[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.]