Ford at Fox: 24 Film Boxset

[whaleallright]

and the first worthwhile film he made in the Sound Era.

perhaps of the films in the box set, but Salute and especially The Black Watch have their merits. that said, you seem to be deep into probably the least inspiring (if not the least interesting) period in Ford's career. coming up: Arrowsmith is a stilted film that is nonetheless quite lovely to look at (thanks in large part to Ford's encounter with the Goldwyn camera staff), and Air Mail is almost certainly the first great talkie that Ford directed.

[movielocke]

I've only seen Arrowsmith on the old VHS on a rather terrible 13 inch TV, but I wasn't impressed, I might revisit it after I've finished the rest of the Ford kevyip. The others I haven't seen, I don't think, I may have seen airmail when I was binging on TCM many years ago, but I'm not sure.

[movielocke]

Doctor Bull is the third Will Rogers Ford film I've seen, and it was good enough it made want to watch the other two again (which I saw on old VHS versions).

Ford sketches a small town beautifully, but in broad caricature strokes, by and large this works. Will Rogers doesn't do much other than be charming and that is often all you really need.

Spoiler

It's a little shocking, at the end of the film, that when the town is informed their water supply was infected by the wealthy nob's construction crew that they blame the Doctor as the problem (because he didn't inspect the water supply as he was supposed to). as good midwestern republicans must, the town stalwartly ignores the actual cause of the typhoid outbreak and instead blames it on a government failure. it all reminded me of the book of mormon, "shit go in the water, water go in the cup..."

The good doctor is saved by a treacly deus ex machina that not even Disney's Pollyanna could stomach, he happens to invent a serum to cure paralysis and so the town loves him again.

The film isn't great but it is suffused with a relaxed charm and laconic style that makes it incredibly appealing and delightfully watchable. Ford exaggerates the characters shamefully which is part of the fun, it's not mean spirited, but you can certainly see that future DGA president Ford was progressive enough to have little patience for the resistance to modernity. Doctor Bull as a character and Will Rogers as a persona embody that same resistance to modernity leaving the film with a central contradiction that gives the film its comic success; Doctor Bull is certainly one of the townsfolk, sharing most of their failings and foibles which is why the film can get away with critiquing and exaggerating the townsfolk so extensively. It's a classic comedian trait, being able to call out the tribes you belong to, and its adroitly done here.

[Michael Kerpan]

Don't diss Polyanna -- looked at carefully it is not as "treacly" as you might expect (judging by the book, which I've re-read more recently than I've seen the Disney film). ;~}

I was surprised to find out (recently) that the author of Polyanna was a Bostonian (well, a Cantabrigian).

Dr. Bull is the one Ford-Rogers film, I haven't yet watched. Looking forward to it -- though it does not seem to be quite so rigorous in its social critique as the similarly-plotted "Enemy of the People" (wonder what Ford would have done with Ibsen?)

[movielocke]

funnily enough, I'm actually a huge fan of the Pollyanna film and think it is often unfairly dissed. The "DEATH COMES UNEXPECTEDLY!" sermon by the magnicificent Karl Malden is one of my favorite scenes in any Disney Live Action film.

I was actually getting at obliquely one of my old contentions that Pollyanna doesn't have a happy ending

Spoiler

what with her being paralyzed and being taken to get "cured" because Haley Mills plays it like she's willing to go along with the adults in their lies even though she knows there's no cure.

[Michael Kerpan]

Movielocke -- I like the movie too. ;~}

Spoiler

The book makes it clear that Pollyanna regains the ability to walk -- also, author wrote a sequel, I believe. I do recommend the book, if you haven't read it yet.

The Glad Game has been wildly misinterpreted -- it is actually a rather Buddhist notion, putting misfortune into perspective, rather than focusing on what has lost (or does not have), recognize that one has been given an immense quantity of good things. ;~}

Even if your interpretation of the film was correct, Pollyanna is doing more than "going along" with the adults, she has recognized that she has, in fact, helped other people -- and she can accept even a forlorn hope of recovery because she has realized that her life can be worth living even if she never walks again

[movielocke]

Pilgrimage is hands down the best John Ford film I'd never heard of. It might even rate in his top ten. The film is staggeringly good, I haven't seen an american film this unknown but this outstanding since I rooted out a copy of an impossible to find Make Way for Tomorrow a dozen years ago. When I was in film school, we were often inflicted with terrible Hollywood female melodramas from the thirties like Dark Victory, Stella Dallas or Imitation of Life. Pilgrimage blows them all out of the water with a hardbitten, fascinating and largely unsympathetic (yet compelling) central character who goes through a tremendous spiritual journey. In some ways this feels like Ford's most Catholic film, steeped in guilt, penance and redemption modulated by permanent tragedy. The film squeaked by in the pre-code window, which means it doesn't have the coy demurrals that often mars films of this vintage (at least in comparison to the films out of Europe and Japan, Pilgrimage is one of the films that holds up to the domestic authenticity of the international cinema of the thirties). In some ways I'm surprised Japan never remade this. It's probably because I've been binging on a variety of Japanese cinema this month, but the film is a female tragedy and although there is no connection it feels like a western cousin of Japan's female tragedies (though of course in Japan there would be no redemption only more unchanging misery).

