second man through the door: ward bond

If you'd said when I was a kid that one day I'd have a crush on Bert the Cop, I'd have said you were nuts. But it happened, somewhere between watching the Big Trail in November and Tall in the Saddle in February, one of those crushes that creeps up and hits you sidelong so you don't see it coming.

Ward Bond, they say, appears in more of AFI's 100 Best Films Ever Made than any other actor, and I believe it. In 1939, he's not in Stagecoach, as you'd expect (rumor has it Andy Devine complained onset that the only reason he got the role was because Ward Bond couldn't drive a six-up), but he shows up that year as a Yankee officer in that other film, the one where Atlanta gets the torch. He's there somewhere in the Maltese Falcon, It Happened One Night, the Grapes of Wrath, Bringing Up Baby, and if you haven't seen him in the Searchers, you're missing a beautiful thing.

Someone ought to write a book. Politically a little to the right of Attila the Hun, he was listed 4-F for the draft in WWII because he was a secret epileptic. This was a man who suffered backlash blacklisting: that is, he was so vociferously involved in the Hollywood anti-communist movement in the forties that in the fifties he could only find work with friends, and it's lucky the ever-powerful Wayne was one such. In the latter fifties he scored the lead in the Wagon Train TV show (I've watched a single ep, which was dreadful, due not to the acting but to a gaggingly awful script) which made him First Man Through the Door for the first time (unless you count Hitler -- Dead or Alive, a strange little propaganda film I haven't been able to find yet, and as far as I can tell the only one in which he ever scored top billing. Even in Wagon Master, the template for the TV show, he got fourth billing after Ben Johnson, Joanne Dru and Harry Carey Jr.). He was a loyal part of John Ford's inner circle from the time he entered the business. He died, after stumping for Nixon, two days before Kennedy took the election in 1960, from a heart attack in Dallas. According to Scott Eyman's Print the Legend, after returning from Bond's funeral, John Ford walked up to Andy Devine and said, "Now YOU'RE the biggest shit I know." I don't know why, but I really hope that story is true.

Only the Valiant: (1951. dir: Gordon Douglas) Gregory Peck is pretty, Gig Young is the embodiment of louche, and Ward Bond is a force of nature in this Ford-like cavalry picture. Had Coach been at the helm, Victor McLaglen would've played Bond's role, and that'd've been too bad, because Bond has a scene at the beginning in which the camera hardly glances away while he whirls around a barracks, talking to the men, sneaking a drink, unseating a fellow from a card game who's holding an enviable hand, delivering exposition in so deft and engaging a manner that it's a pleasure to be in his company. Even the drunken Irishman act doesn't gall me the way it normally would because his chops are so flawless. That is, he's not just any drunken Irishman, but a very particular one; the way he carefully measures out each swallow of the limited whiskey, for instance, makes it feel like we're watching a man whose life extends beyond both ends of the movie rather than a character caught between its frames.

It's not the best cavalry picture ever made, but it's surely one of the more interesting ones. Gregory Peck is unpopular with his men for a variety of reasons, most of them due to an excess of enthusiasm for following orders, but when he's ordered to send his rival in love on a suicide mission he was slated to lead himself, everyone turns against him. He gathers up all the men who hate him most and takes them on another suicidal mission against the Apaches, having to watch his back from all sides as well as the front. There are some great moments: my favorite is the eerie night-time silence while the cavalrymen watch helpless from their fortress as each lantern they've set up in the passageway is shot dark by unseen Apaches. And Lon Chaney plays a mad Arab soldier. Did anyone in those days emote as fully, as unabashedly, as Lon Chaney?

Three Godfathers: (1948. dir: John Ford) This is a tough one. Garry Wills in John Wayne's America (HIGHLY recommend this read) includes it in his list of the best of the Ford/Wayne partnership, but, boy howdy, it's tough. It's shamelessly sentimental, dripping with it, even, and shot right through its very heart with a mawkish Sunday-School religiosity, but the worst of it is that the story is entirely unbelievable on nearly every front. Three barely credible cattle-rustlers turn bank-robber and get chased into the desert by Ward Bond and his posse, where they come upon a woman dying in childbirth who makes them promise to raise her baby as their own. I can only suggest this one to die-hard Ford fans, who'll find the folks they love (Ben Johnson, Dobe Carey, poor Jane Darwell in another of Ford's "let's see how utterly we can humiliate Jane and keep her coming back for more" roles) and some compelling photography. Carey's death-scene is gorgeous, his prone form shot from a sort of Mantegna's-Christ angle while Duke stands holding his hat against the sun to shield the boy's face, and the way the desert storms are shot is the kind of poetry a person can see.

Ward Bond's role as Marshall Buck Sweet is problematic (everything is problematic in this movie), but his first scene (again) involves a truly wonderful bit. The three cowboys have just ridden into town and pause on their way to rob the bank long enough to laugh at the shingle on the fence that reads "B. Sweet". Sweet, a nice guy but a good lawman, senses something ill in their intentions and tries to stall them with neighborliness. When he pulls on his vest with the star pinned to it, they all go quiet and he knows his hunch was right. "I'll be seeing you boys again," he says, still neighborly, but with a serious underscore, "probably." It's not a very well-written scene (it's not a very well-written movie) but Bond gives it just the right turns, just the right inner life. By the rolling of the end credits, his character has faded into two-dimensions, but so has the whole movie, and it's none of his fault.

Tall in the Saddle: (1944. dir: Edwin L. Marin) I love this one, although it suffers from a surfeit of Gabby Hayes (a little bit of Gabby goes a long way indeed, and I think maybe folks had a different sense of humour in those days) and some two-dimensional characterizations. This is a Western in which Duke gets to solve a mystery, which becomes a murder mystery as he goes along. As the big fan of genre-crossing, it's a natural for me. Another thing it's got going for it is the fact that Duke chooses the bad girl over the good one. Bond plays one of the villains, and not his usual unthinking muscleman but a slick, lawyerly type of bad guy. In fact, it took me several scenes longer than it took John Wayne's character to realize that this Judge was trying to cheat a nice girl of her inheritance, since the Bad Judge looked and sounded like Ward Bond and who wouldn't trust Ward Bond if he said sign this paper and I'll take care of everything?

There's some lovely noirish lighting in the night-time scenes, particularly up at the cabin when some unknown foe attacks the Duke unawares while he's (if I remember this correctly) making biscuits. This is also one of those movies where Wayne and Bond have a big knock-down fist-fight (Shepherd of the Hills is another favorite in that respect), and that's always good, because nobody besides Ward Bond ever had both the physical size and personal presence to balance the Duke in a scene. Everyone else seems pale, or emaciated, or just plain dwarfed.