ward bond filmfest evening five: two completely insane john ford films

The more Ford I watch, the more I get it that he's one strange cat. That clunky, unaccountably pedestrian sense of humor, particularly as it involves women, is just one element of it. (And it's not just Jane Darwell who gets repeatedly humbled. Maureen O'Hara must have been a really swell sport to put up with Coach so long. See for example the scene in the Long Gray Line where she finally offers herself up to Tyrone Power for a kiss. Ford gives her such awkward and unfunny comic business that it's no wonder she's come down to us as a second-rater. Nobody could pull that stuff off gracefully, not even a Glenda Jackson or Cate Blanchett.)

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.

things I've been watching: may 2010

An Education: (2009. dir: Lone Scherfig) As per the hype, Carey Mulligan is indeed both skilled and adorable. The cast at large is highly satisfying. The appeal is not so much in the story, which is an old and simple one (young girl nearly throws away her future when swept away by an affable roue), but in the easy, charming way it's put together. Scherfig and his team manage to avoid those sucking fens of sentiment and cliche, realizing a place and time (suburban London in the early '60s) truly and without ostentation.

I was going to say that how you react to this movie depends on how you feel about Peter Sarsgaard, the rotter in question, and to a large extent I stick to that. If you don't like him, you won't like the movie. He's got the most difficult role because we never really get inside his head; we see him from the outside, through the eyes of others. On the other hand, I've always liked Sarsgaard; I'll go out of my way to see a movie if he's in it; and I think he's missed something crucial in this role. Having said that triggers a flag in my head and I go back to the last time I mentioned him in a post (reviewing In the Electric Mist) and by gum if I didn't say pretty close to the same thing about his performance in that. My reluctant conclusion is that he's one of those lazy actors who ignores the problem aspects of a character, glosses past them trusting charm and enigmatic smiles to carry him through instead of tackling and solving them, as, say, Glenda Jackson or Daniel Day-Lewis might do. It's not the worst thing that can be said about an actor. He's in good company. Henry Fonda comes to mind in that respect. More than once I've seen Fonda go kind of blank and stoical when a sticky corner of a character or a problem line presents itself (see, for instance, There Was a Crooked Man). And who doesn't still love Fonda? In any case, charming as he is, Sarsgaard is the potentially weak link in the cast. And, by God, I still like him.

Alfred Molina gets much of the buzz for his turn as The Father, and he is, as always, very good, but it's Rosamund Pike who turned my head as the decidedly unclever beauty dating the cad's business partner and best friend. Most actresses would play her lines for the laughs for which I think they were written, but she avoids that easy way. Every thick thing she says is completely frank, often tinged with that panic experienced by those who are highly intuitive about people but completely without intellectual prowess and who discomfitingly find themselves surrounded by clever people.




the China Syndrome: (1979. dir: James Bridges) Nuclear power scared the crap out of me when I was a kid. Driving past Hanford on the way home from Seattle used to give me a badassed case of the creeps. This is the place where the plutonium was manufactured for the bomb we threw at Nagasaki. The tower is fat and squat and has an evil dome like something Saruman would have built.

I remember seeing this movie at the drive-in. It's got an anti-nuclear message and Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas and it might have been self-righteous and awful except that it was made right at that cusp, just before the hideousness of the eighties was brought to bear on filmmaking, while there was still a use of quiet and verisimilitude. The instigating scene, in which there is a panic at the nuclear plant caused by a faulty gauge and secretly filmed by a team of news reporters there to do a fluff piece, is a wonderful thing. The combination of Jack Lemmon and Wilfrid Brimley is lovely. The suspense is allowed to build unforced by music or fancy camera nonsense, just through a decent script and some damn fine acting. There is some oversimplification, I assume for the sake of the drama, in which the nuclear muckymucks wear blacker than is perhaps believable hats, killing without conscience; or maybe I'm a little Pollyanna, I don't know. Anyway, good vs evil are suspiciously pat here, which brings us back to the first law of learning your history from Hollywood, which is: don't do it.

