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That's good advice, thanks. The boxset versions of the films I have are still just the Studio Classics discs, right? The difference between Shark Island MoC and Fox is compelling, and if they've somehow gone and further cleaned the transfers to make them even better, that would be a reason to spring again for what I already own.

I had someone burn me their copy of Tobacco Road only to discover after the fact that it's available on NetFlix-- I cannot stress this enough, watch it before buying

It originally seemed totally ignorable, as the reputation is not great, but the passionate defense by a few posters and a few reviewers has me willing to give it a shot. I guess I'll try to track down a rental of that, and get the other microsets as I can.

Famous last words. By the way, you missed by literally a day Amazon's sale on the Ford sets-- they were all HALF OFF. Not anymore though

While we're talking about those films not available outside the big set, has anyone already seen "The world moves on"? Somebody has described it as a 'costume drama' (which sounds intriguing), and I wonder whether I'm missing something for not having it.

I've run into a problem. I opted for the Essential John Ford set and my disc of How Green Was My Valley is the older 1999 release, without the commentary, etc. It should be the Studio Classics version. I called Fox and they're no help, saying no one else has reported this problem and that they're turnaround time is 4 to 8 weeks. Did this happen to anyone else (or did anyone else even purchase the Essential John Ford set)?

souvenir, your post prompted me to check out the HGWMV disc on my copy of the Essential John Ford, and I've got the same disc you have, unfortunately. I'll have to contact Fox...

souvenir wrote:I've run into a problem. I opted for the Essential John Ford set and my disc of How Green Was My Valley is the older 1999 release, without the commentary, etc. It should be the Studio Classics version. I called Fox and they're no help, saying no one else has reported this problem and that they're turnaround time is 4 to 8 weeks. Did this happen to anyone else (or did anyone else even purchase the Essential John Ford set)?

I just opened up the box to check and my copy does have the commentary.

Does it state on the box and DVD menus whether is includes the commentary?

The disc's contents is exactly the same as the Studio Classics version (same menus etc). The only differences are the packaging and the cover of the disc (which should have a picture of the miners walking down a path and a Ford at Fox logo)

The back of the slimcase mentions the commentary, but the disc is the 1999 release with the emerald green menu as seen on the DVD Beaver comparison. It even has "1999" on the disc itself and there's no commentary or AMC Backstory when I play it. It's obviously a mistake on Fox's part, but they say they won't send out just the disc. Now I'm wondering how widespread it is.

I called Fox, and got the same the same run around as souvenir. I then emailed them at [email protected], requesting that they just send a replacement disc. Let's see what happens. I'm certainly not crossing my fingers.

I also decided to contact Amazon about a replacement disc, as I had purchased the set from them. They cannot help me because, apparently the item is "now unavailable from our supplier."

Denti, on the Shark Island issue: have you seen the film? This is all pretty straightforward.. I was thinking both things myself, then (via my Figuring Out John Ford Brain Project) listened to the commentary, and he relieved my brain by mentioning the racial thing which didn't really make me cringe (I try and operate in the big picture and fit things into perspective & context and don't hold films to today's pc rules, though I can still look at Grif and say "ach" while admiring the genius and gift for storytelling).. The homecoming at the end, the civil war theme of north abusing south, the assassination reconstruction, complete w Lincoln lookalike, bonfires, dances, bumbling "yessa nossuh bossman" ex slaves, the loyal slave who hews to his master with selfless fidelity even postwar, the southern gentleman maintaining his earthy dignity in the face of northern hubris straight thru to the end of the film-- all roaring echoes of BOANation. Back then that movie was considered-- probably by the same number of people who say KANE nowadays-- the greatest movie ever made. The echoes would be absolutely unmistakable.

Tom, you're right. There are moments in b&w Kurosawa of heightened pictorialism, but they're fleeting (though not as fleeting as Ford). I was thinking the style of melodrama he mastered in 7Samurai, all those pretty shots are never lingered on.. Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Hi & Low, Hidden Fortress are mostly the same way... some are lightly lingered on like some of the setups in say SHARK ISLAND but this is still nowhere in the Mizoguchi/Sternberg/Kobayashi/German style. In stuff like Throne of Blood, Ikiru (the swing moment), Red Beard you do get those Exalted Moments. He was definitely more self reflexive than Ford. Kurosawa's most distinct ancestor was to me always Stroeheim. Fantastic, moving, compelling melodrama punctuated with fantastic pictorial setups here and there.

