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Monday, December 31
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY
by
Lloydville
on Mon 31 Dec 2007 12:14 AM PST
Jean-Luc
Godard once said that every tracking shot is a moral statement.
This is true and worthy of much meditation. Another way of
putting it might be "where a director moves his camera, there will his
heart be also".
It occurs to me that the pacing of a film and the length of its shots
also involve moral choices. There are vast areas of human
experience which cannot be addressed with the kind of fast-paced MTV
editing that many films today employ, and moral choices come into play
when excluding these areas from popular culture.
These thoughts are prompted by a recent re-viewing of How Green Was My Valley,
one of the greatest works of American cinema. The film is not
really slow-paced -- it's full of incident and movement -- but it's
episodic and it pauses often to record the precise and deliberate way
certain incidents unfold. It's the story of a particular family and a
particular community but it's also a poem about family and community as
phenomena. It concerns itself, as Ford's films often do, with
process -- in this case the process by which family and community are
constructed, the practical ways they function.
This involves showing the ways that mundane activities are ritualized,
so that everyone's role in them is clear. It involves showing the
ways that mutual consideration is shown -- which might include a rude
jest or keeping one's peace, joviality or silence, singing and dancing
boisterously or slowing down the pace of a social interaction to
accentuate its gravity.
Modern films -- which people in Hollywood are fond of referring to as "rides" -- can feature families but they cannot be about
family in the way that Ford's films were about family. Families
can certainly go on rides, but family life is not constructed like a
ride. Family life is what happens between rides -- and so is the
real story of How Green Was My Valley.
The family in the film, like all families eventually, comes apart --
through kids leaving home, disagreements between the generations,
external social pressures and death. The film's narrative is
almost a litany of
ordinary tragedies. But these are not the things that sum up the
film in your mind after you've seen it. It is not a tragedy, nor
a soap-opera ride. It's a movie about the creation of a miracle,
a work of art -- a family. It's about the deathless essence of
family -- the highest achievement of human civilization.
In Hollywood today, moral choices masquerading as aesthetic, stylistic
preferences virtually insure that this subject can never be presented
on the screen -- though I would guess that there's hardly any subject modern audiences are hungrier for or more in need of.
Sunday, December 30
TOBACCO ROAD
by
Lloydville
on Sun 30 Dec 2007 03:16 AM PST
In
1941 John Ford, as a contract director at 20th-Century Fox,
made two films for the studio. One was the sublime How Green Was My Valley. The other, made right before Valley, was a bewildering misfire -- Tobacco Road.
You just have to throw your hands up at Tobacco Road.
It's clear why the studio would be interested in the property -- based
on a novel by Erskine Caldwell but derived more directly from a
theatrical adaptation which at the time held the record for the
longest-running Broadway play of all time. The movie pokes
merciless fun at the same class of sharecroppers who were treated as
almost saintly characters in The Grapes Of Wrath, made only a year before.
The film's humor is extremely broad but rarely funny. Ford
lets his actors mug and jerk around like puppets -- they might as well
be shouting "look at me, laugh at me!" It's only the occasional
throwaway gags that actually elicit chuckles. At the end of the hi-jinx Ford tries to summon up some pity for his
rustic clowns, but they aren't real enough to pity.
The film is
beautifully shot and its perversity is impressive if not exactly
entertaining. (Some might find the whole thing worthwhile just
for the chance to watch a scantily-clad Gene Tierney slithering
lustfully through the dirt like a sex-crazed slug -- surely the strangest thing she was ever
asked to do in Hollywood.) It almost seems as if Ford was
indulging his worst
instincts -- to get them out of his system before tackling How Green Was My Valley.
Apparently it worked -- in the latter film he hardly makes a single
wrong move, and takes the poetic possibilities of filmmaking about as
far as anyone ever has.
If he did indeed need to root around for a bit on Tobacco Road to create the miracle of How Green Was My Valley you'd have to say that, on balance, it was a road well-taken, though not much fun to revisit today.