The best part is the directing: simple, straightforward, the telling of a story. I miss the seventies. I miss silence over rolling credits. I miss little things like Jane Fonda carrying a tortoise inside when she walks into her house, a tortoise that she never talks to or about, that never gets explained or addressed; you just know it's part of her life and that suggests that there are many parts of her life you know nothing about which suggests that her life stretches beyond the boundaries of the screen in all directions, which is never a bad thing in filmmaking, and doesn't happen enough anymore in these literal times.




Junior Bonner: (1972. dir: Sam Peckinpah) A peculiarly sweet and endearing ode to rodeo -- peculiarly sweet for Peckinpah, especially. Steve McQueen and Robert Preston make an easy and likable father-son team. I've never been a Preston fan -- he's a little too musical-theatre for me,-- but in this role as a hard-drinking, hard-riding, jovial storyteller of a man who always pleases his audience, it works. The really extraordinary part comes from Ida Lupino, though. Never in all my years have I seen a female character in any Peckinpah film given the opportunity for depth and sympathy that Lupino's is here, and she doesn't waste it. Plus (bonus!) there's Ben Johnson, always a good thing.




The Sun Also Rises: (1957. dir: Henry King) Picaresque Lost Generation ramble from bar to bar, drink to drink, diversion to diversion. No one ever writes or works at all, except bartenders and bullfighters. It reads better than it plays because the writer had a certain talent. Twenty years later or made in Europe, it'd've been edited more dynamically; as it stands, there's a dull, repeating sequence in which they walk into a bar, remove their wraps, order their drinks, over and over. Instead of pulling in and making it personal, the filmmakers pulled out and made it epic, which is sometimes pretty but mostly a bore. Tyrone Power is alright and Ava Gardner is gorgeous. The bullfighter is played by the very young Robert Evans, which is kind of a kick, but the only real attraction is Errol Flynn as an aging, drunken roue watching himself fade into impotency and unimportance but still able to laugh at himself. It's fascinating and true and unutterably sad, and I'd have given him an Oscar for it.

gearhead existentialism

Two-Lane Blacktop: (1971. dir: Monte Hellman) Part of that extraordinary canon of existential masterpieces (including Vanishing Point, the Parallax View, the Passenger, High Plains Drifter, and Hellman's own the Shooting, among others) appearing in about a ten-year period rounding out the sixties and starting up the seventies, Two-Lane Blacktop is poetry, and that's no exaggeration. "That Plymouth had a hemi with a torque flight," the Driver says to explain why he was able to pull in front during a race once he hit fourth gear. It's all like that, like listening to poetry in another language, one you know just well enough to catch a few words, an image or two. James Taylor is The Driver, Dennis Wilson The Mechanic. The Mechanic performs magical rituals on the car: at one point he synchronizes the ignition timing using a sort of strobe-wand or timing light. He's readjusting the distributor, apparently, so the spark plugs fire at just the right instant. I watch him do it, then my boyfriend says, "pause it," and explains to me what I'd just seen, and it's STILL Greek to me, or, rather, magical, in the sense that it seemed both an important and a preternatural action.

Casting rock stars in your movie was not unusual by the turn of the seventies, but casting in lead roles so far against type was. They're used to being looked at, lusted after and photographed, rock stars, but they don't have actorly habits that give them a falseness before the camera. There's something about the awkwardness of using non-actors that emphasizes the existential angst of the piece. On the other hand, they don't have actorly chops to get them through the rough spots, so it's a general wash, except that Warren Oates is there to pick up the pace and hit the right marks. Nobody in the world played the creepy guy with more endearing vulnerability than Warren Oates did, and this one is some kind of acme, some kind of Everest he's topped.



Vanishing Point: (1971. dir: Richard C. Sarafian)

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"The rebel himself wants to be 'all' ... or 'nothing'; in other words, to be completely destroyed by the force that dominates him. As a last resort, he is willing to accept the final defeat, which is death, rather than be deprived of the personal sacrament that he would call, for example, freedom." Camus, the Rebel
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The vanishing point is that place on the horizon where all roads converge into the sky. It's where everything disappears from view, where being turns into nothingness. You reach it, you dissipate into the universe.