Spoiler

Hannah Jessop is a single mother eking out a hardscrabble existence in rural Arkansas, long widowed she raises her son alone. Jim is old enough to want to leave home--or at least bring a wife home--but his mother will have none of it and refuses to grant her approval. Particularly, Hannah will not grant her approval for Jim to marry his sweetheart, Mary, the neighbor girl who is of their caste but whom his mother deems "trash." Jim says he'll leave home to marry her and his mother marches straight to the draft board and enrolls her son to ship him off to France to keep him away from the girl. But it's too little too late, because Jim and Mary have already gotten pregnant, not that they find out until Jim ships off to Europe, before they can get married. Naturally Jim is killed on November 10th, and he leaves behind his widowed lover and his bastard, disowned by Hannah.

That is all just prologue, because the film is ultimately about Hannah's guilt for getting her son killed in her attempt to control his life. Ten years later, she is selected to join a Pilgrimage to Europe so that the mothers can see the graves of their sons who died in Europe. Hannah is bitter, cynical and more or less badgered into going against her will. Even all the women surrounding her are experiencing different oceans of grief from her, she feels an imposter amongst them and flees when it becomes too much. And that's when she gets a chance for redemption, and encounters a young drunk man who is contemplating suicide because his mother won't approve of his pregnant girlfriend. It becomes a vehicle by which Hannah must confront herself, and while it contains the on-the-nose aspects you expect from the genre, it's incredibly effective and downright poetic in the elegant execution that Ford and Nichols pull off.

Absolutely unmissable, I was surprised to see there was a commentary on this, and I'm looking forward to listening to it.

[Michael Kerpan]

Pilgrimage sounds interesting -- I'll check it out after my HHH orgy ends. ;~}

[movielocke]

The World Moves On is essentially the better version of Cavalcade you never wanted to see (blended with a dash of House of Rothschild to give the plot more cohesion, and bizarrely a touch of Smilin' Through in it's completely unconvincing pair of generation spanning pseudo reincarnation romances). I think that Fox was angling for a Best Picture nomination with this film, as it feels like the sort of stolid and mostly terrible studio-backed contenders that populate the endless parade of 1930s Best Picture nominees.

Spoiler

The film ponderously opens with an endless reading of the will scene. Basically it establishes that a family business in New Orleans will partner with a family friend in England and expand to Prussia and France, the expansions to be headed by the younger sons respectively. The eldest son will stay in America and run that branch and he is very attracted to the very young wife of the rather old English family friend. A compact is formed and a party is thrown. At the party, a gentleman didactically attempts the most hamfisted besmirchment of a lady's virtue I've ever seen (he literally says, "you are so virtuous and that tempts me"), perhaps it was the iron fist of the production code flexing its muscles? The eldest son responds with a remarkably cliche empty glove slap and insists on dueling the guy right away and also insists the young wife not tell her husband. He is victorious but is winged by the other man's shot. When the young wife discovers he is wounded she instantly falls deeply in love with him and they have an interminable scene talking about how much they love each other, Singin in the Rain style. Then they have to part forever, sigh, so sad.

Fast Forward eighty years and the exact same actors are playing the great grand children roles of the unrequited lovers above. Eventually they get together after some melodramatic nonsense and with much mystical sighing about how they both knew they loved each other in a previous life. But, the Smilin Through part of the movie is over, and now we move on to the remake of Calvalcade. The German family is feeling rather cousincestuous and is making marriage alliances for their sons into the French and British branches of the family.

Then you know the war thing breaks out, and the family manages to be involved on all sides of the war, with cousins shooting at each other, and be on the sinking of the Lusitania and the uboat that took it down and so on and so forth. Then you know the family forms a global vertical monopoly in the roaring twenties, Then, you know the Crash and the Great Depression thing happens and the family manages to get ruined, but it's okay cause they find religion.

Also stepin fetchit, comicly relieving himself at various moments throughout the Cavalcade of the World moving on.

and they specifically predict World War II, and then mention all the major axis and allies powers other than italy.

The film is remarkably terrible in almost every possible respect until the War breaks out. There is one memorable shot in the pre war sequence, Ford pans down the opulent and empty wedding feast table and then uses a dissolve wipe to transition to the reverse tracking shot down the now full wedding feast table. It's very nicely done.

