Film Culture (Spring 1963)

Wings of Eagles, The Rising of the Moon. 1958 —The Last Hurrah. 1959—Gideon of Scotland Yard, The Horse Soldiers. 1960—Sergeant Rutledge. 1961—Two Rode Together. 1962—The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John Ford is the American Cinema’s Field Mazshal in charge of retreats and last stands. In the work of no other director is the pastness of experience so vivid, and the force of tradition so compelling. No other American director has ranged so far across the landscape of the American past, the worlds of Lincoln, Lee, Twain, O'Neill, the three great wars, the Western and trans-Atlantic migrations, the horseless Indians of the Mohawk Valley and the Sioux and Commanche cavalries of the West, the Irish and Spanish incursions, and the delicately balanced politics of polyglot cities and border states. Ironically, Ford was adopted by the Critical Establishment at the wrong time, for the wrong films for the wrong reasons, and abandoned when his work attained new summits of personal expression. The Informer and The Grapes of Wrath, his official classics, are among his lesser works. The Informer, like The Fugitive, runs counter to Ford’s sense of order. Liam O’Flaherty’s renegade informer and Graham Greene’s renegade priest are clearly beyond Ford’s comprehension, and in both instances, Ford’s casual Catholicism cannot encompass the authors’ causal Catholicism. The Grapes of Wrath involves a conservative director with liberal material just as Advise and Consent involves a liberal director with conservative material. In both films, the tensions between director and subject are more compelling than the subjects themselves. Ford’s personal style was particularly inimical to Steinbeck’s biological conception of his characters. Where Steinbeck depicted oppression by dehumanizing his characters into creatures of abject necessity, Ford evoked nostalgia by humanizing Steinbeck’s economic insects into heroic champions of an agrarian order of family and community. Ford’s major works can be traced in a rising parabola from Steamboat ‘Round the Bend and Judge Priest in the mid-Thirties to the extraordinary American trilogy in 1939 — Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln and Drums Along the Mohawk— and then on to the post-war classics beginning with My Darling Clementine and culminating with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. How Green Was My Valley established Maureen O’Hara as the definitive Ford heroine just as a FILM CULTURE Stagecoach established John Wayne as the definitive Ford hero. The extraordinary rapport of the Wayne-O’Hara team through Rio Grande, The Quiet Man and Wings of Eagles adds a sexual dimension to Ford’s invocation of tradition in human experience. How Green Was My Valley is also notable for introducing Ford’s visual treatment of the past as a luminous memory more real than the present, and presumably more heroic than the future. Ford and Hawks, the directors closest to the Griffith tradition, project different aspects of Griffith’s personality, Ford the historical perspective and unified vision of the world, and Hawks the psychological complexity and innate nobility of characterization. Of course, Ford can never become fashionable for the rigidly ideological critics of the Left. Too many of his characters wear uniforms without any tortuous reasoning why. Even the originally pacifistic What Price Glory is transformed by Ford into a nostalgic celebration of military camaraderie with the onceraucous Charmaine emerging from the dim shadows as an idealization of the Chivalric Code. As a director, Ford developed his craft in the Twenties, achieved dramatic force in the Thirties, epic sweep in the Forties and symbolic evocation in the Fifties. His style has evolved almost miraculously into a double vision of an event in all its vital immediacy and yet also in its ultimate memory-image on the horizon of history. D. W. GRIFFITH (1875-1948) FILMS: (Partial List 1908-1914): 1908—The Adventures of Dollie, For the Love of Gold, After Many Years, The Taming of the Shrew, The Song of the Shirt. 1909—Edgar Allan Poe, The Curtain Pole, The Politician’s Love Story, The Voice of the Violin, The Medicine Bottle, The Drunkard’s Reformation, The Suicide Club, Resurrection, The Cricket on the Hearth, What Drink Did, The Violin Maker of Cremona, The Lonely Villa, Her First Biscuits, A Convict’s Sacrifice, The Mended Lute, The Sealed Room; 1776: Or, The Hessian Renegades; In Old Kentucky, Leather Stockings, Pippa Passes, A Change of Heart, In the Watches of the Night, Through the Breakers, Lines of White on a Sullen Sea, Nursing a Viper, The Restoration, The Light That Came, The Red Man’s View, A Corner in Wheat. 1910—In Old California, As It Is In Life, The Unchanging Sea, Ramona, In the Season of Buds, A Child of the Ghetto, The Face at the Window, Muggsy’s First Sweetheart, The House with Closed Shutters, The