His romantic fixation on the armed forces, specifically focused on the familial clannishness of groups of men gathered around one paternal authority figure (Wayne's Spig Wead in Wings of Eagles, Powers' Marty Mahar in Long Gray Line, Robert Montgomery's Brickley in They Were Expendable, not to mention the similar dynamic in both the cavalry movies and the shape of his own little stable of actors and companions in life) bemuses me, but his work is so unified by this aspect of his vision that I can't fault it.
The way he throws himself headlong into unabashed sentimentality is both virtue and vice: it works like gangbusters when he balances it, as in the Searchers, with darkness, and cloys and gags until you feel like you're choking on treacle and lace doilies when he doesn't (Three Godfathers. Yes, there is death in it, but highly romanticized death, and it has not one character -- except an already-dead no-good brother-in-law -- who is not good-hearted, optimistic, and trustworthy. Which is not to say there is nothing worth seeing in the film. There is, if you can defend yourself successfully against the treacle and lace doilies).
I've seen some John Ford films that struck me as failures, some as brilliant failures, and others that are just downright brilliant, no caveats or addenda required. And now I can honestly say that I've seen two John Ford films that are unutterably, unequivocally insane.
The first is Salute!, an early comic tribute to the annual Army/Navy football game. The script, the gags, the acting and everything are so mannered and over-stylized that, even adjusting for an eighty-year shift in consciousness, nothing in it bears any resemblance at all to real life. Strike that: one thing in it feels like it came out of real life, and that's the very young John Wayne in his first speaking role. It's a small role, as Ward Bond's sidekick, of all things. Bond plays a tough upper-classman at the naval academy who bullies the younger boys... but not really; not in any way that makes any sense, anyhow.
The crazy stuff aside, though, it's sort of wonderful to see how easy and natural Duke is in front of the camera already, and that Bond has already formed more than just the rudiments of his own later persona. You wonder if this was a moment in time when it looked like Bond was being groomed to be the star, and Wayne might spend his career as second man through the door. Probably there was a moment like that, at least in Bond's mind, but even then you could see how much Ford liked looking at Wayne; he shows up in the background of every third group-shot.
Other than that, the football game is kind of fun, and George O'Brien is always easy to hang around with, but the rest of it is simultaneously insane and dull, like a schizophrenic in the corner reciting an endless Fibonacci sequence. Part of it, admittedly, is culture-shock: this is the first time I've seen Stepin Fetchit, which is a pail of cold water into the politically-correct face. He squires a goat around and has long, blandly horrifying comic routines, which I assume Ford thought were funny.
The other one, Tobacco Road, is not just divorced from reality, but entirely bughouse whacked. Not having read the book, I sat slack-jawed with wonder and confusion, wondering what the hell was going on, then ran to the library next day and I'm here to tell you what the movie left out: all the Southern Gothic, all the twisted darkness, all the death and most of the pornography (everything's gone except that famous shot of Gene Tierney, half-clad and seductively pushing herself through the dirt toward Ward Bond). Then it added a nice whitebread deus ex machina in the Dana Andrews character.
In the movie, nobody has facial deformities: Sister Bessie has lost her boneless shotgun-nose and Ellie May, instead of being frightfully ugly with her extreme wound-like hare-lip, looks like, well, Gene Tierney, for God's sake. The first scene in the film, when the Lesters steal the turnips away from Lov (Ward Bond), is crazy mad and makes no sense, since Ward Bond is strong enough to whip them all if he wants to. In the book it works because Ellie May has her way with him right there in the courtyard, with Ada and Grandma standing by to hit him over the head with boards if he tries to disengage, and that gives Jeeter the opportunity to steal the bag away. The writing is subtly pornographic and leaves one with the unsettling impression that Ellie May's brother Dude takes advantage of her prone nakedness there in the courtyard after everyone else has scattered. The movie, being all cleaned up, begins to suggest the seduction then leaves off with the three women fighting Lov into submission, which is the first wrong note in a long film full of unintentional discordance.
In the book, there's a lot of lust and savage hatred (everyone hates Grandma, who never speaks but skulks around the edges scavaging food when she can, and nobody really notices when she crawls away and dies) and some crack-brained theodical noodling, and it all culminates in big fiery death for the mater and pater. None of that is in the film. All the darkness is transmuted into madcap highjinks. Dude is constantly yelling, which kind of sticks your finger to the fast-forward button, and Sister Bessie is constantly singing hymns. There are a few laughs: Ada computing the number of her children in terms of "head" like cattle, Lov flipping the car over as an afterthought to belting Dude. The one thing the movie really has going for it is the photography. Ford uses layers of broken-down fences to give depth and texture to shots of the road and the homestead; he'll do a similar thing later in My Darling Clementine at the OK Corral. He also uses thick swirlings of autumn leaves for texture, and tilted camera angles to give us an appropriate sense of the off-kilter, and that's all gorgeous and satisfying.
But, ultimately, what is this movie aiming to be? A swan-song for the old South, or a burlesque sketch sending it up? It's never clear, and it works as neither. It feels like a meth-head fable without a moral, like the Beverly Hillbillies on crack. There is a disclaimer at the beginning suggesting it was based not so much on the book as on the Broadway production, which was wildly popular: to this day, Tobacco Road reigns as the second longest-running nonmusical in Broadway history. Reading the plot synopsis, though, the play still kept its darkness, its harelips and panicking underaged brides and terrible, wasteful deaths. It looks like the buck stops either with Ford or the studio in my search for whatever fellow squeezed the ugliness out of it and tried vainly to whip it into prettiness with a sugary coating. In an interview with the St Petersburg Times in 1940, Ford said, "We have no dirt in the picture. We've eliminated the horrible details and what we've got left is a nice dramatic story. It's a tear-jerker, with some comic relief. What we're aiming at is to have our customers sympathize with our people and not feel disgusted."
Aha. Nice dramatic story, my ass. Ford got this job because of his brilliance with handling the poor folks in the Grapes of Wrath, but anyone with hindsight can see how ill-suited he is for the project. He harbored a horror of the dysfunctional family, the wife/mother who is anything but loving and strong, the father who abdicates the role. This incestuous den of cannibals to whom blood-ties mean nothing short of a savage prison sentence would have given him nightmares. It's no wonder he came up with a wacky mess. I have a mental image of him with his dark glasses and navy cap and pipe, his face pinched and pruned with maiden-auntish distaste, trying to sop up all the generations of the Lesters' dirt and viciousness with one of those famous handkerchiefs he used to chew on, and to no avail.
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