Ford at Fox: 24 Film Boxset

[John Hodson]

The whole thing has been handled rather badly IMHO; the exclusion of 'Frontier Marshal' in the first instance, the naive website 'code', the lack of any real communication at any point, and now this blanket silence.

It's not a huge issue in the scheme of things, but it's not the way to treat customers who shelled out a not inconsiderable sum for that humongous set.

[criterionsnob]

Has this set gone out of print like DVD Planet suggests, or are they conveniently not selling it because the 20% off sale is coming up?

[HerrSchreck]

A genuine limited edition: the first batch is It. Once inventory is depleted Ford @ Fox is over and out. One of the few "collectors editions" that is actually absolutely that. Which is why I grabbed mine in february this year... I got the best deal at cd-wow at that particular moment, and they were sold out, and admitted to me that to fulfill my order they had it drop shipped to my apt from another dealer here in the US.

Some smart sunbitch should hoard a few sealed copies-- cant imagine what these will go for on e-bay on down the line.

Between Sunrise (one of the finest presentations of any film on home video, transferwise, encode wise, and extras-wise), this, and now the Murnau-Borzage box to come, (not to mention the wonderful Fox Noir line) this studio is taking good care of its studio heritage (unlike Universal and slowpoke WB viz silents).

If only they could figure out how ta fuckin effect a technicolor transfer..

[domino harvey]

In stock at Amazon if you're itchin

[whaleallright]

I just watched UP THE RIVER. A fun film. I'm not entirely sure why Fox chose to include it over a few other candidates from the same era, but I'm not complaining. (I suppose it's because of the Tracy and Bogart involvement. BORN RECKLESS, on the other hand, was an inexplicable choice. One of Ford's worst films.)

But the print used for this DVD was among the most splicey, if not the most splicey, I'd ever seen. I'd guess 10 minutes were knocked off the running time through bad splices alone. Some sequences would have been practically unintelligible without subtitles for all the words that were clipped off. The disc comes with the standard "This film was presented using the best available etc." disclaimer, but still, does this film not survive in any better condition? I would have preferred a 16mm dupe, if it didn't have all the splices....

[zedz]

But the print used for this DVD was among the most splicey, if not the most splicey, I'd ever seen. I'd guess 10 minutes were knocked off the running time through bad splices alone. Some sequences would have been practically unintelligible without subtitles for all the words that were clipped off. The disc comes with the standard "This film was presented using the best available etc." disclaimer, but still, does this film not survive in any better condition? I would have preferred a 16mm dupe, if it didn't have all the splices....

I have no idea how accurate the info is, but after watching this chopped up version, I checked Lindsay Anderson's Ford book, and he had a considerably longer running time listed. Can't remember offhand, but it seemed that more than 10 minutes were missing, as you suggest. I also wondered if entire scenes might have been missed near the end, given the abrupt resolution of some plot threads.

[Titus]

My Frontier Marshall arrived today. It was shipped in a paper sleeve. Not a a huge deal, it just seems somewhat surprising that, given the backlash with the set itself, they wouldn't go to the trouble of at least placing the disc in a jewel case or something.

[Perkins Cobb]

Yeah, I got my Frontier Marshal today too (with the title spelled correctly on the DVD, thankfully, unlike in most of the posts in this thread and some of the Fox promotional material, I believe). Via DHL, no less.

Now all I need is a Ford at Fox set to go with it.

[Props55]

I caught UP THE RIVER on Cinemax (I think in a slot they used to call "The Director's Showcase") at least 20 years ago and I recall that print being a real splicefest as well, Jonah. Dropped lines, performers spasmodically jumping around the frame, reaction shots with no stimulus, all gave the film a near Ed Wood WTF ambience. And yes, the conclusion seemed abrupt and unsatisfying. I almost thought it code cut but really couldn't make sense of it that way either. It just seemed to have been run continuously on some circuit as bill fodder, apparently for decades!

[whaleallright]

I don't remember the ending of UP THE RIVER confusing me, but I may not have been paying strict attention. It did seem a bit rushed. The best part of this movie (and I don't mean this as faint praise, honestly) is Warren Hymer's hapless sidekick. If you look at Hymer's IMDB page, he has a great collection of character names, for example: 'Pug' Morini, 'Lug' Kaufman, Brassie Randall, 'Jitney' Smith, Gunboat Bimms, 'Knock-Out' Walters, Mugg Schnitzel, Sam The Gonoph, Sour Puss, Buggsy, Smacksey, Twister McGurk....