Moving into late Kurosawa, I (I know we're opposites here) have very little use for it. Not because of the visual style (which does get more extreme ) but for the scripts. He lost his check on himself with his Roundtable Trio process, and like Seinfeld without Larry David, I lost interest.

HerrSchreck wrote: I was thinking the style of melodrama he mastered in 7Samurai, all those pretty shots are never lingered on.. Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Hi & Low, Hidden Fortress are mostly the same way

That's funny, because you happened to mention all in a row those Kurosawa films that are probably my least favourite apart from the very early ones. I always thought my reason for this (excepting "Seven Samurai", but this is also not among my favourites) was that they lacked a certain emotional 'depth' that I find in all his other post-"Rashomon" films including the very late films, but now that you mention it, this perceived lack of 'depth' may have something to do with the not-lingering, his refusal to let the images (and thus the meaning) sink in. It's curious to see how such things that are purely an editing decision might influence one's perception of the over-all meaning of a film. As these films are indeed perhaps the closest to Ford's way of handling things, I still wonder why I nevertheless do not have a similar feeling with Ford. For instance, although we see Monument Valley only in passing, its presence is somehow always 'felt' in the films that are set there. It might be a sort of cumulative effect with Ford always coming back to the same location in various films, and once you've seen more than one of them, the memory is reactivated and you don't have to linger on the landscape because you KNOW it's there.
In any case, even the lingering moments in Kurosawa are far less extensive than in the directors that went before him, and apart from his reliance (still comparatively seldom, but much more often than, say, Mizoguchi) on typical Hollywood SRS-editing, this might be a reason why Kurosawa has often been thought of being 'westernized' as a director.

HerrSchreck wrote:He was definitely more self reflexive than Ford

And also much more didactic, sadly. I like it that Ford never seems to rub in the 'message' in the way Kuro does. An exception might be the mother's speech at the end of "Grapes", but that seems to be due to Zanuck's interference rather than to Ford.

HerrSchreck wrote:Moving into late Kurosawa, I (I know we're opposites here) have very little use for it. Not because of the visual style (which does get more extreme ) but for the scripts. He lost his check on himself with his Roundtable Trio process, and like Seinfeld without Larry David, I lost interest.

Yes, and you're not alone with this. Even Stephen Prince dismisses the last three films for this and other reasons (though not "Ran"). I also have my problems with "Rhapsody in August" and "Madadayo" because of their sentimentality (and the awful miscasting of Richard Gere in the former), but somehow still enjoy them for their visual beauty, and I can easily forgive him his old man's nostalgia after what he did for the cinema in the fourty years before.

This is a really interesting discussion and it makes me wish for the big box even more. I’ve not seen nearly as much Ford as I’d like, and I’m particularly intrigued by the look of Shark Island and the silents. Though from what I have seen I too am very keen to get to grips with Ford’s seemingly effortless and ‘invisible’ mise en scene. On the theme of pictorialism, I find Ford reassuringly, sometimes breathtakingly, ‘classical’, not at all like Kurosawa, whose images (pre-Red Beard) are far less stable (constant lens shifting, spatial distortions, diagonal emphasis, sudden camera moves, wipes etc). I think wishing for further lingering in Kurosawa would be to miss vital nature of his work – they’re images to be inhabited rather than observed. In Hidden Fortress it’s the impression of texture that I remember most vividly - the pebbles, the dust, the bark etc - and makes me want to return to it. Also, though I agree to an extent about a certain didacticism, usually in the voices of the characters, I find the films as a whole to be a lot more ambivalent (quite profoundly so). I’d say Ikiru is probably AK’s most thoroughly and one-dimensionally didactic film, and not a personal favourite.

I also think that much of AK's pictorial lingering very unsophisticated, especially versus Ford, even early "I worship Murnau" talkie/late silents. Mentioning IKIRU, I agree. I find it at it's most engaging when it operates efficiently, moving itself along at a good clip and allowing the story/actors to do their thing. I think the "heightened" moment of IKIRU, the swing sequence, to be a bit trite, rather unsophisticated vs say Mizoguchi or later Kobayashi (just as an example), and so blatant and manipulative that Ford would have laughed himself into hernia.

