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Thursday, December 13
HANGMAN'S HOUSE
by
Lloydville
on Thu 13 Dec 2007 08:12 AM PST
Hangman's House is the last, and least, of the five silent films included in the new Ford At Fox box set. It's not a bad film, exactly, just sort of respectably mediocre.
Ford here abandons his effort to out-Murnau Murnau. He moves his
camera very little, and only once or twice with any real effect or
beauty. Generally he returns to his more characteristic style of
fixed camera positions looking into deep spaces with lots of
choreographed movement within them. There is some moody lighting
here and there, and some fog effects on studio "exterior" sets,
reminiscent of those in Sunrise -- but the film rarely comes alive visually.
You get a feeling that Ford simply wasn't all that inspired by this
somewhat creaky melodrama -- entertaining enough, but just
barely. Viewers who only know Victor McLaglen's work as a comic Irish drunk in later Ford films will be surprised by his easy, restrained performance here. It makes you wish he were the
romantic lead in the film, instead of the limp Larry Kent. And there's one
really powerful camera move -- in on the villain as he appears suddenly
in an apparently deserted house. It's spooky and unsettling -- like the push-in on Ethan's face in The Searchers as he registers the horror of the condition of the female captives just freed from the Indians. It's markedly different from the longer, Murnau-esque camera moves in Four Sons, which are typically about exploring locations or expressing high spirits.
In his book on Ford, Andrew Sarris said that if Ford's career had ended
with the coming of sound, he wouldn't be recognized as a major
director. Even Joseph McBride, in his notes for this new set,
says that Pilgrimage, a talkie from 1933, is Ford's first great film. Having seen just the five silent films in this set, along with Kentucky Pride a few years ago, I must say I find these judgements puzzling. 3 Bad Men and Four Sons are hardly lesser works than Pilgrimage, The Iron Horse is a masterful film with elements of greatness, and Four Sons is one of the finest achievements of the silent cinema.
Ford would go on to make finer films, but he was "major" well before the coming of sound, at least in my book.
Wednesday, December 12
FOUR SONS
by
Lloydville
on Wed 12 Dec 2007 12:26 AM PST
Four Sons,
from 1928, is one of the greatest works of German expressionist cinema
-- even though it was made by the Irish-American John Ford in
Hollywood, U. S. A. Ford doesn't just seem to be working under
the influence of Murnau here -- he seems to be channeling Murnau.
If the film had somehow been misattributed to Murnau, it would be very
difficult to correct the mistake by means of a stylistic
analysis. Ford even, at one point, seems to be following in
Murnau's missteps -- Four Sons, like The Last Laugh,
has an odd extended epilogue which violates the tone of the rest of the
film but somehow seems to work in spite of that, lightening the mood
in a strange, surreal way without diminishing the power of the work as a whole.
In Four Sons Ford moves his
camera as elegantly and expressively as any director ever has -- and
the plastic invention involved is ravishing. The lighting is
typical of Murnau, employing soft, glowing, complex chiaroscuro
effects as opposed to the stark contrast of light and shadow often
associated with expressionist cinema (and which Ford himself came
to favor in his later "expressionist" films, from The Informer to The Fugitive.)
Ford had two great masters in his formative years, first Griffith and
then Murnau. What's astonishing is how totally he was able to
absorb each man's style -- he didn't seem to be imitating it so much as
working within it naturally and unselfconsciously. Maybe even
more astonishing is that Ford absorbed Murnau so quickly. We know
how powerfully Sunrise
affected him -- just from viewing the rushes he declared it the
greatest film ever made. Less than a year later he was working
with full confidence and mastery in the Murnau style -- and even shot
parts of Four Sons on sets from Sunrise that were still standing.
Apart from its lack of a strong female lead, Ford's Just Pals
could have been directed by Griffith and would rank among Griffith's more
enjoyable minor films. The epic visual poetry of Ford's The Iron Horse bears favorable comparison with the epic visual poetry of The Birth Of A Nation -- which is saying a lot. If Four Sons had been directed by Murnau, it would rank among the German director's most important works -- and that may be saying even more.
