some final thoughts on ward bond

Alright, look: the parameters of the Bondfest have stretched way beyond what I cover in these posts. I've now seen sixty-eight Ward Bond films and two television appearances, all but seven of them watched (or happily re-watched) since I began the film festival four months ago. That includes movies like Chained, a little shipboard love story with Clark Gable and Joan Crawford from 1934 in which Bond has one scene, about five seconds long, as a ship's steward, and one line, and you see him only from the back with a tiny bit of profile, and if his physique and voice and movements were not so distinctive I'd never have known he was in it. The only one in which I haven't been able to find him is the Big House, a prison thing with the young Robert Montgomery (in a fabulous performance as a rich kid jailed for vehicular manslaughter who turns out to have a yellow streak a mile wide) and a burly Wallace Beery. I went back to IMDB and it says he plays Convict Holding Flowers, but I swear that's not Ward Bond. I'd put money on it.

I've seen so many that I no longer know what to write about them. He has become personal, sunk into my underconscious, so that he shows up now in my dreams. I had one the other night: I went to some sort of a hippie rally dressed in a flowing white skirt and blouse, and they slapped white paint across my face to mark me as one of theirs. Ward Bond was a soldier in civilian clothes, wearing the spectacles from Tall in the Saddle and with his hair greyed, but falsely-greyed, from a spray-can, like they do in theatre. He was wearing jeans and I remember thinking his ass and legs looked wrong, too skinny, undernourished.

After awhile your mind no longer experiences the films one at a time, but sorts them into bunches. Lately I've been seeing parallels. What are the chances that one man would be in two films about warring logging camps (Park Avenue Logger, Conflict) in the space of two years? Or there's Operation Pacific and Mr. Roberts, which share a nearly identical scene in which naval crews wreak havoc during their shore leave on a tropical island and it's all played for giggles, like it's fun and games when the white boys tear up your party and terrorize your girls.

There's 1938's Prison Break and the old Richard Barthelmess Heroes for Sale, both political statements: the first about how we as a society don't give ex-cons an even shake, the second about how we don't give reformed drug addicts an even shake. Bond just shows up for a few lines in a few scenes in the second one, as a railroad hobo called Red, and if you don't know the sound of his voice you'd think he wasn't in it. The movie itself is interesting, though. It begins with a great shot of soldiers pouring out of a WWI trench on a suicide mission, filmed from above. He gets greater play as the heavy in Prison Break, in which he's playing against Barton MacLane, an actor he'll be paired with in several films, including the Maltese Falcon and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye.

Sometimes he's playing the same role. There's Waterfront Lady and Slightly Dangerous, in which he plays the same dapper, loyal bodyguard tasked to stand guard over a beautiful woman for a rich guy. Slightly Dangerous, a lightweight Lana Turner Cinderella story with an even lighter-weight Robert Young as her leading man, has a good gag where Bond keeps taking Young out with a sock to the gut, but the third time Young is ready with a cutting-board stuffed inside his jacket. (Good times!) He's played a lot of morally shallow bullies; I've seen probably ten in the last month alone, and (despite the class differences) you can find similarities between Tim Dorson in Swamp Water and John Palmer Cass in Young Mr Lincoln, but Honey Bragg in Canyon Passage is unlike any other. There's not a false note in it. I love the time Bragg takes between his lines. Bond convinces us that he's both mentally slow and malevolently sly. The choices he makes in every conversation with Dana Andrews are absolutely true to character and full in ways that might be missed on a cursory viewing. It's possible that you have to watch a number of Bond films back-to-back to glean truly the extraordinary measure of its worth and beauty, this performance, but I'd have given him an Oscar for it, without hesitation.