Saturday, December 29
READING JOHN FORD
by
Lloydville
on Sat 29 Dec 2007 01:41 AM PST
In
the present age of extreme political and cultural polarization, it can
be hard to read John Ford. He worked in an era when it was
possible to revere military culture with an almost religious fervor and
hate political war-mongering at the same time, when it was possible to
traffic in racial and ethnic stereotypes and subvert them at the same
time, when it was possible to worship the family and family values and
see the oppressive role of families at the same time, when it was
possible to be at once a social conservative and a political
progressive, a deeply religious artist and a man with a profound
suspicion of organized religion.
In our own either/or age, Ford's complexities can be confusing, with
what seem to be conflicting cultural signals. This is due partly
to Ford's rhetorical strategies, in which the obvious pieties of his
stories could be completely undercut by their emotional undercurrents
-- and it's due partly to
Ford's comprehensive sympathies, essential for a great dramatist, which
wouldn't allow him to judge anyone based on an ideological position or
professed beliefs.
Many people are distressed by the presence of Stepin Fetchit (above) in several
of Ford's films. Fetchit specialized in impersonating what was on one level a most objectionable
stereotype of the slow-moving, slow-witted African American. But
he was usually, in Ford's films, far wiser and cannier than his image
suggested, in itself an interesting comment on the stereotype, with its
inescapable implication that it might be no more than a mask.
(Fetchit was also a brilliant physical comedian and Ford showcased his
art with great care -- which has to count for something.)
Even more remarkable, in a film like Judge Priest (above), starring Will Rogers in the title role, is the way the
Rogers character subverts the stereotype -- by treating Fetchit as a
peer, with total respect. You search in vain in Rogers' performance for
the slightest hint of paternalism or condescension -- it's simply not
there. Since Fetchit-like characters were used in large part to justify
paternalism and condescension, Ford is subverting the phenomenon at its
root.
The same phenomenon is at work in another scene from Judge Priest
when Hattie McDaniel (above), a "mammy" stereotype, starts singing a silly
song about the judge to a Gospel-sounding tune. The judge chimes in
with heartfelt responses of "Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!", in full,
joyful voice, again without a trace of irony. He likes the way he
and she sound singing together -- he treats her "quaint" musical idiom
as a serious medium of communication, and also as a medium they share
and rejoice in equally.
For the judge, the character we most identify with, to see through the
most extreme stereotype to a real person behind the facade, is radical.
It's like the way Priscilla sees past the racial stereotypes and
imperialist assumptions in Wee Willie Winkie, the remarkable collaboration between Ford and Shirley Temple.
In a superficial reading of that film one might see it as a celebration of the
British Empire and its mission -- unless one remembered that Ford was an
Irishman, with a built-in grudge against the British Empire. When Khan
laughs hysterically at the idea that Queen Victoria wants to help his
people, he's probably expressing Ford's truest feelings on the subject.
Ford was both a subtle artist a wily old son-of-a-bitch -- taking anything he does too much
at face value is always dangerous. It risks missing the deepest meanings of his films.
Friday, December 28
THE WORLD MOVES ON
by
Lloydville
on Fri 28 Dec 2007 12:33 AM PST
The World Moves On, starring Madeleine Carroll and Franchot Tone (above),
is a fairly undistinguished and only mildly entertaining John Ford film
from 1934. One might be tempted to see it as an assignment in
which he had no great personal interest, except for the fact that its
themes are ones that preoccupied him all his life -- family, war and
religion.
The film is an epic family saga that begins in 1825 with the setting
up, in New Orleans, of an international textile combine. After
this lengthy prologue the film concentrates on the first third of the
20th Century -- showing how war and greed destroy not only the combine
but the family that runs it and, by not so subtle implication, the
fabric of civilization itself. There are chilling and prophetic
hints of the war to come -- with documentary images of Hitler reviewing
marching Nazis, of Imperial Japanese and Russian and French troops on
parade, of British ships and American warplanes on maneuvers.
The coming apocalypse -- which in 1934 could conceivably have been
averted -- is presented, like the previous apocalypse of the Great War,
as the direct consequence of rejecting Christian values. At the
end of the film, when the lead couple visit their crumbling home in New
Orleans, the ruined patriarch says, "There's nothing left." His wife
answers that there is something left -- and points to a crucifix hanging on the wall.
