Ford at Fox Collection John Fords American Comedies Dvd Review
The Grapes of Wrath.
Ford at Fox
20th Century Fob Home Amusement
Available December. iv, List Price $299.98
Cranky sometime John Ford might never take used the word... but "Wow" is the only advisable reaction to this mammoth collection. Twelve pounds, 20 discs and 24 grand old films (eight of them beautifully restored) from the 1920 Simply Pals to My Darling Clementine in 1946. You also get a pretty picture book and an illuminating new documentary, Condign John Ford, which concentrates on the director'due south working human relationship with Fox studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck. The whole enterprise is a grand and fitting tribute to the man whose movies Spielberg and Scorsese, Lucas and Leone and Kurosawa learned and so much from. Ford was the classic American manager. The box set up is a classic in its own correct — what could be a paradigm for collections of other Hollywood originals.
Ford's response to this attention would probably be a dismissive grunt. Possibly an obscenity. Fact is, he was not a nice man. Equally Orson Welles puckishly noted, "Jack had fries on his shoulder like epaulets." In Becoming John Ford, one of his biographers, the scholar Joseph McBride, says, "He was a tyrant, he was a sadist. The John Ford family, it's sort of like a bunch of driveling children, and an abusive begetter. And yet they were devoted to him." An alcoholic with a mean streak, Ford "would read and drink himself into oblivion," according to McBride. Some other sympathetic critic, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, describes the managing director as "kind of a nutcase." Ford may accept been speaking of himself when he observed, "Irish gaelic and genius don't mix well."
Ford was not a full-service auteur. He didn't write the scripts for his films (which makes the documentary's complete ignoring of the contributions of Dudley Nichols, Nunnally Johnson, Lamar Trotti and Philip Dunne — who shaped the stories and wrote the dialogue for most of the best films collected here — a nigh-criminal offense). Oft, it'southward claimed, he wouldn't read the script. "An older human being was supposed to kiss some woman," McBride says, "and he wasn't doing information technology with enough passion, and Ford said... 'Kiss her on the mouth.' And he said, 'Mr. Ford, she's playing my daughter.'"
Like virtually every other director in the '30s and '40s, Ford was obliged to be a company man, rankling under his dominate'due south gaze. ("The front office likes the rushes," he once said, "then there must be something wrong. We'll have to keep shooting till we find out what it is.") And when the shooting was over, Ford didn't edit his films; he left that job to Zanuck and his minions. "Darryl knew I hated to get into the project room," Ford said about The Grapes of Wrath. "So I had this tacit agreement that he would cut the moving-picture show." Ford praised Zanuck's use of music (not much) and sound effects (crickets). "He was a groovy cutter, a keen film editor." The boss fine-tuned Ford'southward movies while the director moved down the associates line to the side by side job of work.
Only on the set, between "Action!" and "Cut!," he worked miracles of visual composition and human emotion. The young Ford learned much from F.W. Murnau'due south 1927 Sunrise (fabricated at Play tricks); he practical Murnau's framing savvy and moving camera to his next picture, Four Sons, and kept enriching his technique with borrowings from before masters and the application of his own innovative spirit. His aim, he said, was to create "auditory imagery, the chance to projection symphonic qualities for the creation and holding of mood, so that pictures will no longer be limited to pure and elementary narrative for material." Ford's souvenir for getting the best out of actors — especially, in his Play tricks years, Henry Fonda — earned them 10 Oscar nominations. Ford'southward peers at the Motion Movie University recognized his gift: they gave him a record four Oscars or Best Director. Ford at Fox shows why Ford deserved those accolades.
If $300 ($209.99 at Amazon.com) seems a bit steep for a box of old movies, buy one of the cheaper, smaller packets. Offset with The Essential John Ford Collection; information technology contains the official classics My Darling Clementine, Drums Along the Mohawk, How Green Was My Valley and The Grapes of Wrath, plus Becoming John Ford). Too available are: John Ford's Silent Epics (Just Pals, The Iron Horse in two versions, 4 Sons, Hangman's House and 3 Bad Men); John Ford'south American Comedies (leading with iii movies starring the immensely popular Will Rogers — Steamboat Around the Curve, Judge Priest and Doc Bull — buttressed by the minor When Willie Comes Marching Home, Upward the River and What Price Glory). These sets go for $35 to $38 at Amazon. Two fascinating early talkies, Pilgrimage and Built-in Reckless tin can be had in a double-feature set for $17.99. Highly recommended is the one-disc Becoming John Ford, whose extras include the director's wartime documentaries The Battle of Midway and December seventh ($11.19 at Amazon).
