The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)

***
Country: US
Director: John Ford


After President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated by John Wilkes Booth at Ford's Theatre in 1865, Booth was pursued by Union soldiers and shot twelve days later. Eight people were later charged with conspiring with or assisting Booth. Found guilty by a military tribunal, four of these were hanged, one received a six-year prison sentence, and three more were sentenced to life in prison. Among the last group was a Maryland physician, Dr. Samuel Mudd, who had treated the broken leg Booth received when he jumped from Lincoln's box to the stage after shooting the president. The Prisoner of Shark Island is the story of Dr. Mudd as told by director John Ford based on an original screenplay by his longtime collaborator, Nunnally Johnson.

In the film, Mudd (Warner Baxter) is portrayed as an innocent victim of circumstance unjustly accused and railroaded into a hasty conviction. When we first meet him, he is a contented country doctor living on a Maryland farm with his wife (Gloria Stuart), young daughter, and feisty father-in-law. When he treats Booth, he has no idea who Booth is or even that Lincoln is dead. After soldiers pursuing Booth find that Mudd has treated the fugitive, they arrest him as a conspirator and take him back to Washington for trial. From the first, he is mistreated and his family kept uninformed about what is happening to him. The tribunal is depicted as a kangaroo court which ignores the basic tenets of criminal justice, such as the rules of evidence, the presumption of innocence, and even the right to defend oneself.

Mudd is convicted not on the evidence, but because of his Southern background and his pro-Confederacy political beliefs during the Civil War. Transferred to a federal prison on Dry Tortugas, an island in the Florida Keys, Mudd is systematically bullied and abused. Chief among his tormentors is a sadistic officer named Rankin, played by a feral-looking John Carradine in the first of twelve films he would make with John Ford. Before finally being released and reunited with his family several years later, Mudd endures among other ordeals an abortive escape attempt, solitary confinement in an underground pit, and a yellow fever epidemic.

John Ford is a director who inspires both admiration and loathing in film critics. "A storyteller and poet of images," says Andrew Sarris of Ford. "The glorification of Ford . . . as an artist should not conceal the fact that his message is trite, callous, and evasive," counters David Thomson. One could easily find enough evidence in The Prisoner of Shark Island to support either of these views.

Like most film directors who got their start directing silents (he directed dozens of silent films between 1917 and 1929), Ford had a highly refined sense of the visual, and The Prisoner of Shark Island contains many of the imaginative visual touches that make a Ford film special. Working with the cinematographer Bert Glennon, who shot several of Ford's films including Stagecoach, Ford gets in a number of darkly lit passages that are highly atmospheric. The dim gaslight of interiors and the cavern-like corridors and medieval gloom of the prison create scenes which in style are almost expressionistic. The trial sequence, with the hooded prisoners roughly dragged into the courtroom and the disheveled Dr. Mudd making an impassioned plea for his innocence, is particularly memorable. So is the long, expertly staged, and nearly silent nighttime action sequence when Mudd attempts to escape, with Baxter doing many of his own stunts.

"He could dispose of a plot quickly and efficiently when he had to, but he could always spare a shot or two for a mood that belonged to him and not to the plot," writes Sarris about Ford, and you can find plenty of examples of such visual artistry here. The most startling single shot in the film, coming right after Booth shoots Lincoln, is one of those mood shots Sarris describes. Ford lingers on a close-up of the wounded president seen through a lace curtain being comforted by his wife, then suddenly pulls focus so that it's the curtain in the foreground, not Lincoln's face behind it, that briefly comes into focus before the scene fades out. You can sense both the life receding from the dying president and Ford's reticence to intrude on such an intimate moment.


So what's not to like about The Prisoner of Shark Island? Well, the usual things that bother me about many of Ford's movies. For one thing, there are the misplaced attempts at humor, thankfully limited mostly to Mudd's father-in-law, an incongruously comical character who comes across as a cornball Kentucky colonel. Then there's the Ford sentimentality, expressed here through Mudd's idealized family. It's not as maudlin as in some of Ford's work, but in this context the sentimentality seems as jarringly antiquated as something from a D. W. Griffith silent of twenty years earlier. Then in his attempts to be even-handed about the South in the Civil War, Ford makes Southerners seem almost victims of oppression in the style of Margaret Mitchell. Finally, as in too many of Ford's films set in the nineteenth-century South, African Americans are portrayed in a manner that comes precariously close to Uncle Tom stereotyping, not as offensive as in some of Ford's films, but close enough that this viewer was not entirely comfortable with it.

In spite of its mixture of strengths and flaws, The Prisoner of Shark Island has one undeniable asset, the heartfelt performance of Warner Baxter as Dr. Mudd. This is an actor I'm not all that familiar with. I have seen him give a handful of noteworthy performances in the early 1930s—as a mob lawyer in the pre-Code mystery Penthouse (1933) costarring Myrna Loy as a prostitute who helps him solve a murder, as the harried director in the archetypal Warners backstage musical 42nd Street (1933), and, also with Loy, as a lovable racehorse-obsessed scoundrel thumbing his nose at rich snobs in the other screwball comedy Frank Capra made in 1934, Broadway Bill. But his work here outdoes those other performances. He avoids the melodramatics of suffering or the self-pity of victimhood actors so often indulge in with roles of this nature. Baxter's modulation of his facial expressions alone as Mudd undergoes horrendous physical and psychological anguish is a marvel of expressive control. Equally impressive is the way Baxter quietly conveys the nobility of Mudd's belief in his duty as a doctor and his unyielding determination to be proven innocent and be reunited with his family. The main reason I watched this movie was to see if Baxter is as good as I'd heard. He is.