Vanishing Point is the story of Kowalski (just Kowalski; no first name, following halfway in the tradition of the Man With No Name, played to perfection by Barry Newman): ex-soldier, ex-racer, ex-cop, and speedfreak, in more than one sense of the word. He works delivering souped-up muscle-cars back and forth across the country. His current task: to drive a white 1970 Dodge Challenger halfway across the country over a weekend. He insists on the assignment (his employer begs him to take some time, get some sleep first), then insists he will complete it in less than half the alotted time. Although from the outside the decision seems random and unmotivated, Kowalski makes it clear that, internally, he has no choice. "I gotta be in Frisco three o'clock tomorrow afternoon," he tells his dealer, who says he must be joking, to which Kowalski replies, "I wish to God I was." We never get a clearer reason, and that's one indication of the greatness of this film.

Super Soul (played with grace and sphinxlike intelligence by Cleavon Little) is the DJ of a tiny but ultrahip radio station in an armpit backwater burg somewhere in Nevada. He is handsome, dark-skinned, smooth-voiced, and, in the ancient tradition of prophets the world over, blind. Tapping illicitly onto police wavelengths, he hears about the ongoing interstate pursuit of the Challenger and becomes obsessed with it, sensing both a deeper importance in Kowalski's gesture of rebellion and perhaps an intertwining of their own personal destinies as well. Throughout the film, he speaks to Kowalski across the airwaves and somehow hears his responses.

Everyone knows this film, whether they know it or not. (Tarantino's Death Proof is a sort of ode to it, or the second half is.) Believe it or not, it was remade in 1997 with our beloved Viggo in the lead, and with all that makes it great and subtle stripped clean away. In this one, Kowalski's enigmatic gesture of defiance becomes a race across country to join his wife in a life-threatening childbirth: that catch-all, feel-good, old family-values reason. Scapegoated by a wicked FBI agent out to make a name for himself, "Jimmy" Kowalski becomes a hero for the Ted Nugent/Ruby Ridge crowd when his progress is reported by an anti-government, don't-tread-on-me, taxation-is-thievery DJ in a baseball cap played by the extraordinarily whitebread Jason Priestley. Believe me, not even Viggo or a cameo by John Doe can make this one interesting.

The original, though, is a true American classic. Newman's smile just before he makes that final decision is one of the real Mona Lisa moments in film-making history: why does he smile? what is he thinking? Somewhere on the cutting-room floor there lies a telling scene: Kowalski has picked up a beautiful hitch-hiker (Charlotte Rampling). She gets him high (the only time in the film he accepts any drug other than speed), tells him she's been waiting for him forever then disappears into the night. In commentary and interviews with actor and director, it seems accepted that this encounter was to be a metaphor for approaching death. Does that clarify the smile? What are we to make of the fact that it was excised, then?

In a truly-lived existentialism, one creates one's own rules, one's own code, seeking honour and freedom from within, completely independent of the predominant (and often crippling) paradigm. In America, we tend reflexively to picture freedom as a long, solitary drive in a fast car along a desert highway. These two movies can be watched as a visual essay about the pursuit of existential freedom in that particular moment when the sixties had just become the seventies, hippie optimism was hardening into a more cynical stoicism, and the rebel was really and truly without a cause, without allies, without hope, more so than ever before in cinematic history. Pending films like The Parallax View and Chinatown, both from 1974, would take these themes and colours and darken them further, almost into hellishness.

ward bond film festival: evening four

The Maltese Falcon: (1941. dir: John Huston) The thing about this film --other than the extraordinary fact that this masterpiece of nastiness marks Huston's debut in the director's chair-- is the claustrophobia of it. Much of it plays out in crowded little rooms: Spade's seedy office, Gutman's rich, overstuffed living room where Spade gets slipped the old mickey, and then everyone squeezes for the night into Spade's coldwater flat to await the delivery of the rara avis and to strip metaphorical pieces of flesh off one another. Huston's camera angles add greatly to the air of suffocation and vileness. Rarely do we look straight across at someone: it's up or down, giving a sinister feel of distortion, and groups of threes tend to be cramped together and hunched over, like caged beasts.

