JOHN FORD CHAPTER 6: The Fork in the Road by Craig Hammill

As part of our The Ford Fundamentals: John Ford Director of 2022 series, founder.programmer Craig Hammill is writing an appreciation in 12 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue across the year.

Important Note: Movies will be talked about in depth so definitely spoilers!

CHAPTER 6: The Fork in the Road

As we come up to the halfway point of our John Ford series, we look at two late period Ford masterpieces, the 1961 summation masterwork The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and 1958’s the lesser seen but incredibly sensitive and powerful portrait of a politician who realizes his era is doneThe Last Hurrah. We also take a brutal look in the mirror about the first part of the year and the amazing masterpieces that lie ahead in the second half.

As we’ve done all year, we move backwards and forwards across John Ford’s filmography with many of his greatest pictures still left to be screened. All-timers like Stagecoach, How Green Was My Valley, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, My Darling Clementine, and The Searchers are still ahead of us (along with a host of great early, deep, and late period progressive cuts). At the same time, we have already screened all-timers like Fort Apache, The Informer, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, and Wagon Master.

So we come to a fork in the road.

It’s a strange place to be as a programmer. On one hand, I’m glad for what we’ve done and for the loyal audience I’ve gotten to know. Watching Ford, especially when we get to do it on 35mm, is really like watching the heart and soul of what can be best about the American movie system and someone who knew how to work within it to create art (a word of course Ford would NEVER use. And would probably slug me in the jaw for). On the other hand, I KNOW we can do better and want to make sure the second half of the program is exciting, revelatory, and inspiring beyond the true believers who already know and love Ford.

But really that challenge is easily addressed: it’s up to us to make it exciting. That’s the job of repertory theater. And so we just have to roll up our sleeves and get to it. Let us know how we did when we get to December 31, 2022.

For now, at this fork in the road, we look at the two late period Ford masterpieces we just screened: 1961’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin, Woody Strode and 1958’s The Last Hurrah starring Spencer Tracy and Jeffrey Hunter.

Ford, in many ways, set the template for late period work that many moviemakers would follow. As he headed into the late 1950’s and then 1960’s, Ford himself was in his 60’s. He had survived, even thrived, in three distinct eras of Hollywood (the Silent era, the Golden Age, and the transition to the modern era). His late period work includes such fascinating if flawed progressive movies as Sergeant Rutledge, Cheyenne Autumn, and Seven Women, (all of which we’re showing) which tackle racism, the treatment of Indigenous Americans, and feminism respectively. It shows Ford re-committing to the “all people are created equal” ethos that powered all of his work really. At the same time, he started to make movies about characters in old age still giving a hundred percent but watching as the world they knew dissolves away and a new modern one, one which they helped build but of which they won’t fully be apart, rises.

His 1961 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is often considered his summation movie. In a strange way, John Ford set a template that Akira Kurosawa (with 1985’s Ran), David Lynch (with 2017’s Twin Peaks The Return) and Martin Scorsese (with 2019’s The Irishman) would follow. He made a movie that strangely incorporated elements of his style from ALL his periods to make a kind of definitive statement on a genre (the Western) he had been instrumental in creating and defining.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a story within a story (already an interesting tip of the director’s hat to introspection, looking back, taking stock) as Senator Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) returns with his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) to Shinbone to attend the funeral of forgotten rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) who is buried in a simple pine box. The only other mourner is Doniphon’s ranch hand Pompey (Woody Strode).

The local press hounds Stoddard for an interview which he (without much of a fight) gives and he ends up telling the story of why Tom Doniphon is so important not only to the lives of those at the funeral but really to the progress of the west itself.

We flashback twenty or thirty years to when the western terriritories were almost without law, run roughshod by psychotic criminals like Liberty Valance (a wonderfully sadistic Lee Marvin) who were secretly financed by rich Cattle Barons who didn’t want working class people to vote for statehood and thus get more equal footing, rights, claims.

Valance is a fascinating movie in that Ford allows himself to get much more allegorical than he normally did in times past (save for occasional heavily symbolic pictures like The Informer or The Fugitive which dealt with Ford’s lifelong Catholic faith and guilt). Stoddard represents the law and local town drunk and newspaperman Dutton Peabody represents the free press. Liberty Valance beats, intimidates, and abuses both.

Wayne’s Doniphon represents a kind of ultimately progressive yet deeply practical and clear eyed American who understands that in order to create a more perfect union, in order to bring education, literacy, equal rights, progressive ideas to the people (all themes EXPLICITLY addressed in scenes in the movie), the violence, intimidation, outsized megaphone voice, and psychosis that Liberty Valance represents must be dealt with. But whereas Jimmy Stewart’s Stoddard believes Valance can somehow be brought to justice through the law, Wayne’s Doniphon understands it might have to be a street fight that ultimately takes Valance down.

It’s hard to do justice to the complexity of the themes Ford tackles in Valance. He told Wayne that he (Ford) was going to give the movie his all, just like had in Stagecoach. And you can see it. Stagecoach and Valance act as powerful bookends to Ford’s body of work. Whereas Stagecoach ends with two lovers fleeing society to live their lives (because that society would otherwise imprison and ostracize them), Valance ends with people sacrificing and committing to improve that society but at great personal cost. Stagecoach might be where many of us are in our late 20’s, early 30’s. Valance is where we end up in our 40’s and beyond if we somehow want to do our part for the world.