A final observation I have about The Prisoner of Shark Island is that aside from his conviction and imprisonment, practically nothing about Dr. Mudd in the movie  has any historical reality, an example of what David Thomson condemns as Ford's "adherence to legend at the expense of facts." I have no blanket objection to filmmakers playing loose with the facts to create a good tale—filmmakers have been doing this for as long as there have been movies—so long as they acknowledge that their films are fictional and not historical, the "based on a true story" disclaimer seen so often nowadays. In the case of The Prisoner of Shark Island, I would not have known about the creative liberties taken in the film if I hadn't made a point of finding out how much truth there was to Dr. Mudd's story as told here. Still, if you accept the film as a largely fictional work set in the context of historical events, you can appreciate it as Ford's version of one of the great subjects of cinema—the plight of a person wrongfully accused of a crime and his heroic efforts to deal with injustice—made especially compelling by Warner Baxter's expertise at subtly drawing us into Dr. Mudd's emotions.

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• Stagecoach (1939)

How Green Was My Valley

How Green Was My Valley, 1941
Directed by John Ford
Nominated for 10 Oscars, Won 5
Won BP Over Blossoms in the Dust, Citizen Kane, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, Hold Back the Dawn, The Little Foxes, The Maltese Falcon, One Foot in Heaven, Sergeant York, Suspicion.

Synopsis: We see the story of The Morgan family, living in a Welsh mining town, through the eyes of the youngest son, Huw.

Overall, this film didn't really have a structured plot line, and was more a series of anecdotes, and smaller subplots. We have the subplot of Huw's father and brothers working in the mines, pay getting cut, going on strike, etc. We have the story of Huw's only sister, Angharad, the prettiest girl in the town, who's in love with the preacher, but she cannot be with him. And then we have Huw, who is trying to become a man, we see him learn to walk after an accident, and going to school, and working in the mines.

I was a big fan of the acting in this film, specifically, the little boy who played Huw (Roddy McDowall). He was natural, didn't overact, and was charming as the young boy telling the story. While he didn't really carry the film, he gave off the innocence of a little boy so well, from when we first see him, to the very end, and we're on his side all the way. I thought he was the most interesting character overall, and wasn't too interested in the scenes without him (there were many). Additionally, both his parents were quite good (the father, Donald Crisp, who Best Supporting Actor), as well as his sister.

Also the film looked very good, as it had won Best Cinematography. And the Original Score was quite good, too. Fun fact about the score: Alfred Newman is the most nominated composer in Best Original Score (He was 43 Nominations, John Williams has 40 (many saw JW has more, but I'm not including best original song, this is score only), is the 2nd most Oscar nominated individual (lost to Disney, tied with JW), scored the 20th Century Fox, then 20th Century Pictures, theme that's still in use today, and he is father to famous composer Thomas Newman (Finding Nemo, American Beauty) and uncle to Randy Newman (Toy Story, Monsters Inc, etc), and is considered one of the three Godfathers of film music, and is still considered one of the greatest composers to work with film. That being said, he didn't win an Oscar for this film, but the music was fantastic anyway.

The set design was also very good. The Welsh city looked great, and had a small, homey feel to it. The small stone houses, the church, the little shops, everything was quaint, and fit the story very well. 

Overall, I didn't find the story all that interesting, and found myself quickly bored with it. While everything concerning Huw was interesting (his accident, going to school, etc), everything else wasn't that remarkable. The stories were realistic, and so honest, but at the same time, they didn't quite capture me. It was a bland story, and so many of the characters you didn't get to know enough. I hardly knew the names, much less the character of all of Huw's brothers, and we only kind of know the sister, and only really in the aspect that she loves the new preacher.

Unpopular opinion, but this is my least favourite Best Picture winner yet. Many complain it beat out Citizen Kane, which is a classic. Frankly, it was an okay film, but I don't see what made it the best film of the year. It was a boring story about a Welsh mining family, and in the end, I felt no impact or emotional connection from it.

4/10

Top Ranked Films of John Ford

These are all the films of John Ford’s that made the top 1000 in our 2011 update of the Top Ranked 1000 Films on the Net, all polls. He had ten this time, down from 14 in 2009. [Photos courtesy of Fanpix.net]

Long considered the 'iconic' American director, he made the most revered westerns of all time, and practically defined the genre by himself. Yet, some of his best films are outside that

CMBA Classic Movies of 1939 Blogathon: Stagecoach

****
Country: US
Director: John Ford

"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." This is how John Ford introduced himself at a meeting of the Directors Guild of America in 1950, as he rose to speak in defense of Guild president Joseph L. Mankiewicz for opposing a proposal to require members of the Guild to take a loyalty oath. Ford, of course, made all kinds of pictures besides Westerns during his nearly sixty years as a Hollywood director. But it is the Western with which he is most closely associated and which, according to that statement at the meeting of the DGA, he most closely identified himself. Of the many Westerns he made, several of them masterpieces of the cinema, his 1939 film Stagecoach surely is the greatest of them all. An archetype of the genre, it has just about everything one expects to find in a Western: cowboys, gunslingers, outlaws and lawmen, blood feuds, an Indian attack, a cavalry charge, a climactic gunfight, and John Wayne.