Which brings me to another rather wonderful point: the way his fist-fighting technique alters from role to role. First, you have the class distinctions: is the boxer a gentleman or a hillbilly? Is he trained in the manly art of self-defence, or is his fighting style rough and self-invented? Gus "Knockout" Carrigan from Conflict might be an early version of John L Sullivan in Gentleman Jim, both heavily trained and hard-hitting but slower than their opponents. Wash Gibbs, the Duke's backwoods cousin from Shepherd of the Hills, is heavy but quick, Honey Bragg is unbelievably heavy-hitting but slow and lumbering, for all the world like the last of the dinosaurs. In the Long Gray Line, Captain Kohler is both highly-trained and very quick when he boxes against the untrained younger Tyrone Powers who will become his life-long protege. Then look at his two Mr Moto films (this is a series cashing in on the popularity of Charlie Chan in which Peter Lorre plays an unassuming Asian professor of criminology who travels the world solving crimes): heavyweight Biff Moran in Mr Moto's Gamble is a slick professional, while the wrestler Sailor Sam, in Mr Moto on Danger Island, is clumsy and slapdash.

Although he has as good a claim as anyone to being in a vaster number of important films than any other actor, part of that is sheer heft of resume. Certainly most of these films are not at all momentous, and many of the roles are tiny, like his hired-thug hockey-player in Times Square Lady, a Robert Taylor picture. He's got one murder, a few lines; extra points given for shirtlessness. Some of the films I'm fondest of are not what you'd call memorable except that Bond has a single good scene in them: as a Nazi bully in This Mortal Storm, a reluctant pilot in Made For Each Other (a depressing slice of marital bliss that not even Stewart and Lombard could make palatable), an unfortunate player in a poker game-turned-interrogation in the rollicking 1939 Western Dodge City.

But let's get back to Gentleman Jim, an Errol Flynn picture loosely based on the life of boxer Gentleman Jim Corbett. I'm no fan of biodrama. I don't like it these days when they at least make a stab at historical accuracy, and back then they didn't bother. You'd be forgiven for mistaking this for a Ford film because of the saccharine-sweet and feisty-cute Irish family. (One thing my Bondfest is doing for me is shortening my patience for that cute, hard-drinking, fighting Irish thing.) Bond gives one of his greatest turns as John L. Sullivan, though. This is one of those rare cases in which a role exists that really can only be played by a single person (like, for instance, the Viggo Mortensen role in Cronenberg's History of Violence). Someone else might have done the fighting and the braggodaccio, both of which he pulls off beautifully, but it's that last scene that's the killer: the one after he's lost his crown to Flynn's Corbett and he shows up alone and late and heavily bruised to the triumphal party and resigns his championship status in a very moving conversation. Another actor might have done it, of course, but not like this. Bond carries with him throughout the scene a numinous glow, the kind of thing you'd conjure up if you were playing a saint, a man who's just seen God on the road to Damascus, and the effect is breathtaking. In that single moment of space following their exchange, when Sullivan turns to leave and the crowd parts dumbly before him out of respect for this strange grace he's carrying, he does not see them at all, but pauses to put on his hat and walks out to face his future, a future empty now that his lifework is done; it's a heartbreaking thing. It's a perfect piece of film, and it's all Ward Bond. And, yes, I'd have given him a second Oscar, no question.

In any case, it has to end, my Bondfest, although I'm nowhere near the end of his CV. I've about exhausted Netflix, my local video store has liquidated all its old videos except for Oscar-winners (selfish, selfish bastards), and I can't keep buying movies off Ebay. TCM, it seems, shows some six to ten of his movies per month, so that'll keep me for a spell, but let's face it, it can't last. It has, however, been a gloriously fruitful animus projection. My God, the movies I've seen that I never would have otherwise. I've seen more Cagney, Crawford, Flynn, Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews and Walter Brennan in the past months than in my previous life together. I thought I disliked Lana Turner and Joan Crawford and Robert Taylor. Jury's still out on all three counts but I know now that I like them more than I'd thought. Actors I'd never heard of, people like George O'Brien, Barton MacLane and Nat Pendleton are becoming old friends, all because of Ward.

I'm going to miss him, but the timing is right: it's time for World Cup 2010 to kick off, so I can't watch any movies for the next month, anyway. I'll be back here in July, once the football madness has ended. Meanwhile, come visit A Pretty Move if you'd like to follow the action and hysteria alongside us.