Tuesday, December 11
3 BAD MEN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 11 Dec 2007 12:40 AM PST
[Caution -- this post contains plot spoilers.]
In
modern-day Hollywood it's fashionable to analyze drama in terms of
"character arc". A character starts off a tale with a problem
which he or she must then develop the skills and inner resources to
solve, and this development follows a chartable arc. I think
corporate executives are drawn to this model of storytelling because it
reminds them of the charts and case studies they used in business
school -- it reduces human experience to something resembling the
problem of growing a business or maximizing profits.
The model is useless, of course, for understanding the actual life
experiences of human beings or the great stories and dramas in the art
of the past. Achilles has no character arc, neither does
Hamlet. They both undergo various experiences which sometimes
reveal their characters, and sometimes make their characters seem
hopelessly mysterious. Neither of them "solves" anything.
The character arc model is particularly useless for analyzing the films
of John Ford, which are full of characters who suddenly do complete
turnarounds, often without the slightest explicit motivation -- the
most famous case in point being Ethan Edwards in The Searchers.
Their "arcs" are unchartable, mysterious -- they raise more questions
than they answer, but the questions are ones of profound interest . . .
they provoke moral thought in audiences.
In 3 Bad Men, a silent film by
Ford from 1926, three criminals are suddenly converted into saints by a
young woman who mistakes them for heroes, and from that moment on they
behave like heroes, and in the end sacrifice their lives for her.
Such a tale would never make it past the first story conference in
Hollywood today. The film would have to spend most of its length
working up to that moment of conversion, showing the conflict within
the men as they struggled with the decision to be good.
Instead, Ford presents us with a mystery up front, and lets us spend
the rest of the film wondering what it means. For Ford, the
answer lies somewhere in the realm of the moral, the spiritual, the
religious. This is a realm not studied in business schools, not
relevant to ordinary business practice, and thus meaningless to the
corporate executives who run Hollywood today. In modern corporate
culture, which is Hollywood's culture, moral issues are covered by
charitable contributions, perhaps by a dedication to ethical behavior
or to worthy political causes. The issue of saving souls does not
arise.
But the saving of souls is what Ford's films most often concern, which
involves positing the existence of souls in the first place. 3 Bad Men
suggests that the worst of men have souls and are just waiting for a
chance to save them -- just waiting for a call to goodness. And
it further suggests that goodness is not always approached on paths
with chartable arcs. Sometimes goodness descends on men like a
dove and changes them in an instant.
We may cheer when the hapless nerd grows his business or maximizes his
profits against all odds -- but the bad men in Ford's movies,
unaccountably redeemed, make us cry. It can be argued that they
also make us wise in the actual ways of the human heart.
[With thanks to the Silents Are Golden web site for the images above.]
Monday, December 10
THE IRON HORSE
by
Lloydville
on Mon 10 Dec 2007 07:05 AM PST
You can look at John Ford's The Iron Horse
in two ways -- as a silent melodrama set against the epic backdrop of
the building of the transcontinental railroad, or as an epic poem about
the building of that railroad with some melodrama woven through it to
give it a more coherent structure.
In truth the film is both these things, simultaneously or alternately
-- the two halves of its nature are never entirely reconciled.
The melodrama isn't at all bad -- it's entertaining and sometimes
moving -- though it has one of the lamest lovers' misunderstandings in
all of movies. (Interestingly, the international version of the
film tries, through rewritten intertitles, to make the misunderstanding
more plausible but just succeeds in making even lamer than it already was.) The real
problem is that the epic poem which hosts
the melodramatic narrative is one of the most sublime achievements of
the silent cinema. It's hard to imagine any melodrama which could
holds its own with such poetry. (It should be noted that Griffith
faced the same dilemma with The Birth Of A Nation, and similarly failed to solve it.)
The epic poem within The Iron Horse
has themes and developments peculiar to itself. Ford is
interested, as he often was, in the process of things, which in this
case centers on the land, the physical fact of the land, which
determined the challenge the road builders faced. Ford is also
interested in the moral development this challenge prompted --
specifically the uniting of diverse peoples in a national consciousness.