Ford'southward films aren't miniatures; they're epics, with the yard sweep of life passing earlier his cameras. Births, marriages and deaths, especially deaths, are movingly recorded. Mothers are the moral center of Ford's world; they have folk wisdom in their DNA, and commonly dispense it lovingly. From the mother, emotional bonds spread less to a homo's spouse than to his family unit, his neighbors, his village or class, who often join him in celebratory or mournful vocal at a milestone event. (Ford was a sucker for choral singing nigh as much as for roughhouse comedy. He put way too much of it in his movies, and Zanuck had the adept sense to go out a lot of it on the cutting room.)
And after the singing, the keening, the fond or tearful farewells, the hero is left alone to commune with the departed. Some of the most telling moments in the period films Approximate Priest, Young Mr. Lincoln and Clementine are of men talking to their dead brides or visiting the graves of loved ones. Even in the contemporary films, Ford'southward tone was elegiac. The documentaries The Boxing of Midway and December 7th spend virtually every bit much fourth dimension on requiems for the fallen soldiers as on the attacks themselves.
In the '30s and '40s, Ford worked at nearly of the large studios: MGM, RKO, Columbia, Goldwyn, Universal and United Artists. This freelancing resulted in some of his most famous films, including The Informer, for which he won his first Oscar, and the ur-Western Stagecoach. (Both these films were written by Nichols.) But for a quarter century Fox was his home. There, and throughout the studio organisation, directors rarely got to choose their own films. Ford accumulated power every bit his reputation grew, and under Zanuck he got the prestige projects: the best-selling novels ready to become Oscar-worthy pictures. Simply he and his contemporaries were typically hamstrung by the industry's avidity to compromise. "If you lot're thinking of a general run of social pictures, or fifty-fifty but plainly honest ones," he is quoted as saying in Becoming John Ford, "it'southward almost hopeless. The whole financial setup is against information technology. What y'all'll get is an isolated courageous endeavor here and there."
Earlier, he took what he was given, though fifty-fifty the routine assignments take their pleasures. The 1930 gangster drama Born Reckless parades the brashness common to those frontier days of the starting time talkies. In i scene, Edmund Lowe, as the charming con Louis Baretti, pulls a ring off his finger, tosses it into a moll's blouse and pats her breasts cheerio. Later, Lowe has a speech (written by Nichols) that compresses every underworld cliche into 53 words — or perhaps it invented the phrases that James Cagney and countless tough guys would use later. "Made ya turn stool pigeon," Lowe tells a police informant. "Double-crossed your ain mob, huh? Turned in Big to salvage your ain rotten hibernate. Say, this room ain't large enough for both of us. This town own't big enough. And so yous if you always crash-land into me you amend see me commencement, you dirty sneakin' rat."
Which is to say that Ford's pictures were of their time. Or, more frequently, the time before that — a pastel by of rural virtues, docile wives, southern hospitality and shiftless Negroes. The most unshiftable, and inscrutable, was the astonishing Stepin Fetchit, who dominated any scene he was in past establishing his own molasses tempo when he moved or spoke. He was in v Fords, including Judge Priest, where he plays Volition Rogers' handyman and, more or less, lawn jockey. Rogers sends him on an errand, asking, "Gonna put your shoes on?" "Saving' 'em instance my feet vesture out," is the drawling reply. Rogers: "Every bit much settin' effectually as you lot exercise, won't be your feet that wear out." Judge Priest, set in 1890, has bushels of this sort of sense of humour, plus a quartet of mammies apostrophizing the Quondam Confederacy past joining Rogers in a chorus of "My Old Kentucky Home." Yet the film is so relaxed, and then amiable, that it might exist in some alternate universe where blacks weren't chattel, and the races got along fine.
It might surprise viewers of the Rogers films to hear that Ford was a liberal Democrat who during the blacklist days defended the not-Communist Left against right-wingers like Cecil B. De Mille. The Grapes of Wrath is in a manner a primal Ford flick (and a great i), with its close-knit family unit led past Jane Darwell as a wise, flinty mother. But the film also bordered on socialism, with its sympathy for immigrant laborers (Okies) and its defiant speechifying: "Wherever there'south a fight, so hungry people tin eat, I'll be there. Wherever there'southward a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the fashion guys yell when they're mad." John Steinbeck, the novel's author, was apprehensive that Play a joke on, owned by Eastern banks, would squash the carmine out of his grapes. Zanuck assured him the adaptation would exist true-blue, and it was. And Ford wrung every drop of rage and desolation out of the plight of desperate farmers, 10 years into the Depression.