Ford was rarely so explicit in his references to religion, because he
didn't need to be. They were built into the narratives of his
films, as they were built into the parables of Jesus (before he
explained them in private to his disciples, at which point they lost most of their
power.) Here the religious references seem imposed from outside
the narrative -- one
of the few cases in which we catch Ford preaching. Ford wasn't at
his best in a pulpit -- like Jesus, he did his best work out of
doors, in taverns and in the homes of ordinary people.
The most moving sequence of the film shows a series of
soldiers walking through a town towards the train that will take them
to the front. We see the film's young lovers but also nameless
characters -- a stiff-upper-lip officer walking with his son, tenderly holding the little boy's
hand, a soldier walking with his mother, who babbles advice as a way of
not falling apart. In these small vignettes we feel the truth of
war, feel its threat to decency and humane life, far more deeply than in
the noble pronouncements of the characters who expound Ford's
sentiments directly.
Thursday, December 27
PILGRIMAGE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 27 Dec 2007 01:13 AM PST
[With plot spoilers -- don't read what follows unless you've seen the film . . .]
Pilgrimage,
a John Ford film from 1933, is unapologetic melodrama -- it makes a
shameless appeal to the emotions. A modern sensibility, schooled
in a cynical age, tends to resist this sort of appeal and I did, too,
the first two times I saw the film, and it worked -- up to a point. Beyond that point I found myself crying
like a baby. I'm still not entirely sure how Ford got around my
defenses (twice!) but I'm
forced to admit that he deployed the complex and mysterious resources
of melodrama with devastating effectiveness.
One of the key resources of melodrama, especially cinematic melodrama,
is indirection -- while the conscious mind is busy resisting the
obvious assault on the heartstrings, the filmmaker finds an unexpected
avenue around the conscious mind, and the emotion catches you unawares
by some other route than the one you were defending.
Pilgrimage tells the story of
a possessive mother who ships her son off to WWI rather than lose him
to the young woman he plans to marry -- and the kid dies "over
there". The fiancée is pregnant with the boy's child, whom the
grandmother refuses to recognize. Something has to give -- but
where, and how?
The first radical shift in the tone of the film is visual rather than
(explicitly) emotional. The embittered old woman is offered a
trip to France to visit her son's grave and is shamed by her neighbors
into going. We cut to the station where she's boarding her
train, and the cut is a shock -- because the station is an exterior
location, shot in sunlight . . . the first such shot in the film.
Everything else, even the rural exteriors, has been shot on a sound
stage, with moody, often expressionistic lighting. (There is a
single shot prior to this, of a moving train at night, which couldn't
have been shot on a sound stage but might as well have been -- all we
see is the train surrounded by darkness.)
From this point on in the film, Ford shoots on real exterior locations or sets built out-of-doors
as often as he can. Real sunlight becomes a player in the
tale. You don't need to notice this consciously for it to have
its effect. It's disarming. It prepares us for deeper
changes. At the station, the mother of her son's child asks the
old woman to take a bouquet of flowers to the grave for her. She
raises it up to the window of the train compartment where the old woman
is sitting, unseen by us. Slowly the old woman's hand reaches out
and takes the bouquet, draws it in to the train.
We never see the old woman's face in this exchange -- and we really
want to. We want to know if she takes the flowers angrily or
tenderly, if she's softening or still hard as stone. Ford
won't tell us. The next time we see her, we look at her a bit
more closely -- suspicious that Ford might be keeping something else
from us. We might think we don't care about this old woman and
her damned intransigence -- but the damned director better not try to
hold out on us like that again. It's a master melodramatic stroke.
As we watch what happens to the old woman in France, surrounded by
other mothers who lost sons in the war, things develop in a conflicted
and complicated way. The old woman finds a kind of companionship
she's never known in her life -- and we suddenly realize the depth of
the loneliness that made her want to hang on to her son. We'd
been looking at the pathology of it before, at its horrifying effects
on other people's lives -- now we're blindsided by an awareness of the
unutterable isolation and sadness at the core of her being. She
doesn't seem so much delighted as bewildered by her ability to get on
with others -- and that's what breaks our hearts
But as the old woman comes alive among her peers, she also grows more
distant from them, dealing with the fact that they mourn loving relationships
with loving sons while she wrecked her son's life, and sent him off to
die. She faces up to her guilt with courage but it estranges her
from these woman in whose company she has blossomed as a human being
for perhaps the first time.