The inclusiveness of the film is notable, and notably modern.
Building the railroad unites former antagonists in the civil war
between
North and South. It unites Eastern engineers with Western scouts
and hunters. It unites ethnic groups -- most specifically the
Irish
and the Italians, though there are a few scenes demonstrating
good-natured camaraderie between Europeans and Chinese. It unites
women and men, who at one point take
up arms together to rescue some besieged track layers . . . and in the
climax of that scene, a band of light cavalry rides to the rescue --
not U. S. soldiers but Pawnee Indians, allies of the train
workers. The only people conspicuously absent from this American
mosaic are blacks -- probably to avoid alienating white Southern
audiences of the time.
The epic poem of America that's at the heart of The Iron Horse unfolds
at a stately pace, even though it's brimful of incident and exquisite
lyrical images. (There's enough pure cinema in this picture to
supply a dozen ordinary movies) Unless you surrender to its
rhythms, are willing
to just sit back and enjoy the sheer spectacle of it, you are likely to
find The Iron Horse tough going. If you're primarily interested in the
melodrama, wanting Ford to get on with it already, you'll find it even
tougher going.
On the other hand, if you let Ford take you at his own pace, show you
want he wants you to see, you'll be deeply rewarded. Here is the
vernacular lyricism of Leaves Of Grass
applied to a truly epic subject and translated into visual terms that
transcend its melodramatic armature. It's an imperfect but genuinely awesome work.
The film is part of the new Ford At Fox
box set, where it's presented in two versions -- the American release
and the somewhat abridged international release, derived from a
separate negative made up of second-camera shots and alternate
takes. The American version is far superior but apparently better
print material survives from the international version. You
really need to be familiar with both to appreciate the film fully.
The international version on the set has a first-rate commentary by
Robert Birchard, filled with a wealth of information about the
personalities involved in the making of the film and about the
production.
Sunday, December 9
JUST PALS
by
Lloydville
on Sun 09 Dec 2007 06:35 AM PST
Just Pals, the first film John Ford made for Fox, makes an
illuminating pendant to another silent film also recently released on
DVD, D. W. Griffith's True Heart Susie. They could have been made by
the same director -- which is to say that Ford, the younger of the two
and the one newer to the business, obviously studied hard at his
master's feet.
Both films fall into the American Pastoral genre, both feature plots
that are outrageously melodramatic, unashamedly sentimental -- and both
are visual masterpieces.
We forget it sometimes, but American culture is in love with virtue -- a
love tempered only by the desire not to be taken for a fool. We like
our virtue delivered sidewise. In less cynical times than the present,
this sidewise delivery could be only slightly oblique. So we have
Griffith's gentle teasing of the innocent protagonists of his tale, and
Ford's cursing urchin in his. But simple decency is the theme of each
film -- as it is of Huckleberry Finn, from an earlier age, and of Casablanca, from a later one. The differences in attitude mainly
involve how cynical the narrator or protagonist has to pretend to be
before getting down to doing or celebrating the right thing.
The message of most works of art can be boiled down to a platitude, if
one is so inclined. The message of Huckleberry Finn is "blacks are
human, too, and anyone who thinks otherwise risks losing his or her own
humanity." But art is not about messages. It's about creating psychic
movement within the audience -- about internalizing the wisdom
trivialized in a platitude.
In silent movies, this process of internalization happens visually --
not in the plot or in the intertitles. In Just Pals, Ford convinces
us that he loves his protagonists not by making them narrative agents of
good but by the way he situates them in space, in the settings of the
story. The cursing urchin is revealed as plucky and independent and
admirable not by his curses but by the way he rides a moving train.
Bim's moral authority in foiling the express office robbery is conveyed
not by his statements of resolve but by the way he commandeers and rides
a horse in the execution of his resolve.
Just Pals is a celebration of sacrifice -- of the mechanics of
sacrifice -- not a sermon about sacrifice. It makes sacrifice seem
beautiful by making the mechanics of sacrifice beautiful.
Just Pals is part of the recently released Ford At Fox DVD box set. It can't be said often enough that the release of
this set is one of the most important cultural events of
recent times.
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