The war more or less rescues the film with grim images, strong editing, and a pacifist undertone with a surprisingly bitter bite (The love interest won't make munitions, but will make bandages which is a not so subtle way of reminding you that the latter are very nearly as necessary as the former). Plot wise, the film is unrelenting in making sure every male character in an army suffers wounds or is killed. None of the boys escape unscathed. When the film jumps forward from Armistice to 1925, it does so with an on the nose religious refutation of the immorality of that dastardly decade, something along the CB Demille lines of: " Man embraced his new God, Money. and its immoral companion, Power. " Richard is going mad with money and power, his office his bedecked with a mural of slaves groaning in agony harvesting cotton (cotton is the family business). his now priest cousin rebukes him with an allusion to Jesus being tempted in the desert, and his wife also scolds him for neglecting her and pursuing money as his lover rather than putting a baby in her belly.

Only the British branch survives the fallout from the Crash. the family corporation dissolves and there is much gnashing of teeth that war has destroyed everything they built for over a hundred years. and this is where the film gets interesting.

"War is just nature's way of clearing out excess humans."

"That's ridiculous, why not close all the hospitals and let disease clear out all the excess humans? After all, it's nature's way as well.

"Don't be absurd, disease has nothing to do with it."

"Disease has everything to do with it! War is a disease."

I thought that was a stunning little scene, particularly that rather lovely metaphor. This is part of a larger conversation that another war is coming, one based on nationalism, they say in the scene, and then it's followed up by a lengthy and ominous sequence of Hitler and his marching men (complete with little german kids marching), Japanese marching, USSR marching, French marching, British naval battleships, and American air power. It's rather prescient for 1934, particularly putting Hitler front and center at the beginning of the "the next war is coming" montage. The film ends on a deeply religious note, with the camera dollying to a mantle piece crucifix, and the crucifix dissolving into a glowing crucifix in the sky.

The sudden turn to the religious is a bit out of nowhere, the film had pacifist moments laced throughout its entire runtime, but then it goes very explicitly and visually Catholic in a really big way, it's almost Rossellini level, but less elegant. The problem isn't the religious moral, the problem is that it comes from out of nowhere and for that reason seems insincere relative to rather effective pacifist anti-war elements of the film. The film's greatest strength lies in it's contempt for the war and for war in general, and Ford really lays the groundwork for his later films with that skeptical approach to War.

[movielocke]

Tobacco Road
My God, this film is an experience. It's terrible and wonderful in its terribleness especially it is just a beautiful film to look at. I wish I had been able to write my thoughts down a couple months ago when I watched it.

When Wilie Comes Marching Home
A bizarre WWII comedy doubling as a pseudo-musical at times (there are three deleted numbers which are better than any of the numbers in the film). There's some redeeming shots of montage in the film of basic training, but for the most part it is a not very good film. On the other hand the film is more enjoyable when you know he's not going to be cosmically screwed. Whether he's misunderstood as a goldbrick, as a coward or as a deserter, ultimately no one retains those misunderstandings or judgments, not very realistic, but at least it lowers the vicious sting of the thorough "comedic" dismantling of his social status, identity, dignity and personal sense of honor. The film is rather effective at giving you the dismay he feels at being relegated to permanent instructor, showing a sympathy for all the non-combatants out there, but it's supposed to be funny, how "screwed" he is for being "lucky," and the comedy never really comes off because they're trying to force a situational irony into becoming a broad belly laugh. It doesn't happen.

What does work comedicly is when the film cycles and expands and cycles and expands the central irony in a whirlwind and improbable 3 day tour of duty in Europe that comprises the totality of the film's second and final act. This section of the film is stronger and more interesting but is seriously hampered by trying to be a comedy all the time.

[Michael Kerpan]

Tobacco Road. I agree -- terrible AND wonderful. I think Ford very much subverts the source material -- and creates an almost surrealist family comedy-drama. Prefigueres Bunuel and Monty Python -- at some moments at least. My sense is that this is more interesting in a lot of ways than more "successful" films.

[movielocke]

What Price Glory?

This film isn't good, but it isn't quite bad either, Ford keeps it interesting visually, but the tonally off happy ending seems like a post-production switcheroo (the pre credits somber march to a downbeat version of an old hymn feels like it was the original ending of the film). The film is weird because it feels like a John Wayne film, he could play either of the leading roles, but Wayne is nowhere to be found. Cagney is pretty interesting, and although he initially feels miscast, he makes it work by dent of scenery chewing force, it's sort of nice for a change for Ford to work with such a physically atypical leading man. The script is moderately to extremely terrible throughout, but the expressionist battlefield palatte of parts of the cinematography keep things interesting. I dunno, I've sort of changed my mind, I think it is a bad film, but unlike When Willie Comes Marching Home, I sort of like it and enjoy it in spite of its badness because of it's Ford-i-ness.

I can't believe finally finished all the blind buys in the set.