Interestingly, while Valance is to Ford as Psycho is to Hitchcock, that is it is both a bracingly modern picture and shot in a very stripped down style (compared to both directors’ most expressively cinematic works), Valance actually resonates with Fordian poetry that is so distilled as to be overpowering. Ford is still in full command of his power to use an image or a shot of something as simple as a cactus rose on a casket or a burned out room addition to a ranch that never got completed to mean oceans more than the object itself.

There’s even a shot that acts as a tragic mirror image/rhyme to a Stagecoach image. In Stagecoach, John Wayne lights a cigarette in a shadowy hallway as he watches Claire Trevor exit into the silvery moonlight in one of Ford’s most hopeful, emotional, poetic images. In that moment, we know Wayne and Trevor are in love. And there’s hope in that love. In Valance, a drunken Wayne stumbles into a shadowy corner of main street and lights a cigarette, alone, a solitary man, because he has just accepted that the woman he loves (Vera Miles who will go on to marry Stewart’s character) is better off with Stewart and can never be with him if she wants to really excel in life. In this image, Wayne has accepted his life will be WITHOUT love.

I have always loved Valance. Like so many others, I have also always considered it absolute TOP TIER John Ford. But now that I am approaching 45, it hits me much much harder than it did in my 20’s. I suppose I am finally catching up to what John Ford was getting at when he made a movie about effort, sacrifice, love, pain, loss, violence, things often not working out the way you expected them to, standing up in a sometimes psychotic world to fight a fight you believe in.

We all learn eventually that everyone’s got to take a beating in this world. But filmmakers like Ford, at their best, show why we have to take that beating. And they also show us why we have to fight back.

Of course, Valance ends with one of cinema’s most famous lines. When the current day newspapermen learn that it was actually Tom Doniphon who shot Liberty Valance and not Stoddard, they refuse to print the story. “When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.” It’s a great line of course. But I sometimes wonder if the small beautiful miracle John Ford has pulled off gets overlooked. Yes, Ford is putting out how myths, legends, heroes are necessary for a country’s sense of itself. He may even be saying we MUST preserve the myths even though we know they are myths. BUT he has also just shown us EXACTLY what did happen. He also PRINTED the facts. And he showed that the real heroes of society are often forgotten, unheralded, uncelebrated. And their sacrifice is what often preserves and grows a country, a nation. It is a deeply powerful and important message. Because maybe Ford is saying that all of us, regardless of reward or recognition, must fight the good fight. It’s the only way the Liberty Valances of this world get defeated.

Although I am only briefly going to touch on Ford’s 1958’s The Last Hurrah starring a supremely wonderful Spencer Tracy, I do encourage everyone to see it if you want to see a great John Ford picture. The Last Hurrah is to Ford as The Bad Sleep Well is to Kurosawa. A movie made about the modern moment (1958 for Ford, 1961 for Kurosawa) and dealing with a very modern issue (money and television’s affect on politics for Ford, money, corruption, and corporate culture for Kurosawa).

The Last Hurrah follows Boston mayor Frank Skeffington (based clearly on real life colorful Massachusetts politician James Curley) during his last mayoral campaign. We see how Skeffington (played with a kind of mischievous Irish glimmer by Tracy) uses underhanded political tactics and good old fashioned glad handing, machine politics to run a city, get his way (often in service of actually important issues like housing the poor) but ultimately is no match for a fresh young face backed by lots of political contributions from the wealthy and racist gentry of the city who use television.

The Last Hurrah also has a kind of melancholy about it that Valance has. And Frank Skeffington may be to mayors what Tom Doniphon is to western citizens: people who ultimately believe in progressive policies but also believe that sometimes downright brutal tactics must be employed to achieve them. Hurrah is surprisingly hilarious (including a great scene where the young candidate’s family is introduced via television and it’s clear the entire thing is fake and staged as none of them speak or act naturally, visions of the reality we all now live).

But what makes Hurrah ultimately a classic Ford film is Ford’s ability to show he can tell and film a story and bring understanding, meaning, poetry, layers to it without once sacrificing pace. In fact, for a late period John Ford picture, Hurrah moves with a jaw dropping spring in its step. If you’ll allow me the strange comparison (as I’m full of analogies in this blog), Hurrah is to Ford what Wolf of Wall Street is to Scorsese. An older director showing he can still school the young Turks in how you make a picture.

All that being said, Hurrah builds to a final act of defeat, era changing, death, and reflection. All the hustle and bustle of the first two acts suddenly shift into a very intentional, emotional, personal, intimate final act with Skeffington realizing not only has he lost but he also is at the end of his life. Unlike Wolf, Hurrah is ultimately about the acceptance that all of his have our moment and then that moment passes and a new moment comes on the scene. We are all in a river of existence together but new people jump in and we soon jump out. But the river itself goes on and on.

I’ve had numerous conversations with audience and team members who say they admire Ford though they don’t completely feel they’re on his wavelength. And I’ve often heard that Ford films move at a different pace and tell stories in a way that isn’t quite for them.

And I get and respect that. Truly. Ford was born in 1894 and in many ways represents the lifespan of cinema itself. When Ford died in 1973, filmmakers like Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, now themselves the grand lions of cinema, were in their 20’s and just starting out, about to bring a whole revolution to American cinema. Three to four whole lifetimes of cinema have happened since Ford’s death.

So I see our job, the job of work as Ford would say, for the second half of this series, to do our best to make our case why new, exciting, powerful, innovative cinema can come out of the fertile ground of watching John Ford’s filmmography. See if we do it. Hold us to account. But we want to do right by the old man. The Old Man inspired countless great moviemakers. We hope we do our job so he inspires you.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.