I've been told that the existing original prints of MEN WITHOUT WOMEN are similarly worn (or worse), which might explain why this important film was left off the box set. In Sarris' Ford book, written in the mid-1970s, he writes that the film was only in circulation in a silent print, which may be for the same reasons.

Still, there are a host of other Ford/Fox films, all much better than BORN RECKLESS and many better than UP THE RIVER, that survive in decent condition, and which now will likely never be released on DVD: I'm thinking particularly of LIGHTNIN', the very funny RILEY THE COP, and SALUTE (featuring the first speaking roles of both John Wayne and Ward Bond). Oh well.

[Props55]

Yes, UP THE RIVER gave Hymer a lot of good screen time. So much so that I went to the trouble to actually identify him positively. I'd seen him before but until I saw UTR I couldn't have put the name on the face. He certainly carved out a niche with comic pugs, gangsters and convicts.

Agreed also regarding the other Ford titles readily available. Did you catch that Ford Festival on AMC years ago. Taped all of them but most are at SLP so I wouldn't have to get up at 4 AM to change a tape! SALUTE was a neat little film (and looked great as I recall) and in addtion to Wayne and Bond offered a look at a more animated Helen Chandler. I need to dig out my Sarris/Ford book to refresh myself with his impressions and compare with more recent books on Ford.

[HerrSchreck]

Got my Frontier Marhsall yest... Dwan's direction saves a completely miscast film.

(I nearly had a heart attack, with a hand delivered DHL express envelope w "marshall" on the cover, I thought an overlooked old debt came back to bite me or something and the marshall was coming for my assets or somesuch..)

[Scharphedin2]

Did anyone not from the United States manage to secure a copy ofFrontier Marshal? If so, how did you go about it?

I love Dwan, did purchase the Fox Box, and would like to pick up this disc somehow.

[whaleallright]

I was surprised how many motifs from the Dwan film were retained for the Ford -- clearly Zanuck was trying to get extra mileage out of an existing property, more than just returning to the same "theme." (And the same story was made in the 1930s as well!)

That said, the two films couldn't be less alike in most other respects. Not only did Ford transfigure the material stylistically, tonally, thematically, but he did a much better job with the plot mechanics. For example, Randolph Scott's Wyatt Earp seems undermotivated to me. Dwan's film did have some interesting low-key photography; I thought shooting the final dust-up in near-darkness was a minor coup.

Re. SALUTE, I think it looks good by comparison to the other early talkies, probably because much of it was shot on location and Ford was clearly having a good time. But it's still stylistically constipated thanks to the multi-camera shooting that reigned at the time. It's amazing what a difference a year, and technological adaptation, makes: AIR MAIL and ARROWSMITH look beautiful, while the films that came before are just serviceable.

[HerrSchreck]

Did anyone not from the United States manage to secure a copy ofFrontier Marshal? If so, how did you go about it?

I love Dwan, did purchase the Fox Box, and would like to pick up this disc somehow.

Why not get a US forum bud to be your mailing address? They can receive it in your name, and send it over to you? I'd volounteer my services scharf, but my name & addr are burned down having already been shipped a copy...

I was surprised how many motifs from the Dwan film were retained for the Ford -- clearly Zanuck was trying to get extra mileage out of an existing property, more than just returning to the same "theme." (And the same story was made in the 1930s as well!)

I thought the same thing. Hadta be Zanuck, since neither screenplay has a whit to do with the real deal went down between the Clantons & the Earps. The whole spray of OK Corral gunfire took place in a matter of seconds and practically face to face standing on the street. A sudden eruption of retard street violence much like the crap you see in inner cities, and not at all as heroic or morally cut & dry as the films would have you believe. Many folks think the Earps were a coupla self important douchebags who just barely avoiding swinging for the point blank shootings, and Doc Halliday wasn't neccessarily the lengendary bad man he was made out to be in western myth.

[tryavna]

Received my Frontier Marshal the other day, too. It really is puzzling that Fox forgot to include it in the big boxset, since it carries the same menu and label designs.

Born Reckless is pretty weak, but it's worth watching for the swinging-door climax at the end -- with Ford's wonderfully mobile camera. It's almost as if Ford went through the paces of this film in a sleepwalk and then suddenly came alive for one day of shooting. (Though I suppose Ford probably enjoyed the comedy of the army scenes, too.)