The film opens in the Arizona frontier town of Tonto with the arrival of a stagecoach to change horses and pick up passengers for its final destination of Lordsburg. When the stagecoach pulls out a short while later, besides the driver (Andy Devine) and Marshall Curley Wilcox (George Bancroft) riding shotgun, it carries five passengers, a combination of respectable citizens and not-so-respectable social misfits: the alcoholic Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell); the prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor); Lucy Mallory (Louise Platt), a demure gentlewoman traveling to the next stop to meet her soldier husband; a mild-mannered liquor salesman, Samuel Peacock (Donald Meek); and a professional gambler named Hatfield (John Carradine), a genteel but somehow disreputable Southerner. At the edge of town, the coach picks up a sixth passenger, the president of the local bank, Henry Gatewood (Berton Churchill).

Doc Boone and Dallas are being run out of town by the Law and Order League, a group of female social vigilantes headed by the bank president's harpy wife. As the tipsy Doc quips to Dallas, "We're the victims of a foul disease called social prejudice, my child." Some of the other passengers are concealing their own secrets and vices. The nearly frantic Mrs. Mallory clearly is driven by something more than just the desire to be reunited with her husband. The gambler Hatfield joins the others at the last minute only after developing a mysterious fascination with Mrs. Mallory at first sight. The banker is absconding with $50,000 he has embezzled. And the whole journey is wrapped in an atmosphere of imminent danger, for Geronimo has just declared war and the travelers will be accompanied on the first part of their route by a cavalry platoon to protect them from Indian attack.

Later the stagecoach encounters the final passenger for Lordsburg standing by the side of the road—the Ringo Kid (John Wayne), who has just escaped from prison determined to get to Lordsburg and kill the three Plummer brothers, who are responsible for the death of his own brother. This was John Wayne's first major role in an A-movie, and our first sight of him twenty minutes into the picture—holding a rifle and a saddle, standing absolutely still against the backdrop of the desert with the buttes of Monument Valley in the distance as the camera quickly glides in for a close-up—is an auspicious one. It almost seems designed to announce the arrival of a new star.

One of the best things about Stagecoach is its perfect balance of character and action. The passengers may at first appear to be a group of near-stereotypes thrown together by circumstances, yet each is given an individual personality gradually revealed by their reactions to the dangers they must face and by the way they relate to one other. Throughout the film, their individuality continues to grow, and their personalities, far from being static, continue to evolve as they come to know one another better and their mettle is tested by the perilous situation in which they find themselves. In a way, Stagecoach is all about the way a diverse group of strangers are impelled to form an ad hoc community as a response to adversity.

One of the most fascinating episodes in the film is the interlude that occurs at their first stop. In many of John Ford's movies, meals are treated almost as a rite of fellowship, during which people reveal a great deal about themselves by the way they behave toward one another. As the stagecoach passengers prepare to dine, they divide themselves into two camps, the socially acceptable and the social outsiders. When Mrs. Mallory balks at sitting across the table from Dallas, the gambler Hatfield gallantly picks up her dish and silverware and escorts her to the far end of the table, where they are joined by most of the rest of the passengers. Only the Ringo Kid consents to remain with the humiliated and abashed Dallas and even strikes up a conversation with her. He is either too naive or too nonjudgmental or too egalitarian to treat her as a pariah, and as the movie progresses it becomes clear the two are falling in love.

Ford was well known as a lifelong Republican and political conservative. But he was the kind of libertarian conservative who places great value on individualism and has the populist's faith in the ability of ordinary people to detect corruption and power-mongering in their leaders. That his favorite presidents reportedly were Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy shows perhaps that he was more impressed with strength of character and the ability to respond forcefully to crisis than with adherence to political dogma. So it's not surprising that in Stagecoach the great humanist moviemaker who was able to find both noble and not-so-noble personal qualities in his characters reserves his most negative feelings for the banker Henry Gatewood, a thorough hypocrite willing to cheat and rob while condemning the morality of others. Unprompted, the blustering Gatewood succinctly presents his political manifesto in a hilarious monologue early in the movie: "America for Americans. The government must not interfere with business. Reduce taxes. The national debt is shocking, over a billion dollars a year. What this country needs is a businessman for President." Was this character the first Tea Party Republican?

Stagecoach is really an ensemble movie in which no cast member, some of whom worked with Ford many times, is slighted. Every single actor in the film is perfectly cast and does exemplary work. Even so, three particularly stand out. Thomas Mitchell, who appeared in no less than five of the great films of 1939, deservedly won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his performance here. Continually spouting observations on human nature like a boozy Greek chorus, his Doc Boone is a cynic whose profession and Civil War experience have taught him to be unafraid of danger. As he says at one point, "I'm not only a philosopher, sir, I'm a fatalist." Yet when unexpectedly called on to sober up and deliver a baby, he rises to the occasion, and the baby he delivers does more to smooth over tensions and unite the stagecoach passengers than anything else in the movie.