One of the strongest anti-capital films Ford directed is ane that has received little attention: The World Moves On, written by Reginald Barkley. It traces 100 years in the life of a banking family, slogging along until it gets to Earth State of war I. Suddenly there are 5 mins. of harrowing war footage, equally intense every bit annihilation from the many state of war movies made at the time. The scenes aren't Ford's; they were taken from the 1932 French picture Wooden Crosses (available on Criterion's Raymond Bernard box set). Flash frontward, as a title menu informs us: "So post-state of war years — ideals born of blood and cede forgotten — money the new morality — power the new God —" Equally if in the Almighty's personal penalisation for the family's forehandedness, the Depression arrives, and the clan is bankrupt. Then is the country. "There'due south no mode out except for another war." The heroine (Madeleine Carroll) grows biting: "State of war is a disease. Homicidal mania on the thousand scale, brought on by fearfulness and jealousy." Cut to a startling montage of news clips showing Hitler and his SS, a militarized Japan, Britain's warships, Mussolini'south soldiers in Rome, U.South. fighter planes. It's Globe War II, all foreseen in a movie from 1934.
Ford, who had been in the Naval Reserve since 1934, was one of the first Hollywood directors to go to war. (Zanuck went too.) He didn't make a commercial movie for four years, though Fox, at the suggestion of Franklin Roosevelt, put the documentary The Boxing of Midway in theaters. "This is Midway,' announces the narrator (Donald Well-baked, from How Greenish Was My Valley, reading Nichols' script). "Non much state, right plenty. But information technology's our outpost. Your forepart m." Midway is both a record of the military engagement and a pure John Ford movie. There's even a Fordian mother (voiced by Darwell), choked with emotion as she wishes godspeed to her departing Navy son. Then comes the battle, shot past Ford and ii other cameramen. It'southward tremendously intense for its time; moviegoers had seen nothing like it. "The prototype jumps a lot," Ford said, "because shells were exploding right side by side to me. Since then they do that on purpose, shaking thc photographic camera when filming state of war scenes. For me information technology was accurate because the shells were exploding at my feet."
Even bolder was Dec 7th, which Ford shot part of and after boiled downward to 34 mins. from a feature-length version assembled by cinematographer Gregg Toland. (The total version is available from VCI Video.) The motion picture detailed for wartime audiences the attack that triggered America's entry into the war. "Pearl Harbor," the narrator proclaims, "the Navy'south $100 1000000 fist." The moving picture notes that a radio man detected incoming aircraft xxx mins. before the set on — time enough to warning the armada and save lives — but was waved off past an unnamed, "inexperienced lieutenant." The radioman and other soldiers play themselves in this early on docudrama. The narrator: "At 7:55 a.m., hell broke loose. Man-made hell. Made in Nihon." In ane reenactmnt, we come across a Navy gunner, a immature blackness man, unloading his weapon into the heaven. He is killed, and a white man takes his place. As part of the U.Due south. reaction to the attack, we meet Hawaiian children in trenches, donning gas masks, and Waikiki Beach wreathed in barbed wire. And of form, a roll phone call of dead sailors and their surviving parents, wives and infant children. Even in the short version, it's powerful, harrowing stuff.
It'southward the afterward, mail-Fox John Ford who's remembered today — the director who sustained and reinvented the Western, whose signature star was not Fonda but John Wayne, and who made Monument Valley his own personal landscape. (He lived in it, he loved it, he painted it, he owned it.) What you discover in this gigantic collection is a man who could lend his expertise to any genre. He'd make ii, three or four films a year, segueing from a ferocious drama (The Prisoner of Shark Island) to a Shirley Temple movie, and a good one. (McBride says Ford should accept won his first Oscar for Wee Willie Winkie, not for The Informer.) You also come across what has been chosen "the genius of the system" — the dream factory in high gear, producing more than caviar than sausage. Ford at Flim-flam is every bit much nearly Fox as it is about Ford — a sumptuous reminder of a director and the studio that enabled, hobbled and sustained him.
Source: http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1665692_1665693_1693162,00.html
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