As a kid I disliked the film because of Mary Astor, who seemed to me about as fatale as the overworked waitress down at the corner bakery. She gets announced in the first breath of the film as "a knockout", but instead this pinched, nearsighted woman with hair simultaneously mousy and insane walks in and proceeds to hyperventilate and overemote for two hours. In retrospect, I can see that the character herself never once relaxes, never stops acting; that we never do see a moment that we're certain is the real girl beneath the masks. I'm willing to concede that it may be quite a feat, and I may owe Astor an apology; I'll get back to you when I'm certain.

Bond is Detective Tom Polhaus, the benevolent half of the Good Cop/Bad Cop plaguing Spade, and he gets photographed mostly from the side or back so we watch Bogart instead, but I'm fond of this character. I love the low-key delivery, the solidity of this man amid the jackal-pack of crooks and half-crooks, a decent man in a place where no one ever says exactly what they mean unless they know it will hurt someone. I love the optimism of him, as when he says of the dead Archer, "It's tough him gettin' it like that, ain't it? Miles had his faults like any of the rest of us, but I guess he must have had some good points, too, huh?" To which Spade can only grimace, hesitate, and reply, "I guess so," in a tone that really says, "No, and I knew him as well as anyone did."



Hitler -- Dead or Alive: (1943. dir: Nick Grinde) Whoa! Buckle up for a wacky, hamfisted little war-time film about gangsters fresh from Alcatraz who hijack a plane into Germany to assassinate the little guy with the moustache for a million dollar reward. A lot less fun than Inglourious Basterds while every bit as bughouse-unbelievable in its plot-turns, it does boast a more satisfying means of offing the Fuehrer, but very little else. Bond is the head gangster and gives a strangely over-the-top performance, like he's imitating a Cagney mobster, missing what's good about it and just skimming the cheese off the top. He's got a few satisfying scenes, like teaching the newbie prison etiquette or (my favorite) the time the Countess turns on the ice when she hears he's just doing it for money and he comes back with, "Is it a crime for a guy to make a couple of quarters?"



Dakota: (1945. dir: Joseph Kane) Walter Brennan has one funny moment in this decidedly unfunny comedy/action oater. He's trying to deny that two people have been murdered: "Maybe it's one of them suicide pacts where one person says to the other, 'Hold on a minute while I blow your head off.'" Doesn't really look funny on the page, but he makes it so, and that's about it for the humour. John Wayne and Vera Ralston are nobody's George and Gracie, and in fact the script plods every time Ralston walks onscreen. It's hard to say who's more annoying: Vera herself or her character, a ditzy blond who brings trouble with every decision she makes. I suppose she was supposed to be in the tradition of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, but the two names shouldn't be spoken in the same sentence. Ward Bond is entirely in his element as a smooth land-grabber out to cheat everyone in Fargo, but we never get to see him fight the Duke, always a disappointment for me.



Blowing Wild: (1953. dir: Hugo Fregonese) Love triangle amongst oilmen in Central America. Hard to miss when your triangle consists of Stanwyck, Cooper and Quinn, but this one comes pretty close. The directing feels shabby and loose, and there's no palpable chemistry between the supposedly mutually-obsessed Stanwyck and Cooper. The heat comes from Anthony Quinn on the odd-man-out point of the triangle; he throws himself full-force into the passion as a hot-blooded man in love with his wife and unable to punish his best friend or to live with the truth of it. Stanwyck is a goddess and can play this role hogtied and blindfolded, and she does, she plays it into the ground, but I'm tired of seeing her stuck in this same dead-end role of the woman who's too strong to live. Bond is Cooper's sidekick again, this time kind of a thick and hangdog one, who disappears into the hospital after a half hour and so gives the Cooper character his excuse to stick around town long after he says he wants to leave.