In Ford films, of course, with their strong Christian, Catholic
underpinnings, facing up to one's sins leads to redemption -- often by
miraculous means. In this case it's a young suicidal man the old
woman meets on the street and saves from himself -- a surrogate son,
who gives her a second chance to be a good mother. This doesn't
remove her burden, but it gives her the final measure of courage she
needs to visit her son's grave.
That visit is shot on an exterior set built inside a sound stage, lit
moodily,
with a long tracking shot through the crosses in the graveyard.
Stylistically, we're back where we started in the film -- we have made
a kind of circle through the sunlight and come back to the shadows
again. The old woman places the withered bouquet given to her by
her son's fiancée on the grave -- then falls into the dirt and asks her
son's forgiveness. She's saved -- and somehow Ford has badgered,
enchanted and tricked us into following the mechanics of her salvation,
believing in them because we have felt them, in spite of
ourselves. The Christian dynamic of confession, repentance and
redemption is rendered in convincing psychological terms.
In one sense, it's all done with mirrors, with clever deviations and
circumnavigations around the story's deep undertow -- but the tears it
draws out of us, the tears it allows us, finally, to release, are quite real . . . and precious.
Wednesday, December 26
JOHN FORD AND THE COMING OF SOUND
by
Lloydville
on Wed 26 Dec 2007 12:42 AM PST
In
a 1966 interview John Ford was asked what happened when talkies
came to Hollywood. "Nothing," Ford said, "we just made them with
sound."
That might seem like typical Ford bluster but on the evidence of his first three sound features for Fox -- Born Reckless, Up the River and Seas Beneath, all included on the new Ford At Fox DVD box set (and all
from 1930!) -- it seems like a fair assessment of his own remarkably
assured transition into the sound era. (Ford had made one sound
short and one silent feature, The Black Watch, which was released with interpolated talking sequences, before the three sound features from 1930.)
The first two of the three are admittedly clumsy programmers.
Ford moves his camera occasionally in these films but they also have a
number of scenes that feel stagebound, with proscenium
framing and little dynamic choreography within the shots. Often
these scenes were staged and directed, at Fox's insistence, by "dialogue experts" with stage experience.
The results could be truly dreadful -- especially so for a film like Born Reckless,
which was meant to be a gritty underworld drama. To hear actors
portraying hoods declaiming street slang in theatrical tones, with
slight pauses between lines to avoid overlaps, is laughable today, and
was probably laughable to a lot of people when the film first came
out. Interestingly there is one scene in a bar, undoubtedly
directed by Ford himself in an experimental mood, which features fast
overlapping dialogue by a number of characters. It's impossible
to make out much of what's said but the film suddenly feels modern for
a few moments.
Up the River, a whimsical
prison comedy, had better lead actors -- Spencer Tracy and Humphrey
Bogart no less -- and so feels a bit more naturalistic, but it's a
routine film, with Ford often straining too hard for his comic effects,
as he had a habit of doing throughout his career. The inspired
visual touches are few and far between. It doesn't help that Up the River
as presented in this set derives from a severely damaged print, with
missing frames (and thus dropped bits of the soundtrack) which make the
dialogue in several places impossible to follow. Apparently this
print represents the best surviving material for the film.
Then suddenly we have Seas Beneath.
The story material is potboiler stuff -- recounting the adventures of
some plucky U. S. sailors in WWI venturing forth on a decoy ship to
hunt German submarines. But visually the film is breathtaking,
with scenes shot at sea that have to be seen to be believed. Even
the built sets, for the episode when the sailors go on shore leave in
the Canary Islands, have solidity and depth and often look out onto
exterior sets alive with action.
The delivery of dialogue is occasionally stilted, but you can see that
Ford was going for something resembling natural speech. He's
greatly aided by George O'Brien (above) in the lead role, whose lack of stage
experience is a decided advantage to him here.
The film has some remarkable action sequences and many beautiful,
powerful images, reminiscent of silent-era filmmaking. Ford
doesn't seem to be straining against any limitations imposed by the
microphone -- he seems perfectly at home in what amounted to a new
medium. The visual bravura lifts the film above its pedestrian
story and script, as it so often did in the silent era. One can
easily imagine it as a silent film. Ford just made it with sound.
