DIRECTOR OF THE DAY JOHN FORD by Craig Hammill (SMC Founder)

DIRECTOR OF THE DAY JOHN FORD: #3 Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) First up, three movies by master John Ford. Ford's YOUNG MR LINCOLN is part of an unbelievable streak of films (all of which we highly recommend) that includes STAGECOACH, THE LONG VOYAGE HOME, and THE GRAPES OF WRATH. All made within 1 year of each other. What's so amazing about YOUNG MR LINCOLN is actually the incredible reserve and tact Ford displays. Lesser directors would have made every scene a kind of overly serious celebration of America's greatest president. Instead, Ford (as star Henry Fonda often relayed in stories) saw the movie as a story about a brilliant but awkward young lawyer trying his first case. The innate sense of cinematic poetry that suffuses Ford's best work is all here. Early on we get a heart breaking chapter about Lincoln's first love, Ann Rutledge, who died young. And then we see Lincoln visit her grave (the living's ongoing relationship with the dead was a perennial Ford theme). Ford also had an uncanny knack for finding a visual image to end a movie that could represent everything that movie was about in a way that transcended words. Here, we get Lincoln, after his first major case, walking up a hill towards a thunderstorm. It's just a kind of brilliance we don't often see these days. Ford HATED to ever admit or go on at length about his artistry. But it's undeniably there in the best of his work. A kind of hard scrabble American poetry that simultaneously celebrates and de-mythologizes everything about our history.

DIRECTOR OF THE DAY JOHN FORD #2: RIO GRANDE (1950). The final installment of Ford's Cavalry trilogy which includes FORT APACHE and SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON. Even though this is often the least talked about, it is this programmer's personal favorite of the three. Maybe because it so touchingly and emotionally focuses on the family dynamics of reconciliation. It centers around a Cavalry Officer stationed on the Rio Grande who must deal with the return of his estranged wife. And how they both must deal with their risk-taking son who may die because of his cavalier nature. The still here represents a key element of Ford's brilliance. He was always able to stage master shots where all the main characters were positioned in a kind of way that you DIDN'T NEED any coverage. All the information, the dynamics between the characters, the relationship of class, gender, rank, etc were all somehow communicated beautifully in a single staging. We would be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that the movie also deals with the Cavalry's conflict with Native Americans. Ford's Westerns also, problematically, occasionally made the Native American the main source of conflict. But Ford, more than any other filmmaker of his day, actually went out of his way to point out how poorly treated and disrespected Native Americans were. In FORT APACHE, the fault of aggression lies with the military NOT the Native Americans. And here, Ford is clearly more interested (as he was in STAGECOACH) with the dynamics of interpersonal relationships and redemption/forgiveness. RIO GRANDE is a touchingly intimate and romantic Western. If Spielberg were to ever have directed a Western, it almost certainly would have come out something like this.

DIRECTOR OF THE DAY JOHN FORD: #1 THE SEARCHERS (1956). The Searchers is one of those Ford movies that is equally passionately loved and (understandably) questioned because of its perceived racism against Native Americans. It is undeniably a brutal and difficult film filled with a kind of dark violent complexity uncommon to most Westerns of that period. A former Confederate soldier becomes obsessed with finding his Niece who has been stolen by Native Americans during a raid that killed everyone else. When he finds her, he's not sure if he will kill her or save her. What separates this movie from almost all other Westerns is its self-awareness that the main character (played by an almost psychotically unhinged John Wayne) is a misfit loner doomed to forever be on the outside of any kind of family and stability. When he shoots out the eyes of a dead Native American early in the movie he tells everyone he did it because by the Native American's own belief system, the Native American will now no longer be able to get to heaven. Ford doesn't forget this. At the end of the movie, Wayne himself somehow can't bring himself to come into a house (this stunning final shot). He wanders back out into the wind. The violence he exacted on others has come back to curse him to also walk in the winds without a home or acceptance. It's as if he himself can't allow himself to disturb the peace he hopes is now inside the home. THE SEARCHERS gets at something both mythic and troubling. It may even be saying that our heroes are much more ambivalent ambiguous characters than we'd like to admit. Anyone with blood on their hands is never quite able to wash it off.

Written by Craig Hammill, Secret Movie Club Founder