As Doc Boone's fellow social outcast, Claire Trevor makes an equally strong impression. Even her Brooklyn accent, which she takes no pains to disguise, marks her as a social alien. Trevor, who could play tough dames so convincingly—and often did—here plays a sensitive and emotionally vulnerable woman. Her Dallas is one of life's victims, a woman consumed with shame at the role her life's circumstances have forced on her and who has given up all hope of ever overcoming those circumstances. It's my own favorite of her many fine performances.

But standing apart from everyone else in the cast is the young John Wayne. A veteran of dozens of movies from 1926 on—in bit parts in A productions and later as a star of many B-movie Westerns—Wayne got his big break in Stagecoach. The movie made him a star. Producer Walter Wanger originally insisted on casting Gary Cooper as the Ringo Kid (he also wanted Marlene Dietrich to play Dallas), but the strong-willed Ford held out for John Wayne and prevailed. Ford had first met John Wayne more than ten years earlier when Wayne was a student at USC working at a summer job at the Fox studio. Over the next few years the two became good friends and Ford essentially adopted him as a protégé. He got Wayne a few bit parts at the studio then in 1928 gave him a small part in Four Sons, the first of twenty-four movies directed by Ford that Wayne appeared in over the next thirty-five years.

Thirty-one years old when Stagecoach was shot, Wayne seems ten years younger in the film. Yet Ringo's youthful appearance and demeanor belie his firmness of purpose and his idealistic sense of justice, qualities that from this film on became inseparable from the screen persona of John Wayne. Ringo's quest to avenge the death of his brother—even against overwhelming odds, for he must face a showdown with all three of the Plummer brothers—is not only personal, but also rooted in the abstract notion that justice must be done, even if it is up to a lone man to do it and even if it places him in grave danger. "There are some things a man just can't run away from," Ringo says, and that statement might have been the motto of the screen personality who became known as John Wayne.

The climactic sequence of the film is without question the attack on the stagecoach by Geronimo that occurs just before the end. By taking a circuitous route, the travelers, no longer protected by the cavalry, make it almost all the way to Lordsburg before Geronimo attacks. The Indian attack sequence, lasting nearly eight minutes and consisting of almost 100 separate shots, is a model of its kind, the sort of sequence that deserves to be watched and studied again and again. It is a thrilling and seamless combination of location and studio photography, static and traveling shots, longer shots taken from outside the stagecoach alternating with closer shots taken inside, rhythmic editing (some of the shots last more than ten seconds, others only a second or two), and astounding stunt work coordinated by the renowned stunt man Yakima Canutt.

Stagecoach may consist of those archetypal elements of the Western film I spoke of earlier, and its characters may be the familiar cross-section of humanity so often found in movies in which a group of people are placed in peril, yet it is much more than just a collection of brilliant parts. The ultimate satisfaction of this movie lies not just in its individual narrative ingredients, or even in its assortment of colorful characters, but in how organically these things seem to fit together and how masterfully director John Ford uses all the elements of his craft to form a series of images which tell the story in a way that is artful without being pretentious. This movie is living proof that entertainment and art can coexist in the same film. The screenplay, the photography and editing, the acting may all be sublime, as they are here, but it takes a master to put them all together in such a way that the whole becomes this much more than the sum of its parts. Only the greatest film directors are able to do this, and Stagecoach shows beyond doubt that Ford was a member of this select group.

Top Ranked Directors on the Net

© 2009-11, William L. Sinclair

All Directors in the top 1011 list that we compiled from all the internet surveys we could find, ranked by total points for all films on our spreadsheet. Alfred Hitchcock led the list [photo above with fellow director, artist Andy Warhol]. John Ford and Jean-Luc Godard had the most films listed at 16 each. Charles Laughton made the list highest with only one film

3 Godfathers

When one thinks of the classic Christmas movies, John Ford’s “3 Godfathers” (1948) doesn’t normally come to mind, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. After all they did celebrate Christmas in the old west and “3 Godfathers” elicits as much good cheer, warmth and hope as other fabled classics.

Despite owning the DVD and having the opportunity to catch it on TCM three times this month, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to catch it on the big screen at the Tivoli Theater in Downers Grove as part of their holiday film series.

It was a fabulous evening.

“3 Godfathers” details what happens when three bank robbers (John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz and Harry Carey, Jr.) stage a holdup in an Arizona town. Chased by a posse and having their water bags shot in the ensuing chase by the town’s marshal (Ward Bond), they make their way across the desert. They lose their horses in a sandstorm and continue the trek on foot.

They come across an abandoned wagon with a dying woman (Mildred Natwick) alone and about to give birth. She asks the men to be the godfather of her child and see to his safety. A baby boy is successfully delivered and the mother dies. The three new godfathers, bereft of horses and short of water, decide the child’s safety is more important than their freedom and decide to bring the child to a town called New Jerusalem. Where is it? Well, there’s a real bright star in the sky over their destination that helps guide them toward the town. And it’s Christmas Eve.