I think Ford's efficiency survives his journeyman status seeing him operate in more and less visually extravagant styles. Looking at Pilgrimage for the first time last night, I was struck by the unwavering Fordian style of deploying his melodrama, despite the obvious Murnau influence. Ford could ratchet up the visual power, but that skill of Knowing What Will Get His Audience Going and translating this into setups/editing doesn't desert him (we're talking his functional pictures here), and we see this in Pilgrimage. In Murnau there's always 1) the melodrama, but there's also 2) Something Else. That something else is extremely haunting, powerful, earthshakingly impressive... it's that FW Murnau something, eerie, and it's always enveloping his characters as they move along. On another thread I could sit down and try and articulate what that something is, as I'm familiar enough with it since he's my longtime favorite. Yet with Ford, though the pictorialism resembles Murnau in a certain way, unmistakable, this almost uncanny sense of the supernatural inhabiting every shot is not there. It remains Fordian in the sense that character and story, the nuts & bolts and the grits & gravy are never second to a Murnauesque quasi supernatural stimmung.

I always thought AK lacked a certain sophistication in terms of "high art", a sophistication which oozed from Mizoguchi, Sternberg, Murnau, later Kobayashi, Okamoto perhaps, whereby his "exalted pictorial setups" are more than one-dimensional... where you have something truly mysterious, exalted and sublime to linger over. With AK its mostly all right there. In other words, when he stops the action and asks you to linger on something, it's usually just to say something obvious like "look at this old man die in agony, isn't the world full of unjust suffering?" The swing scene in IKIRU: a dying old man who knows he's dying singing a sentimental old song in glimmery frost with tears streaming down his face, barely able to sing thru the tears. This is not sophisticated cinema stuff by any means.

I adore Seven Samurai, I think it represents AK's maximum talent at its finest. Despite the rampantly base "heightened moments" I love Red Beard too, Throne of Blood. But (and I wasn't always of this opinion which is recent) Seven Samurai seems to me the apex of AK's skills: nothing is predictable, simplistic solutions to various emotional situations are not dealt with in base manners, he rarely capitalizes on tragedy or sadness in that fist pounding "my god life must change" way seen in some of his more manipulative efforts. And in this sense I think Seven Samurai, generally considered to be not only AK's but one of cinemas finest films ever made, sees AK most exposing his admiration of Ford and employing his mise en scene in a similarly earthy way devoid of flash and sophistication perhaps beyond his natural talent or inclination. There are dozens of beautiful shots in this (and many of his best golden era 50s-60's films) film that are just thrown away, and remain devoid of the artifice that Ford rarely employed himself.

Rowan wrote: On the theme of pictorialism, I find Ford reassuringly, sometimes breathtakingly, ‘classical’, not at all like Kurosawa, whose images (pre-Red Beard) are far less stable (constant lens shifting, spatial distortions, diagonal emphasis, sudden camera moves, wipes etc). I think wishing for further lingering in Kurosawa would be to miss vital nature of his work – they’re images to be inhabited rather than observed.

A very good point re: the classical character of Ford's images and also editing. That's indeed a major difference, perhaps it's this 'classicality' that made it so difficult to describe the style of Ford (individual styles are most apparent when they break the 'rules', not when they adhere to them). Your observation about the "vital nature" of Kurosawa is true, too, but as has been repeatedly noted by many commentators of his work, what is so important about Kuro's style is what I'd call its 'breathing' quality, i.e. whereas other films are either slow or fast-paced, Kurosawa normally uses both. We often find VERY fast editing, and then shots that can even last for several minutes (I think of "The Lower depths" in particular) in a regular succession in his films. And these last are the 'lingering' moments, and for me they rather add to than distract from the vitality.

Rowan wrote: Also, though I agree to an extent about a certain didacticism, usually in the voices of the characters, I find the films as a whole to be a lot more ambivalent (quite profoundly so). I’d say Ikiru is probably AK’s most thoroughly and one-dimensionally didactic film, and not a personal favourite.

Agreed, in general and for "Ikiru" in particular. The first 90 min. are among the best he ever made, but the remaining hour or so is very hard to take in. But it is often the 'didactic' voices that seem to indicate the current position that Kurosawa held at the moment the film was made, see for instance the Takashi Shimura characters in "Stray Dog", "Drunken Angel" or indeed "Ikiru", and these didactic bits very often come at the end of the films (or at both end and beginning, as in "Throne of Blood"), as if he wanted to assure the understanding of the 'message' despite the generally greater ambivalence which is in the rest of the film. Kurosawa shows respect or at least understanding for other positions presented in the films, but in the end it is clear which side he is taking.

