the Big Trail: (1930. dir: Raoul Walsh) This was going to be John Wayne's big breakout role; after four years of trying, he finally bagged the big lead in an important Western. But because John Ford had been grooming him for his own stable, the two were estranged over it and it would be another nine years before Ford teleported Wayne effortlessly into superstardom with that gorgeous introductory zoom-in shot in Stagecoach.
Wayne is just a kid in 1930, and so are the talkies. I got that same pleasant shudder watching the Big Trail that I got watching the Front Page, a sense that movie-making hasn't settled yet into its comfortable tropes, that the river is still shifting, the rules are still being written. It's closer to silent films than it is to, say, Gone With the Wind, complete with title cards and actors with woefully untrained voices. Somewhere in the middle of the thirties, some genius kid in some back room at a major studio developed some fabulous audio techniques, but not yet. "They're still using ribbon-mics," my very knowledgable boyfriend says, and whatever a ribbon-mic is, it's not particularly effective. Wayne's voice sounds high and strained, Marguerite Churchill in the female lead is all whining, and Tyrone Power Sr. (!) as the bad guy is so gruff as to be unintelligible much of the time.
Still, there's much upside. The hallmarks of Dukedom are already there in Wayne: the big, graceful walk, the drawl, the charm; he just hasn't relaxed into them yet. A handsome young Ward Bond is here, too, lurking in the background of the wagon-train. The wagons themselves are huge conestogas, realistic but probably too ungainly to suit Hollywood's purposes for long, and the Indians are real Indians! None of the painted Brooklyn Italians they'll start using in future years.
Much of the photography is downright stunning, like the quiet, breath-taking end-battle among the giant redwoods. Walsh shoots the film almost entirely in long or medium-long shot, giving it a solid ensemble feel, but leaving one yearning in the end for that greatest of all cinematic powers: the intimacy of the lingering close-up.
Wagon Master: (1950. dir: John Ford) Ford had a peculiar sense of humor. The old woman with the horn, for instance. Was that funny, ever, to anyone? It must've been to Ford because he keeps the gag going. Personally, I'd spend any amount of time with Ben Johnson and Ward Bond on the smallest pretext, but I'll tell you what I love best about this movie, reportedly Ford's favorite of his own works: the scene in the Navajo encampment, when the rapist is stripped and tied to the wagon wheel and lashed,-- the way he expresses the mounting tension through still shots of faces, silently, without background music. It may be the biggest reason I love him, that love he's got for interesting faces. That he lets his story get sidetracked sometimes just to explore a character who seems promising to him, or one he just flat-out likes spending time looking at. John Ford never had to discover the close-up; it's his truest medium of expression.
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