Like a lot of Ford’s films, this offers equal doses of action, humanity, comedy, drama, pathos and a loving sense of community. Thanks to Winton Hoch’s stunning Technicolor cinematography, the famous Lone Pine, California locations never looked lovelier, or when needed, more desolate, than here.

The scenes with the men tending to the baby’s needs are not played for broad comedy, but instead are infused with a gentle humor.

This was the screen debut of Harry Carey, Jr. and the film opens with a touching dedication to his father, who had recently died and had appeared in many of Ford’s silent westerns. Carey Jr. went on to a distinguished career in many westerns and is thankfully still with us, having recently provided an audio commentary to Ford’s classic “Wagon Master” (1950).

Despite being bank robbers, the three are really not bad men. Before robbing the bank, they engage in some good natured ribbing with Bond and his wife (silent screen star and Ford favorite Mae Marsh). Other members of the John Ford Stock Company on hand include Ben Johnson, Hank Worden and Jane Darwell. The film’s composer, Richard Hageman, appears as a piano player in a saloon, playing Christmas carols on Christmas Day.

I was a tad nervous at last night’s presentation, as there was a large number of what appeared to be grandparents accompanies by their young grandkids. Would they be bored and start to get antsy? I needn’t have worried as there was very good audience attention throughout. I’d say there were about 150-200 people there, not packed but more than respectable for a 1948 western. The kids exhibited no restlessness at all. Maybe they had never seen a western before, so it was as alien to them as a new planet in a “Star Wars” movie.

Two nights before the Tivoli had shown “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947) but I left after a few minutes when the image was stretched to fill the whole screen. AARGH, I hate that. I complained the next day and received a very nice call from Chris Johnson, with Classic Cinemas. He was very apologetic and said it should have been projected in the right aspect ratio. He said they would make ensure “3 Godfathers” was screened in the right aspect ratio (square shaped) and it was. What a treat it was!

He said I was the only one to complain and I was surprised at that. Didn’t anyone else notice that Kris Kringle appeared shorter and squatter? A friend of mine has a theory that so many people now have big screen TVs and they want the whole image filled that they don’t even notice. Makes sense to me.

Anyway, if you’re tired of the traditional Christmas classics, and want to give a year’s rest to George Bailey, Ebeneezer or Bing and Rosemary, give “3 Godfathers” a chance. I think you’d be pleasantly surprised.

1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 3

Fact vs. Legend in the Old West

In my two previous posts on the great American films of the year 1962, I discussed a historical epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and two brilliant adaptations of stage plays, Long Day's Journey into Night and The Miracle Worker. The fourth American masterpiece released in 1962 was a Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by the undisputed master of the genre, John Ford, the movie was at the time dismissed by most critics as a throwback, a relic of an outdated genre. Since then the reevaluation of the films of Ford and his recognition as one of the major American auteurs have led to the reevaluation of this movie. It is now rightly regarded as his last great work, and of the same caliber as his greatest Westerns: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956).

The film begins with the arrival by train in the small Western town of Shinbone of a distinguished U.S. Senator, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), who have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend—and onetime rival of Stoddard for Hallie—Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is known as the man who first gained fame for killing the notorious gunman Liberty Valance in a gunfight in Shinbone, an event that launched his political career. When newspaper reporters pressure Stoddard into giving an interview, he agrees in order to set the record straight about his own history and his friendship with Doniphon. Most of the rest of the movie consists of a flashback that begins with Stoddard's arrival in the town decades earlier as a recent graduate of law school.

It is on the stagecoach ride into Shinbone that Stoddard has his first encounter with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when Valance and his cronies rob the stagecoach. Valance, a vicious sadist, not only robs the passengers but also humiliates Stoddard and vandalizes his most prized possession, his set of law books. With this irruption of violence and cruelty into the orderly world of Stoddard, the thematic concern of the movie is immediately established (and will be elaborated on in many variations for the duration of the film): the conflict between might, represented at this point by Valance, and right, represented by Stoddard, the enduring conflict between anarchy and the rule of law.

In the restaurant/saloon in Shinbone, Stoddard first meets his future wife, Hallie, who works in the kitchen, and Tom Doniphon, who comes there to visit her. When he hears of the encounter with Valance, Doniphon offers Stoddard a pistol and tells him, "Out here, a man settles his own problems." Stoddard refuses the gun. Amused by the naiveté of Stoddard and his idealistic belief in the power of the law, Doniphon nicknames him—half-affectionately, half-condescendingly—Pilgrim. Is he alluding to the self-righteous innocence of Christian Pilgrim in The Pilgrim's Progress, or perhaps to the Pilgrims of New England, who came to settle a new continent and encountered more difficulties than they had ever imagined?

Lee Marvin, James Stewart, and John Wayne

Embarking on a campaign to civilize and bring democracy to the Old West, Stoddard quickly gains many followers. He founds a free school in the town to teach literacy to both children and adults. He organizes a town meeting to discuss the territorial convention to petition Congress for statehood. He befriends the local newspaper editor, the alcoholic Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), and persuades him to write articles and editorials in support of statehood.