ward bond film festival: evening three

Unconquered: (1947. dir: Cecil B. DeMille) Flat and uninspired frontier epic by that master of the genre who seems to have been tired in this particular year. We all walk into an epic with certain expectations of thrilling grandeur, and in return we are willing to sacrifice certain beloved qualities: subtlety of acting, for instance, and any semblance of historical realism. And those things ARE sacrificed in this, but where's the pay-off? Where's the burning of Atlanta? or the fire hailing against the marble at Yul Brynner's sandaled feet? the eerie green effluvia reaching down to choke the first-born of Egypt? Anne Baxter with her over-chewed but somehow adorable "Moses, Moses"? where's the chariot race, or at least the lepers? Nowhere to be found.

Even the plunge over the great waterfall, which I suspect was meant to be the grand centerpiece of the film, feels rote and decidedly unthrilling, and who among audience-members has ever for a moment bought that particular escape from death? Groans of disbelief all around. The one set-piece that does come off well is when the Indians attack the fort at night with flaming arrows -- always a crowd-pleaser, -- but even that doesn't match up to its counterpart in Drums Along the Mohawk, when the settlers are furiously trying to stop the live immolation of a friend and Ward Bond gets a flaming arrow right in the shoulder. It's a brilliantly vibrant shot, and how in hell did they do it? without actually shooting Ward Bond in the shoulder with a flaming arrow, I mean?

In place of grandeur DeMille's given us lots of colour, and, as anyone who's been reading lately knows, I'm big on bold colour use right now, but this is random. Bright colors randomly placed do not provide the aesthetic pleasure of the well-used palette, so I offer him no cigar for that. The script is incredible both in its plot-turns and in the choices its human characters make. Of course it's politically incorrect as far as the Indians go, that's expected from the time; even worse is the dull use to which they are put. All the Indians are two-dimensional, thick and sanguinary, and wholly fixated on the white man.

Not that the white men are any further fleshed out. Ward Bond is relegated to a maiden-auntish role, fussing over Gary Cooper and doing little else. Paulette Goddard is utterly dreadful and talks though her nose. Is she always this bad? Is it really possible this woman was considered for Scarlett O'Hara? I have to watch the Women; perhaps she's skilled in dark, snarky comedy, but any talent she might have got lost under the sofa cushions at home or something while she was shooting this.

And in what era of history were slaves ever this well treated? When in the history of the world did a guy ever buy a beautiful woman off an auction block, slavering with lust, then say, "I will not force you. I will wait until you come to me of your own free will." PLEASE! There's historically incorrect, and then there's crazy Maybe-On-Some-Distant-Mary-Poppins-Planet la-la-la Pollyannaism.



Park Avenue Logger: (1937. dir: David Howard) Unpretentious, low-budget and badly-preserved little comedy about a rich man sent by his father to learn toughness by helping to deforest Oregon. It's not funny, but it's got a certain charm, and feels ten years older than it really is. The blocking is stage-bound, the sound is bad, and there's a lot of heartbreaking stock footage of really huge trees being ruthlessly downed. Ward Bond is young and handsome and playing the heavy, but one with a conscience. George O'Brien, a strong-man who started in stunts and got his first break when John Ford cast him in the Iron Horse, is easy in front of the camera, the very antithesis of vain.



The Night Key: (1937. dir: Lloyd Corrigan) Unassuming and surprisingly entertaining Boris Karloff piece about an electrical genius whose lifework is stolen by big business, so he teams up with a small-time crook to get his own back. Complications ensue when more serious mobsters get involved; there's a beautiful daughter to be kidnapped, and a handsome security guard to fall in love with her. Karloff may have the most interesting face and the most photogenic eyes in the business, and just contrasting this mild-mannered, nearsighted boffin with the Indian war chief he played in Unconquered is clear testament to his considerable adeptness and flexibility. Bond plays a version of the mobster heavy he came to know so well during his career, but it may be the only time he ends up electrocuted in an easy chair while reading a magazine.