Re. Up the River: Wasn't this considered a lost film at some point? I seem to remember reading that somewhere, but I can't remember where now.

[HerrSchreck]

My god, yesterday I put on The World Moves On.. and shut it off after 15 minutes. Christ that was painful.

Ouch. One thing this set does teach you is that-- unlike his peer von Sternberg, or his hero Murnau-- Ford was very much capable of making a bad film.

Some other long overdue comments on this set:

Four Sons is so incredibly un-German, so completely devoid of the psychology and real human pain and authenticity that Murnau captured in his films, that the "Murnau influence" on Ford is almost funny as a topic of discussion, at this point in his career (the silent era). From the sense of-- "yes, clearly the man was hugely influenced-- but that doesn't mean any of Murnau was actually transmitted into him." It seems that it took Ford a few years to figure out what he could reasonably process and make his own from the elements resident in the films of his hero. Flat-out duplication of the visual plane was not going to cut it for him, as it had for other filmmakers (like Pabst).

Watching titles like Hangman's House, Four Sons, etc, reveal Ford in pure fanboy mode. There's absolutely none of the nuance and deep psychology (and the Manifested World of Dreams) in Murnau, the characters (esp in 4Sons) are so patently, absurdly one-dimensional-- these films are utterly anti-Murnauesque. The pictorialism, though clearly labored over, are flat and reveal none of the grasp of chiaroscuro and romance images in Murnau. There's a conceit in 4 Sons which absolutely annoys me beyond measure-- this technique of sketched in beams of light. From overhead lamps, from windows (when mutterchen goes into her bedroom to gloom over the letter regarding the death of the two sons), there's obviously a transparent overlay either between the camera and the cast (perhaps in the lens), or done during the printing stage (highly doubtful) where white rays of light are sketched into the frame. Maybe there's a large slate of plate glass between the camera and the cast, and the beams are painted onto the glass. But Ugh!-- this unsubtle crap is one of the rankest attempts at naked pictorialism I've seen and surely the most unpleasant and least effective... inspired no doubt by the artificial beam during Sunrise during the wedding sequence in the church. Also used years later with actual wire in Eisensteins Ivan-- geometrically strung pieces of reflective wire strung from window to floor. Of all the experimental visual conceits (blatant artifice or no), from the canvasslike transparent overlays (in for example Browning's The Unknown) inserted between lens and cast/set to give the image the impression of being a charcoal sketch, to distorting lenses and pieces of glass to lend a dreamlike, painterly, or half-remembered quality (Uberfall, LEtoile de Mer, Pandora), these fake beams of light in Four Sons, which look like they were drawn with a fine-point white paint marker on a transparency-overlay, are the worst.

Still the effect of this conceit pales in comparison to the cutesy, utterly unbearable one-dimensional characters in this stuff, Four Sons in particular. If the hallmark of an unimaginative film is a lack of grey shades (i e bad characters must be blackest villains, and good characters must be utterly angelic), then Four Sons actually ascends to atomic levels of Imagination-Lack. The teddy bear mayor, mailman (obviously a Jannings Letze-Mann rip), and beergarden owner/chef, with their silly mincing dancing jigs of innocuous joy, gooey head-tipping smiles and momentary silly squabbles ending quickly in sugary smiles and hugs of forgiveness.. the four boys so innocuous and handsome they seem heliumized, the villainous pantomime of Erich von Stroeheim as the army baddie, etc. Not to mention the absurd characterization of the mother (who practically sprouts angels wings... and the breathlessly mesmerised, half-dazed, fetishizing lip kissing love between her and her boys reads... well-- mesmerized, half-dazed, fetishized and lipkissing). It's like they're going to church every time they fucking look at one another. I half expected them all to get down into slow, rhythmic, eyestaring, deeplove-sex, weeping tender tears of moist love-joy.

Seeing mom panic and fuck up her immigration alphabet test is like a breath of fresh air. If Spielberg lived in the silent era, he would have made this utterly flat one dimensional Four Sons, and Janusz Kaminski would have creamed in his dry goods at the conceit of the sketched in beams of light.

This stuff makes Pilgrimage, and the huge shades of grey of this neither good nor bad but utterly human characterization of a woman/mother, all the more impressive. And shows that once Ford left fanboy mode and retreated back into himself, and within the orbit of people and stylizations which were not utterly alien to him (who simply did not suffer the same pedigree of the Furies and psychological private agonies as Murnau), he found a more visceral use-- a subtle integration-- of his brush with Murnau's greatness.