But Liberty Valance is hired by the big cattle ranchers, who feel threatened by the regulation that statehood would bring to their industry and by the Constitutional rights that the people of the territory would gain. The school is destroyed, the newspaper editor Peabody savagely beaten after he writes in support of statehood, and the town meeting disrupted. The cattle barons and their hired gun, Liberty Valance, have set themselves in opposition to the most hallowed institutions of democracy: the rights to universal education, free speech, a free press, and free elections.

This is all too much even for a pacifist like Stoddard, who declares, "When force threatens, talk's no good any more," arms himself, and goes looking for Valance. It is this decision that leads to the nighttime showdown between the two men in the streets of Shinbone. It seems certain that Stoddard, no match for a practiced gunman like Valance, will be killed, but he miraculously manages to shoot Valance dead. In the rowdy town meeting that follows, Stoddard, treated like a hero, is elected to be the town's representative at the territorial convention.

At the convention Stoddard, whose reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance has preceded him, is nominated to present the convention's petition for statehood to Congress. However, appalled at being lionized for committing an act of violence, an act that in retrospect he feels went against his conscience, he declines the nomination and walks out of the convention. Outside, he finds himself face to face with Doniphon, who has followed him, and who drops a bombshell: It was he, hiding in the shadows, who actually shot Liberty Valance, and we are shown the true version of events in flashback from Doniphon's point of view, Rashomon-style. Stoddard is at first stunned and then, relieved at last of the guilt he felt over killing Valance and becoming a celebrity for committing an act that violated his personal ethics, he returns to the convention and accepts the nomination.

As the film returns to the present, Stoddard has finally told the truth to the newspapermen and acknowledged that it was actually Doniphon who was the hero. He is unprepared for their reaction. They refuse to print the story, preferring to preserve the false version of history that has become accepted as the truth. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," they tell Stoddard, a line that itself has become almost legendary.

The truth behind the legend

One of the reasons this movie was dismissed when it was released is that much of the black-and-white picture was shot in the studio and very little on location. Because of this it lacks the pictorial grandeur of Ford's other Westerns shot in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, an essential element of those movies and one of the things that give them their distinctive character. But to make up for its lack of spectacular scenery, Liberty Valance has a far greater emphasis on theme than any of Ford's other Westerns. In his last great movie, Ford chose to explore larger issues than the character-centered conflicts of his earlier Westerns, specifically the question of the proper role of force in a democratic society. One critic, Richard Brody, writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a recent issue of the New Yorker (Oct. 26, 2009), went so far as to call it "the greatest American political movie."

Doniphon's revelation at the territorial convention causes Stoddard to modify his position on the use of force. Stoddard learns that where force is concerned, things are not as simple as he thought. He learns that force is in itself neither right nor wrong, but that it is the application to which force is put that makes it right or wrong. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Ford suggests that force is necessary to create and maintain order, that force and the rule of law must work together to defeat anarchy and deflect destructive violence. Without force, the rule of law is powerless, but the controlled use of force and the rule of law working together can create an environment in which democratic institutions are able to flourish and civic stability is assured.

And Ford the storyteller seems to argue that the element of meaning created by mythology is just as important in forging a sense of community and civic identity as the facts of history. No matter how an individual viewer reacts to Ford's views—if indeed this is Ford's view, for equating the ideas of Ford with the ideas expressed by the characters in his movies can be a risky thing for a viewer to do—he makes a reasonable case that at the least must be given serious consideration. And as Peter Bogdanovich, perhaps the greatest Ford scholar and interpreter, points out, in Liberty Valance Ford does expose the facts behind the mythology, and one could argue that the idea that the facts don't always correspond to the myth is actually another important theme of the film.

In casting John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford achieved a real coup. The familiar screen persona of each makes him the ideal embodiment of the attitude his character represents. As the embodiment of force, the ultra-masculine Wayne is the ideal Tom Doniphon, a realist, a stolid loner who lives outside society but uses his strength to protect its most cherished values. As Doniphon's opposite, the embodiment of the rule of law, Stewart (the man who played Destry, the sheriff who refused to carry a gun) is the perfect Ransom Stoddard, an idealist who longs to establish and become part of a community based on order and democratic values.

Each man represents one of the elements essential to the maintenance of a civilized community: the power of reason sustained by the power of physical strength. And perhaps most important, by the end of the movie each man comes to see the philosophy of the other as complementary to his own and to incorporate in his own philosophy.

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In the next installment of this series, I'll be examining the final American masterpiece of 1962.

Wagon Master, The Friends of Eddie Coyle

I hit the gold jackpot in movie watching recently, catching two titles in a row that are the best movies I’ve seen in ages. They both deal with community – one celebrating different groups of outcasts banding together in a temporary truce, while the other is a grim, depressing affair about a beaten man trying to escape a community of criminals.

The films are John Ford’s “Wagon Master” (1950) and Peter Yates’ “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973). Two films that could not be more different, yet both make for thrilling and engaging movie watching.

