begins to chug. The chugging accelerates, and we can hear the train moving along now, but the camera stays on Mary. She clutches her face and seems overcome with grief - maybe she does know it's the last time they'll see each other. We now hear the train moving along even faster, horn blowing as it shoves off further out from the station, and a weird tension quickly develops because it really feels like the editing should cut to a shot of the train departing, but Ford is relentless, and the camera stays on Mary. Tears have welled up heavily by this point, and just as it reaches an almost unbearable level, the train - way off in the distance by now - toots its horn one more time, as if to give a final goodbye, before Ford finally relieves the suffering with a fade to a war bunker.

Ford's impulse to fix the camera on Mary's face for the entire duration (nearly a whole minute) is brilliant and heartbreaking, elevating into the realm of aching poetry a moment that in the hands of most would serve as mere melodrama. What a scene, what a movie. What a director.