Schreck, I saw your post only after answering Rowan's. And yes, I also find the swing sequence a bit too 'obvious', but I think nevertheless that it works as a sort of 'childlike' poetic image. In a way I like that Kurosawa wasn't afraid of some occasional sentimentality, something that indeed Kobayashi wouldn't have allowed himself. Only when the sentimentality gets too much in the forefront (as in "Rhapsody" and "Madadayo") I find it problematic.

HerrSchreck wrote: Yet with Ford, though the pictorialism resembles Murnau in a certain way, unmistakable, this almost uncanny sense of the supernatural inhabiting every shot is not there. It remains Fordian in the sense that character and story, the nuts & bolts and the grits & gravy are never second to a Murnauesque quasi supernatural stimmung.

I haven't managed to watch "Four Sons" and "Hangman's Daughter" yet, but would absolutely agree with this for "The Informer". The Germanish look it has (whether particularly Murnau or not) is completely functional in the sense that it shows us the dreary inner and outer world of the characters, but nothing is implied beyond it. But that is basically because the film shows us the social origin of the poverty and the drinking, there's never the idea that it's a divine punishment sort of thing (despite the church scenes, I'd say). In Murnau, there's always a quasi-divine force, be it the messenger from the other island in "Tabu" or even only the hotel manager in "Der letzte Mann" (not to mention the more obvious examples).

HerrSchreck wrote:I always thought AK lacked a certain sophistication in terms of "high art", a sophistication which oozed from Mizoguchi, Sternberg, Murnau, later Kobayashi, Okamoto perhaps, whereby his "exalted pictorial setups" are more than one-dimensional... where you have something truly mysterious, exalted and sublime to linger over. With AK its mostly all right there.

Hmm... I always had the impression that the force that made the characters act as they do in "Throne of Blood" and in "Ran" was something beyond what we see on screen. This may be due to Shakespeare, of course, and it's perhaps not by chance then that these are among my favourites in Kuro's canon.

Steamboat Around the Bend

Watching this was like seeing a miracle. The way Ford juggles pathos, satire and slapstick within single shots is extraordinary. And his "floating museum," whereby mannequins of Yankee, European, and Biblical figures are redecorated into Southern heroes, and then cast in the hellfire of the steamboat furnace for love is one of the most brilliantly political things I've seen in cinema.

Tommaso wrote:Hmm... I always had the impression that the force that made the characters act as they do in "Throne of Blood" and in "Ran" was something beyond what we see on screen. This may be due to Shakespeare, of course, and it's perhaps not by chance then that these are among my favourites in Kuro's canon.

I'm not talking the motives lurking behind a given character's thru-line; I just mean those self consciously symphonic moments when AK stops the film to get you to contemplate an image.

lubitsch wrote:TOBACCO ROAD is the most stunning mismatch of photographic style and content in the whole movie history. Deeply atmospheric photography by Arthur Miller and dumb, broad comedy, what was Ford thinking???

I'd actually award that to the fuckin docu Becoming John Ford, which dollys in out up down and away from it's subjects (dry bespectacled old hipless scholars & reviewers furchrissakes) with this ridiculous hi contrast photography and shadowy "look at my wild shots we're talented filmmakers" style. It's like the most childish and selfishly shot documentary I've ever seen in my life-- those static shots of "scholar sitting watching great John Ford film" are so absurd. Janet Bergstrom looks so uncomfortable she almost looks like shes gonna cry-- "I guess it's either go along with this Cinematographic Audition For An Industry Reputation... or Not Be In The Doc. And I wanna be in the doc,"

I mean if there's a greater disconnect between the subject matter and the means with which that subject matter is described, I haven't seen it. John Ford would have retched ON the cinematographer. These imbeciles gave the term Docu-Noir a whole new twist. Those camera moves tracking away from the subjects until they totally lose them from the frame so where you're like looking at a chair or wall which just the worst. A couple decades ago something this utterly immature, selfish, and absurdly indulgent would never have passed the muster of Fox.

Isn't it the same Nick Redman who put together those ludicrously shot and edited featurettes for Warner's Peckinpah set?

Narshty wrote:Isn't it the same Nick Redman who put together those ludicrously shot and edited featurettes for Warner's Peckinpah set?

You know it is Jon!