Wagon Master

“Wagon Master” was supposedly John Ford’s favorite movie. It has an easy rhythm to it; like its wagon train traveling across Utah - it’s not in a hurry to get anywhere. There’s no story per se, but it’s packed with incident. There’s no opening or closing studio logo; the movie just begins. It’s like we’re witnesses to history, a story we just happen to arrive right in the middle of.

No marquee actor like John Wayne, James Stewart or Henry Fonda here, which is likely why it’s not more known. Hopefully the new DVD (a stunning transfer by the way) will go a long way in making the film better known.

Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr. are two horse traders grudgingly convinced by a Mormon elder (Ward Bond) to lead a wagon train to a new settlement. The Mormons are being run out of town, so have no choice but to head across uncharted territory to a new settlement. Johnson and Carey know the way so agree to lead them.

The picture opens by placing us right in the middle of a bank robbery by the Cleggs. Uncle Shiloh (Charles Kemper) is the leader of his four sons (two of which are played by a young James Arness and Ford stock player favorite Hank Worden) who, after shooting an unarmed bank teller in the back, hijack the wagon train and use it to as a cover to hide from a pursuing posse.

Kemper is a revelation as the physically imposing Uncle Shiloh. He’s one of the most memorable bad guys in western film history. I think he has a grudging admiration for the Mormons and their manners, yet won’t hesitate to kill anyone who stands in his way. I was not familiar with Kemper and wondered why he wasn’t better known. It turns out he was killed in a car crash in 1950. His final film, “On Dangerous Ground” (1952) was released posthumously.

In addition to the Cleggs, the wagon train’s community grows with the addition of a medicine show troupe (Alan Mowbray, Joanne Dru and Ruth Clifford). They were also run out of town, so the two outcast groups temporarily join together.

There’s also a very memorable sequence where the Mormons are asked to join the Navajos at a dance. The Navajos like the Mormons, saying they are less corrupt than other white men.

That’s not the only dance in the film. There are several wonderfully staged square dance sequences with accompanying songs performed by the Sons of the Pioneers, a well-known vocal group also utilized by Ford in his other 1950 western “Rio Grande.”

Ford never directed a musical but this is the closest he ever came. Ford had an innate sense of where to place the camera to get the best shot possible at all time. He likely would have been bored by all the rehearsing necessary to film a musical, but watching “Wagon Master” you regret that he never did.

The Sons of the Pioneers also perform several songs throughout the movie written by Stan Jones. Wonderful songs they are too. If the movie was better known, the songs would be too.

The beauties of Monument Valley, Ford’s favorite local, are stunningly captured by Bert Glennon’s camera in beautiful black and white. There’s hardly any action until the end, but it’s as quick and violent a shootout as a 1950 western would allow.

The movie ends with a wonderful montage of wagon crossing, dancing and romantic stories tied up. We do get a title card that reads “The End’, but it really doesn’t. The film continues for another 15 seconds or so after “The End” title card disappears, as we see the wagon train a herd of horses cross a river, with a new young foal in the lead. Life goes on, and the community presses onward. There’s no end cast list and no end studio logo. The picture ends like it began – an ongoing story that will continue on long after the audience leaves.

“Wagon Master” only runs 85 minutes but each minute is a jewel. I enjoyed every minute of it and look forward to sharing it with others.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Much of the praise lavished on Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” mentions the brilliant opening dialogue sequence at a French farmhouse between a French farmer harboring Jewish neighbors and self-proclaimed Nazi killer Col. Hans Landa. Tarantino shows how intense well-written and delivered dialogue sequences can be, as thrilling as any large-scale action set piece. Viewers who thrilled to Tarantino’s movie would also likely enjoy “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” which is a whole series of beautifully written and performed meetings between criminals, undercover cops, informers and suppliers. It’s riveting from beginning to end.

Sporting a dead-on Boston accent, Robert Mitchum is Eddie Coyle, a beaten, low-level hood who is looking at jail time after being busted for smuggling illegal booze over the Canadian border. He’s willing to do anything to stay out of jail so his wife and kids won’t have to go on welfare. He’s even willing to turn informer, albeit reluctantly. His cop contact (Richard Jordan) wants more dirt than Eddie is willing to deliver. His friend (Alex Rocco) heads a bank robbery gang who look to Eddie to supply their guns. Eddie’s gun supplier (Steven Keats) also has a deal with some rebel Army kids to steal machine guns from the local Army base. His best friend (Peter Boyle) is a bartender who is also a stoolie for the cops. There’s no criminal code of honor on display here. Everyone is out to get whatever they can from each other.

All this is played out in a series of meetings in parking lots, cafeterias and all night restaurants in late autumn in Boston. The air of regret, lost hopes and dead avenues permeates every frame of this movie.

Eddie Coyle is one of Mitchum’s very best performances and that’s saying something, as he has delivered many seriously great performances. (Admittedly, Mitchum slept walk through just as many films if the project or role didn’t interest him. Have you ever seen him in the TV miniseries “The Winds of War” (1983)? He’s positively catatonic in that).

I’m sure Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of this film. The gun runner’s name is Jackie Brown. When Tarantino adapted Elmore Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch” he changed the name of the character from Jackie Burke to Jackie Brown. It can’t be a coincidence.