Tuesday, December 18
CONTRABAND
by
Lloydville
on Tue 18 Dec 2007 09:59 AM PST
Contraband is a Powell-Pressburger film from 1940 recently released in a film noir DVD box set by Kino. It's not by any sensible definition a film noir
-- it's a suspense thriller in the Hitchcock mold, involving wartime
intrigue in the London of the blackout. (Its U. S. title was Blackout.)
As imitations of Hitchcock go, this one is pretty good, as agents and
innocent folk caught up in the adventure chase each other through
improbable locations in the blacked-out city. It displays a lot
of visual wit and cinematic whimsy, and has the usual Hitchcockian
drollery applied to dark and dangerous doings. Indeed, it makes
us aware of how much Powell and Pressburger's work owes to Hitchcock,
especially in terms of attitude.
But it falls far short of Hitchcock in its cumulative effect, and it's
worth examining why. Powell was a great enough director to
analyze and reproduce Hitchcock's tone, his witty use of locations, his
dreamlike progression of narrative incidents. But what he doesn't
do, doesn't seem to realize that he needs to do, is find ways of
implicating the audience in the moral and physical jeopardy of the
protagonists.
Valerie Hobson and Conrad Veidt, as the leads, are introduced as
interesting and eccentric characters. We might well be curious
about what's going to happen to them, and between them romantically,
but we don't see, we don't feel any of it from their perspective. The
protagonists are introduced through he eyes of subsidiary characters
-- a build-up that makes them seem fascinating but distant from us.
This is an acceptable strategy for a standard star vehicle, a romance
or a drama -- it doesn't work for a Hitchcockian thriller, in which the
plot incidents are all a bit silly when viewed literally.
Unless we feel responsible for the characters' predicament, identify
intimately with the mistakes and confusion that have led them into it,
the film itself starts to seem silly.
In Notorious, for example,
Grant and Bergman are morally implicated in Bergman's jeopardy -- he by
the "duty" which impels him to put her into it, she by the self-hatred which allows
her to be used in that way. The literal jeopardy she finds
herself in thus becomes an objective correlative to an inner turmoil,
an inner conflict -- which we experience as well, because we want their
patriotic enterprise to succeed even as we want their romance to
survive it. We are emotionally and morally implicated in the
resulting tension.
No such inner identification is ever established in Contraband.
Veidt's character is an innocent caught up in a dangerous situation,
but Hobson's character is only indirectly responsible for this.
Veidt and Hobson are both behaving admirably out of pure motives --
their jeopardy is
merely circumstantial, with no moral ambiguity.
The result is that we watch the intricate elaboration of the intrigue
as interested spectators not involved on any deeper level. We
root for the good guys, know they are going to win in the end and feel
only the slightest trace of satisfaction when they do. At the end
of Notorious we feel redeemed. At the end of Contraband we feel, at best, diverted and amused.
[This post is a contribution to the Powell and Pressburger Blog-aThon hosted by Beyond the Valley of the Cinephiles.]
Friday, December 7
IT'S HERE
by
Lloydville
on Fri 07 Dec 2007 02:16 AM PST
The Ford At Fox box. Twenty-four films made by John Ford at Fox, eighteen of them new to DVD in this country, including five silents.
Oh, my God . . .
Monday, December 3
SNOW DAYS
by
Lloydville
on Mon 03 Dec 2007 06:06 PM PST
There's
a chill in the air at night out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert
-- a little taste of winter. There will be no snow, of course --
no snow to speak of. Las Vegas gets a light dusting of it from
time to time but it melts quickly and seems like some sort of mistake,
like a FedEx delivery gone awry.
shahn, of the lovely web site six martinis and the seventh art, lives
in San Francisco, which is also a snow-free city, and, missing the
stuff, she's posting a series of images of snow from movies on her
site. Images of snow in movies are almost always wonderful --
especially, to my mind, the ones tricked up in a studio, as in the "A Fine Romance" number from Swing Time (above),
which I hope will be represented in shahn's series. There are so
many other fine images of snow in movies -- from Way Down East (real) to Citizen Kane (tricked up in a studio.)
One can watch them with a glass of egg nog in hand and feel cozy and
warm, protected from the blizzard that's visible through the magic window.
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