I didn't find the aesthetics disturbing (though it does become unnecessarily confusing I agree) as much as how lightweight 'Becoming John Ford' is. It's obviously designed to sit within the Ford at Fox box and as an extra within that set it's reasonable, but even then there's not much mention of any of Ford's scriptwriters or cinematographers, his relationship with them or how they helped him become John Ford.

The Universal period is rushed through, and fer gawd's sake let's try and not mention Warners. I understand it's a Fox product and essentially it's simply an add on for the Big Box, telling the story of Ford and Zanuck. But if you're new to Ford and expecting this to tell anything like the whole story you're going to be disappointed. And if you're pretty well read on Ford, there's very little here that you won't know.

I wasn’t necessarily praising Ford for his stability. Kurosawa’s films are more ‘out there’ for me, and don’t produce the same kind of comfort-zone effect, visually or otherwise. Schreck, what you mention about self-reflexivity is interesting too. I’d never thought about it in quite that way.. Do you mean that there’s more of him (AK) in the films, more of his own conflict, or do you mean that the films themselves are reflexive, formally/thematically? Perhaps a little bit of both. Is the assertion of human goodness at the end of Rashomon supposed to be convincing? To resolve or negate the instability of the rest of the film? I don’t think it is. While I’d never call Kurosawa an ironic director, there is a deep cynicism that runs through all his films, which is offset by moments of almost desperate-seeming sentimentalism. This, for me, is his pathos – and a tension that would be lost if, as Stephen Prince sometimes wishes, he were an out-and-out modernist in the manner of Oshima.

Ford’s approach seems more harmonising and holistic; he’s a more poetic filmmaker. His compositions rarely imply rupture or distance in quite the same way as his Japanese admirer. One of the most breathtaking moments in cinema for me is the very opening shot of The Searchers, where we glide through the door into the air and the light – the fact that Ford sustains this luxuriant, floaty feeling of space through the whole film, even within a tightly organised classical mise en scene, astonishes me. There are some incredibly beautiful pictorial scenes in Mr Lincoln too, and the more rugged Clementine.

HerrSchreck wrote:In Murnau there's always 1) the melodrama, but there's also 2) Something Else. That something else is extremely haunting, powerful, earthshakingly impressive... it's that FW Murnau something, eerie, and it's always enveloping his characters as they move along. On another thread I could sit down and try and articulate what that something is, as I'm familiar enough with it since he's my longtime favorite.

Please do. I'd love to read your thoughts on this. And, continuing the OT.. The Something Else is definitely there in Ran and occasionally (despite prosaic, schematic longeurs) in Kagemusha.

HerrSchreck wrote:I'm not talking the motives lurking behind a given character's thru-line; I just mean those self consciously symphonic moments when AK stops the film to get you to contemplate an image.

I thought Tommaso might have been referring to the implied ‘gaze of the Buddha’, the melancholic otherness that watches/impels/abandons the landscapes/characters, not as motivation but as visual reflection - almost like a mediation on the void at the edge of the frame (or even within it, given all of the ‘negative space’ compositions in Throne and Ran).

Also speaking of the symphonic, is a Ford/Kurosawa comparison a bit like the well-worn Mozart vs Beethoven scenario? Kurosawa’s adoration of the classical perfection of Ford (who is also prone to moments of tweeness) informs a body of work riddled with anxiety and fraying at the edges, but perhaps all the more powerful for it..?

Very quick reply, as I'm in a hurry. I indeed had in mind what you call the 'gaze of the Buddha' in "Ran", and for both films I had the idea that these characters are driven by an inherent 'greed for power' in human nature, something that transcends individual motivations, like 'fate'/'karma'.

It's interesting how you seem to see Kurosawa and Ford almost as opposites, something I'd never thought of before I saw that diagram in Tag Gallagher's book where the author lumps Ford, Murnau, Sternberg and Rossellini in one group, and Eisenstein, Lang, De Sica and Hitchcock in the other. While I find these oppositions somewhat debatable (as Gallagher himself says) and am not wholly sure whether I agree, the descriptions of the individual features of these directors would easily enable us to put Mizoguchi in the Ford group, and Kurosawa in the Eisenstein group.

See for yourself, the link for the PDF file is three or four pages before this one. The diagram is on page 70 of the book.

..