Here’s sample of the dialogue, beautifully delivered by Mitchum when Jackie Brown tells Eddie he can’t make good on a gun delivery Eddie wants.

Coyle: All you got to know is I told the man that he could depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is gonna have a bit fat problem. Another thing I learned. If anybody’s gonna have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.

Brown: You finished?

Coyle: No, I am not finished. Look. I’m gettin’ old, you hear? I spent most of my life hanging around crummy joints with a buncha punks drinkin’ the beer, eatin’ the hash and the hot dogs and watching the other people go off to Florida while I’m sweatin’ out how I’m gonna pay the plumber. I done time and I stood up but I can’t take no more chances. Next time, it’s gonna be me goin’ to Florida.

This is 1970s cinema in the very best way, eschewing Hollywood glamour and stereotypes. It will stick with me for a long time.

Director Point Totals in Critics Top 1000

I totalled up all the films for each listing in the critics top 1000, and these are the resulting point totals, not that I agree with the results. I decided to go to 120 rather than 100 because of some of those just out of the 100, like Yimou, Cimino, Campion, Reifenstahl, Eastwood.
Photo courtesy of FanPix.com





Director Points
1.Hitchcock, Alfred - US

Director Film Counts in the Critics 1000

Directors with the most films in the critics top 1000.

Top Ten:
1. John Ford (18)
2. Fritz Lang (16)
3. Luis Bunuel (15)
4. Alfred Hitchcock (14)
5-6. Ingmar Bergman (13), Jean-Luc Godard (13)
7. Federico Fellini (12)
8-10. Howard Hawks (11), Stanley Kubrick (11), Akira Kurosawa (11)

10 each: Chaplin, Mizoguchi, J.Renoir
9 each: Scorsese, Visconti, Powell (9 total, 7 w Pressburger)
8

Directors with the Most Oscars and More

These directors have won the most Oscars® for Directing:

John Ford (4) [photo left]: The Informer (35), The Grapes of Wrath (40), How Green Was My Valley (41), The Quiet Man (52) - no westerns
Mister Roberts, my favorite Ford film
Frank Capra (3): It Happened One Night (34), Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (36), You Can't Take It With You (38)

William Wyler (3): Mrs. Miniver (42), The Best Years of

John Wayne, John Ford and "Stagecoach"

As we continue our way to the John Wayne Centennial Birthday Celebration, I re-visited the film that made him a star, 1939’s “Stagecoach”. What a marvelous film it is, featuring a set of fascinating characters aboard a stagecoach traveling through hostile Apache territory – each traveling west for very different reasons.

Directed by the great John Ford, “Stagecoach” is a textbook example of the Golden Age of Hollywood, a movie that does not overstay its welcome (only 95 minutes long), offers gorgeous cinematography of the awe-inspiring Monument Valley and boasts a gallery of Hollywood’s best character actors.

For example, John Carradine plays a gambler, a mysterious character known only as Hatfield. We don’t know anything about him except he is from the South and fought in the Confederate Army. Impeccably attired, he takes a special interest in a pregnant woman (Louise Platt) who is traveling to meet her cavalryman husband. He acts as her protector throughout the movie and is even ready to kill her when it appears the coach will be overrun with Indians. We don’t know why he feels the way he does, but I don’t think we have to. Carradine’s acting and the direction of Ford and the writing of Dudley Nichols are so strong and sure we don’t need reams of motivation. It’s likely she reminds him of someone from his past and that’s all we need to know. Ford and Nichols are confident enough to let the audience figure it out for ourselves, and we are spared any angst-filled flashbacks, thank you very much.

Thomas Mitchell earned a well-deserving Best Supporting Actor for his performance here as the alcoholic Doc Boone. Has anyone in Hollywood history ever had a greater year than Thomas Mitchell in 1939? Consider his entire 1939 output: “”Stagecoach”. “Only Angels Have Wings”. “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”. “Gone with the Wind.” Each one a four star movie, and all are still enjoyed to this day.

John Wayne as The Ringo Kid more than holds his own against the veteran cast. In 1930, he starred in the big-budget western “The Big Trail” but it proved a colossal flop and Wayne was banished to Poverty Row studios like Republic and Monogram for the next decade to hone his craft in an endless stream of low-budget westerns. The experience was worthwhile because Wayne is very natural and relaxed.

I particularly liked his scene with the prostitute Dallas (Claire Trevor) when he proposes to her without actually proposing. He tells her about the ranch he has and how it would be a good place for a man and woman to share a life together. The way he says “woman” is drawn out into two long syllables, as if a yearning, and something he thought up to now was only a dream. It’s a beautifully written and played scene. Of course, his entrance scene, as the camera zooms in, goes slightly out of focus, and then clears up as his face fills the screen, is one of the great entrances in movie history.

All of the action takes place in the final third, but when it comes it doesn’t disappoint. The Indian attack on the stagecoach on salt plains is justly celebrated, a thrillingly shot and edited sequence featuring memorable stuntwork by the great Yakima Canutt. The final gunfight takes place off-screen, but is more effective because of it.

There’s more I can write about this movie, but it’s best you discover it for yourself. “Stagecoach” is a true classic, and one of the greatest movies ever made.