One thing the contents of the box has really brought home to me is the huge impact The Birth of A Nation had on Ford. So many times set pieces from the Griffith film are riffed on and echoed in Ford. From Young Mr Lincoln, to Prisoner of Shark Island, to Steamboat Round The Bend (actually it's Intolerance thats riffed on in that film, w the race against time to save the falsely accused loved one from the hangman), and the dixie-soaked atmosphere of slave-spangled plantations of the south in so many of these earlier Fox melodramas, the Griffith influence fairly oozes.

[tryavna]

Schreck, your comments jibe very much with my own feelings. (I do recommend that you stick with World Moves On, though -- at least until Stepin Fetchit makes his first appearance. It's an awful film in many, many ways, but Fetchit's presence is so incongruous to the rest of the film that I get the feeling that he and Ford were making some sort of bizarre in-joke.)

But as you point out, the 1928-33 period of Ford's career is disappointing to review, even if you view it as a period that Ford had to go through in order to become the great artist he did. In a much earlier post, I called this his "Murnau-influenced self-conscious artiste" mode, and I actually find his output during this period weaker than the films that predate it (like 3 Bad Men from 1926, in particular). Yet when we finally get to Pilgrimage from 1933 and Judge Priest from 1934, we really begin to see Ford in all his glory. It kind of makes you wonder what was going on in Ford's life and his own consciousness of himself as a director and artist c. 1933 to initiate such a major change.

The point about Ford being capable of making a really bad film is well-taken, though. Anyone who's ever seen Wings of Eagles is all too painfully aware of that fact....

[HerrSchreck]

But as you point out, the 1928-33 period of Ford's career is disappointing to review, (...) and I actually find his output during this period weaker than the films that predate it (like 3 Bad Men from 1926, in particular).

I totally agree. Imho, Just Pals, for example, the earliest film in the set, absolutely destroys as a piece of entertainment the vast bulk of the 28-33 period-- and it's a really interesting film to watch because so much of the Fordian trademark grabassing humor and style is already there.

[denti alligator]

I agree with Schreck. Working (very slowly) chronologically through the set, now at around 1940 (Grapes of Wrath), Just Pals still ranks in the top three for me. So many of those early talkies are not worth watching.

[Tommaso]

I also agree with all of the above. The few reservations I voiced about "3 Bad Men" are completely minor compared to those I have when it comes to "Hangman's House" and "Four Sons", for precisely the reasons that Schreck has so well described. I liked "Four Sons" better than "Hangman's House", though, perhaps because in spite of its onedimensionality it is still more directly and convincingly playing on the emotional strings (and thus leaves me not quite as cold as, say, "Up the river"); its plot is also far less contrived than something like "Lost Patrol" (not in this set, but it came to my mind as one of the few Ford films I found almost completely forgettable). In this respect, despite of the 'fanboy' nature these late silents clearly exude, I would rate them still a little higher than most of the early Ford talkies I've seen (I'm missing out on "Pilgrimage", though). If one forgets they were made by Ford, at least "Four Sons" might be considered as an unrelevant addition to the silent canon, but still a relatively enjoyable film (while I really had some difficulties actually watching some of the so-called comedies to the end).

[whaleallright]

...

[jguitar]

Did anyone not from the United States manage to secure a copy ofFrontier Marshal? If so, how did you go about it?

I love Dwan, did purchase the Fox Box, and would like to pick up this disc somehow.

I'm not sure if anyone has answered Scharphedin's question about getting Frontier Marshal delivered outside of the US, but I'm in the US and a late purchaser of the box set (the dwindling stock forced my hand) and according to the Fox website link provided earlier in this thread, the offer is closed. Is anyone aware of ways to get one's hands on this, aside from buying the smaller Essential Ford at Fox collection? Or is this one of those disappointments I'll have to carry with me into a bitter old age?

[HerrSchreck]

Question: Is anyone aware of ways to get one's hands on this?

Dual Layer Answer: The official way to get Frontier Marshall is R.I.P. Cremate (burn) before burial.

Especially if I bought the box, and the offer was closed to me, I'd be pretty pissed. They did it in such a dumb way, now they're causing late buyers to pay the price that they didnt use a bona fide UPC type redemption... because since they don't want to get raked over the coals pushing out 20k free discs after manufacturing 10K F@F sets.

[whaleallright]

n/a