I also share the general distaste for the Becoming John Ford docu. It's embarrassingly bad -- for all the reasons Schreck and Jonah have listed. But we should have expected it based on Redman's equally pseudo-artsy docu on the two-disc Searchers set. (Fox really should have followed the John Wayne/John Ford docu format on Warner's two-disc Stagecoach set. Now that's a documentary that worked!) There are, however, a few nice quotations from the Zanuck-Ford correspondence, but the only thing I can say I actually learned was the concept that Doc Holliday may have served as Ford's alter-ego in Clementine. The only use I have for that disc are the three war-time documentaries that Ford worked on.

There's been some really nice conversation in this thread over the past few days. Re. Schreck's comments on Ford's invisible mise-en-scene and the tensions between his auteur vs. his journeyman status: Since I've worked my way all the way through the Fox set, I sat down to watch Mogambo last night for a change of pace, but also because it really illustrates wonderfully all that Schreck and others are getting at here. It's a non-Fordian topic (and is basically a remake of a non-Ford film), and there were virtually no members of the stock company either in front of or behind the camera. And yet it's unmistakably Fordian in execution. Of particular interest are the first few scenes which are loaded down with all those beautiful but split-second throwaway shots, including the gleam of sunlight filtering through the mosquito netting when Brownie comes to wake up Gable's character. That single shot got me to thinking about the nature of Ford's mise-en-scene, and one of the things I noticed throughout the film were the bizarre little touches that seem to serve no other purpose than to add "visual interest" within the frame. In the context of Mogambo in particular, I'm thinking of all the different ways that Ford uses the mosquito netting as well as the shots from within tents directed outwards, etc., etc. At one point in the film, Grace Kelly's husband talks about not liking the netting because it "separates people" -- which obviously serves to emphasize what's going on within their own relationship. But that doesn't explain why Ford uses the netting to add visual interest in scenes with other characters. I don't have any solutions myself -- and I'd be the first to admit that my limited knowledge of visual art makes me a poor candidate for discussing "mise-en-scene" (as opposed to narrative structure, where I feel much more confident). But it does strike me as a particular instantiation of what Schreck is talking about.

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.

Tommaso wrote:While we're talking about those films not available outside the big set, has anyone already seen "The world moves on"? Somebody has described it as a 'costume drama' (which sounds intriguing), and I wonder whether I'm missing something for not having it.

World Moves On is not an essential film by any stretch of the imagination, but I found it to be a somewhat more interesting experience than others. In particular, since you've seen Bernard's Wooden Crosses, it would be kind of neat to see how Ford -- or, more probably in this case, the Fox editing staff -- incorporated footage from that film into World. (I noted this in the Bernard thread. And my main interest is whether or not Ford had much say in what specifically got used from the Bernard film.) Other than that, there's a truly bizarre usage of the actor Stepin Fetchit, who as I noted elsewhere seems to be acting in an entirely different film and seems to be taking the piss out of the starchiness of the rest of the movie.

jonah.77 wrote:And then there's the problem of the ... extreme close-ups of film threading through a projector

What is it about Ford that cause folks to wanta use this image? I also noticed this conceit (masses of 35's in ropes going thru the big-studio developing finishing baths) at the beginning of the Omnibus/Anderson doc in Young Mr Lincoln.

Related note: is part two of that omnibus doc available anywhere, or the whole thing in it's entirety? I REAAAALLLLy enjoyed that doc and pull it out more than Lincoln.

Yeah, the decision to not include the complete Anderson/Omnibus Ford doc on the YOUNG MR. LINCOLN disc has now become an extras programming nightmare right up there with the chopped up and parcelled out "Renoir the Patron" and "Cineastes des Notre Temps" programs. I had a bad feeling when I realized that the complete film was not on disc two and wondered what CC could possibly have in mind to pair it up with since the Ford "Essentials" had already been released via Fox direct. I had fleetingly high hopes for some possible silents despite CC's apparent disinterest in anything without a dialogue track but FORD AT FOX certainly makes that unlikely in the immediate future.

I taped the Anderson film from A&E some fifteen years ago (you remember, when it actually had programming about the ARTS instead of Scandanavian trailer trash bounty hunters and "true crime" tabloid forensic geeks) but it was cut by at least twenty minutes so as to be shovelled into a 90 min. timeslot thus the arc of his career is severely truncated. A pity as it is very likely the best documentary yet made on Ford. It's been years since I saw the Bogdanovich and about three+ decades since that TV doc on Ford's westerns was broadcast but they both suffer from the over adulatory "print the legend" syndrome. Only the Anderson got beneath the surface of the filmcraft and closer to the heart of his art. It would have been nice to see it all on disc at one go.