the ward bond film festival continues

the Long Voyage Home: (1940. dir: John Ford) My God, what Gregg Toland and John Ford can do together. The space that Ford gives his actors to move around in, he gives that to Toland as well; he doesn't clutter the images up with words without a decent reason. Let's be clear: this is a b&w seagoing adventure pulled together from several short plays by Eugene O'Neill, and I have a short temper where O'Neill is concerned. I like him, and I'd watch all six hours of Mourning Becomes Electra if given the chance (and it looks like I never will be), but I have no patience for any of his myriad plays about people whose only joys come in drunkenness and their only problems from an inability to walk out of a bar. It's probably one of those things like the Grateful Dead or smoking cigarettes: either you get it or you don't. Personally, I never got the Grateful Dead, and listening to O'Neill's characters mewl and puke about how they've had to give up everything for the bottle makes me drum my fingers and yawn and look at my watch.

Luckily, O'Neill is not why you watch this. Officially, it's a John Wayne film, the Ford/Wayne follow-up to Stagecoach, but really it's an ensemble piece spearheaded by Thomas Mitchell's customary cute-but-clever Drunken Irishman. Wayne has never been more gorgeous or more sensuously photographed, but it's a pretty-boy role, it's got no heft to it, and he's hobbled by a fairly awful Swedish accent. But none of that is why you watch it, either.

The movie starts with a ship in harbor. Everything is still, stagnant, except on the island shore, where native women writhe in heat while their mysterious native drums beat. There's a beautiful shot of a sailor silhouetted atop the massive dark hulk of ship lighting a cigarette, then we go in close to see it's Ward Bond, blowing smoke rings and gazing to shore. Duke joins him for a moment, then stretches in good-humored frustration and goes away to lie across a bulkhead and look at the stars. It's a beautiful, strange opening, setting up shipboard existence as a sort of anti-life, a suspended animation into which these sailors keep placing themselves because they haven't got the stones to rejoin the world, spoken of warily as "the Land". When on The Land, although they talk wildly of escaping the harsh and fruitless imprisonment at sea, they go immediately into a bar until they've drunk up their money, then use that as an excuse to escape back to sea.

But you don't watch this movie for O'Neill's insights into life or suffering or even drunkenness. You watch it for the artistry of its making. Look at that gorgeous framing, shot by shot. Fan as I am of a strong narrative flow, I have to admire that Ford seems to make his pictures first and foremost to give us a taste of living Someplace Other: in a Northeastern farming community during the Revolution in Drums Along the Mohawk, or in the heat and dirt of the Depression in Grapes of Wrath, or, in this, on a dark fortress of a steamer caught all around by ocean. Even in those films of his which employ the strongest narrative line, it's never the greatest thing. The greatest thing is his love of these worlds of his own creation, and his patience in showing us their beauties and darknesses.



On Dangerous Ground: (1952. dir: Nicholas Ray) I'm gazing across the shifting ground of time to another era entirely, which tends to obscure one's clarity of vision, but it seems to me this must have felt truly edgy and dangerous when it came out. Like most Ray movies, it's got a cheese factor, and hip teen patois rarely ages well, but it's half in love with its own darkness, and by the standards of its day it may have been the fastest paced noir yet.

The first half follows three cops on their beat around one of the ugliest noir-cities you've ever seen, and Robert Ryan, with moments of true Lawrence-Tierney kind of bad-assed mofo, is so attracted and repulsed by the streets he walks that he's going over to the dark side, slowly petrifying into a being other than human, something made out of rock or maybe cruelty. About halfway through he gets sent north into a rural area to help solve the murder of a young girl, and ends up accompanying the shotgun-wielding, vengeance-fixated father (played by Bond) on a search for the killer. Ida Lupino is the killer's blind sister who winds up melting the ice that's been mucking up the workings of Ryan's heart, but the two of them play hard enough against mawkishness that even I was not opposed to the sentiment of it. I think it's the best performance I've seen from Ryan.