[Drucker]

Movielocke, I just watched Up The River and I'm kind of shocked you had such harsh words for it. I found the film absolutely delightful, and the best of the early sound films from the set I've tried out. Whereas Born Reckless was a bit more generic, this film features so many brilliant Fordian attributes. The scene of the new prisoners being judged as the truck brought them in, for example, was spot on perfect. The moment where the guys don't read Steve's letter and react in unison to his inquiries is funny as well.

There's also greatness in what is not shown (another Ford trademark...defying expectation as Wayne doesn't join the family in Searchers, or Fonda's hug at the end of My Darling Clementine). Spencer Tracey lives by his honor code, and they keep Steve out of trouble late in the film, without comic relief. And the film ends with the assumption that Steve and the girl will get together, but no guarantee.

[movielocke]

I Enjoyed Up The River, but plot and dialogue wise it's shockingly terrible, but it's one if those good bad movies that are fun to watch.

[DeprongMori]

FYI: The Ford at Fox box is on sale at Amazon right now for $55.00. Curious whether it will still be possible to get the supplementary copy of Frontier Marshall any more.

[EddieLarkin]

Rushed to finally buy this only to find Amazon want nearly $40 to deliver it to the UK, plus another $20 for import fees. Are there still any exclusives remaining in the set, or can one collect everything individually?

[Askew]

The following are still only available in this set:

Disc 11: WORLD MOVES ON
Disc 14: FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER/SEAS BENEATH

[domino harvey]

And Tobacco Road has no R1 single release

[EddieLarkin]

Thanks. I still need 18 of these and even if they were all available it'd surely cost me more than the £75 I can get this for. I'll probably go for it.

[Emak-Bakia]

Curious whether it will still be possible to get the supplementary copy of Frontier Marshall any more.

Unfortunately not. I contacted Fox about this when I got my set (must have been three or four years ago), and the offer was long since expired then.

[Reeniop41]

I am really interested in finally owning this set and may be able to get this for less than $50 but before pulling the trigger, are there any news that these set will be upgraded to blu ray? Thanks !

[Ribs]

Kino's put out one of the silents already, but considering Fox have suddenly started releasing Kino titles on their own for some reason all bets are off.

[domino harvey]

Going back to Four Men and a Prayer, I do realize that this film falls well within Ford's "journeyman" days, but I think that's part of its interest for me. You get a movie that virtually anyone else could have directed competently, but that central section on the failure of the Latin American revolution still sticks with me in a way that does seem typical of Ford's most powerful scenes. It can't be accidental that it's shot in a similar way to the failed escape sequence of Prisoner of Shark Island (i.e., obviously done on a sound-stage but set at night and with lots of looming shadows to hide the seams of the stage setting and to add a pervading gloom of failure). And there is a similarly pervasive mood of fatalism as well -- as if we know from the start that this effort at escape/resistance isn't going to succeed.

Caught up with this film and I appreciate these thoughts, which I share, as it looks like no one seems to value this as highly as I now do. This is unexpectedly a top tier Ford for me.

Even those less enthused than I talk about how much style Ford brings to the picture, which is a hoary mystery slash adventure yarn featuring an omnipresent conspiracy versus four plucky lads and Loretta Young. But the film is exceedingly well crafted, even by Ford’s standards. There is a scene during the aforementioned revolutionary section that ranks amongst the best in all of Ford’s filmography:

Spoiler

John Carradine pops up to accompany a member of the “protected” conspiracy to a second location. Only gradually does this man realize he’s about to die. Carradine politely helps the conspirator greet his death with the proper appearance of honor.

The way Ford plays this scene is incredible— it is as moving and ambiguous as any more canonized Ford moment of beauty.

Beyond this section, I thought the film also did the impossible: after god knows how many unfunny and protracted Ford bar brawls, here’s one that actually made me laugh courtesy of Barry Fitzgerald of all people! Speaking of humor, I am less enamored with what Ford finds amusing than he clearly did but I appreciated the utterly bizarre running gag of David Niven doing his “Donald Mouse” voice, an amalgamation of Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse used mostly to mock an obtuse Asian stereotype. It’s not funny but I admire the boldness of its peculiarity, and that perhaps extends to the film at large as well.

[therewillbeblus]

My only complaint is that there wasn't enough George Sanders, but I also thought Niven's voice was pretty funny, especially in its overextended first usage. The juxtaposition of Carradine and co's chivalry and the brutality within these scenes is so jarring, and is amongst Ford's most intelligent designs of imbuing tone through scene construction. Along those lines, Loretta Young is a fun focal point throughout, but in these scenes she's a vehicle for the audience's horror, as the kindness is directed towards her and she's a frontrow witness to the rest. That this sequence exists within a soft ball of boy adventure makes it sting even harder. I wish there were more endearing and investing 30s adventure tales like this