Canyon Passage: (1946. dir: Jacques Tourneur) My love for this movie is inordinate; it licks right up over the edges of reason. First off, it gets some billing as a musical, which I hasten to assure you it is not. Hoagy Carmichael sings three songs is all, and it's got none of that Bustin'-into-Song-as-Soliloquy nonsense; he's just a strange character who walks around town with a mandolin and likes to sing, and folks put up with him. Possibly I love it in part because it was set and filmed in my neck of the woods (Jacksonville, officially, and you can see weird old Mt Thielsen crooked in the background of the cabin-raising scene, and when the Indians are on the war-path, the war-path goes right along the rim of Crater Lake). It opens in Portland, back when it was a dirt-laned port-town. "1000 people and raining," the Dana Andrews character describes it. If you step off the ramp in the street, you fall waist-high into mud.

Mostly, though, my love is roused by Jacques Tourneur. My God, the colors in this thing! Being Tourneur, he uses shadows like a master of the art, but I never knew he was a master of technicolor as well. (It reminds me some of that other masterpiece of colour, Drums Along the Mohawk, in which Ford takes the breath clean out of your lungs with the boldness of his palette. His indoor nocturnal scenes are done up in what I can only describe as Dario Argento reds and blues, emphasized by deep pockets of shadow.) The world he creates is fascinating down to smallest details.

The story is compelling without being extraordinary, but the dialogue stands a rung or two above your average oater, with some psychological depth. It's got the parallel extremes of sweetness and darkness, that crucial factor which separates the stallions from the eunuchs in the Western genre; it's got a solid cast, with Ward Bond giving a note-perfect performance as the town bully, haplessly named Honey Bragg. There's a fight scene in the middle, when Bragg calls Dana Andrews' Logan Stuart out, that is one of the best filmed I've ever seen. Bragg is already waiting at the high-ceilinged bar when the whole town converges, bringing Stuart like a lamb to slaughter ("He had an arm like a chunk of oak," he'd said earlier of Bragg), and you see shadows of their heads fall against the far wall until all the sunlight is blocked out. Once the fighting starts, it's Bond's Bragg who is the focus of both lighting and camera. Lit and shot at extreme close range to emphasize the blood and sweat, his fall is like that of a bull in the ring. It's a vicious fight, relentless, nothing pretty about it. "Yellow dogs," he barks at the cheering townsfolk as he stumbles away, beaten and humiliated, brought to the nadir from which he will single-handedly incite the local Indians to destroy the bulk of the white populace.

There is darkness shot all through this bright, sweet film, like poisoned veins: murders and nihilism and Mammon-worship. Reminiscent of Tourneur's films with Val Lewton, there's a beautiful raven-haired proto-Goth woman. The Brian Donlevy character, a compulsive gambler, is obsessed with her, and she is married to a man in black who owns an ongoing card game and a bad cough and who says he calls friend "...any man who believes like I do that the human race is a horrible mistake." Whenever someone is about to commit a murder, Tourneur shows us their eyes as they decide to do it, then fades out on their mid-sections as they walk toward the camera to commit the act, a remarkably effective technique. Horses get shot down in cold blood, folks get scalped; miners are constantly being reported murdered throughout, we assume for their gold, as is the one we see killed, although it's always the Indians who garner the blame; an Indian girl gets raped (we assume, from the look in Bragg's eye) then murdered. And throughout, there's the nagging sense that just behind the happy community feeling (one new bride gushes at her cabin-raising about how lovely it is that all these people came out to help, and people set her straight: they're doing it because they want new neighbors, and more potential guns against the Indians) there's a rabid crowd ready to turn and string you up, as evidenced by the ongoing incitements from the townsfolk for bloody fights on which they can lay wagers, and on their quickness to jail and plan a lynching for the banker who is accused of killing a miner.

Still, in the end, with the town lying in ashes, farms burned and people slain, there's still a feeling of regeneration in the air. It's the culmination of a cycle, not of the world. Tourneur has balanced the darkness and the light with his usual ease, and somehow pulls off an entirely believable redemptive ending.

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.