John Ford Chapters 7 & 8: Silent Ford and 1930's Assignments 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 7: Silent John Ford
We appreciate three John Ford silent movies of the 1920’s-The Iron Horse, Three Bad Men, and Upstream which point to the poetic mastery Ford will achieve in the late 1930’s and beyond. We also look with jealousy on an era where a movie director could hone their craft across 80+ movies before really grabbing the spotlight.
It’s instructive (and somewhat sobering) to realize that John Ford was already considered a veteran director of 12+ years before the sound era arrived. And while his 1924 epic of the construction of the transcontinental railroad The Iron Horse was a huge blockbuster that catapulted Ford to top of the director pack, he still was 11 years away from really reaching the spotlight with his 1935 Academy Award winning The Informer. In other words, Ford was able to hone his craft in the silent era and another near decade of “apprenticeship” with assignment pictures before he was really picking his own material. These near 20 years of preparation meant Ford would be a true master of cinematic technique when he was finally in a position to more carefully choose and craft material personal to him. He understood the business, had deep roots in the industry, and could weather the tempests that wipe out most everyone else.
What’s amazing to see in a movie like The Iron Horse is how many John Ford tropes already appear in near mature form this early in his career. The Iron Horse shows how immigrants (including the Irish, the Chinese, and the African-Americans) built the railroads while nefarious businessmen tried to collect all the riches. Here already we see hilarious scenes of nascent democracy like a bartender who doubles as a judge that we’ll see refined twenty four years later in 1948’s Three Godfathers. We also see Ford’s keen desire to show how immigrants, often derided by Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, form the true work force and backbone of the country.
Ford, the second generation son of Irish immigrants, had an acute understanding of the iniquities of landed gentry prejudice. It would make him empathetic to Native Americans (Cheyenne Autumn), African Americans (Sergeant Rutledge), and women (7 Women). And though John Ford was a complicated man of competing values, the rebel and the institutionalist always fighting inside him, he ultimately always seemed to land on the side of the oppressed, the downtrodden, the working class, the immigrant, the victim of societal prejudice who, in soldiering on despite the headwinds, truly represented the American spirit.
What is missing in The Iron Horse or even Ford’s first true masterpiece, Three Bad Men (more on that in a moment), is the German expressionist influence of F.W. Murnau that permeates Ford’s work from the late 1920’s to the end of his career. After Ford saw dailies of Murnau’s Sunrise in the late 1920’s, he was a changed man excited by the possibilities of deep focus, atmospheric production design, light and shadow. One can see the first glimmerings of this critical component of the fully developed Ford “style” in his 1927 programmer Upstream. Upstream was thought lost for decades until a pristine print was discovered in the New Zealand National Archive in 2009 and restored. This comedy-drama is about a boarding house of vaudeville performers who discover how fickle success is when one of their own becomes an international celebrity playing Hamlet and immediately forgets about all his friends who helped him achieve that success. Upstream may seem an odd duck in the Ford canon given its focus on stage performers but it fits right in in its focus on families formed by community and shared labor and vision. It’s also interesting to see Ford lean in a more self-aware way towards composed shots, psychological lighting, large scale suggestive production design (a billboard outside a window directly comments on the romance occurring within). The German Expressionistic focus on finding visual ways of making the internal, external cinematically would be the light bulb that would allow John Ford to create cinematic masterpieces regardless of genre or source. His toolbox was so deep and rich, he could access it to make any story personal and cinematic.
Of the three Ford silent movies we screened this year, John Ford’s 1926 Three Bad Men feels like the first instance where Ford’s craft, sensitivity, artistry, and sensibility find the sweet spot of cinematic expression. A very emotionally moving story about three outlaws who take it upon themselves to help a struggling young couple in the dangerous wild west, Three Bad Men finds Ford finding his own inner compass of what moves him as a storyteller. He focuses on the humor and heart of these “three bad men” and ultimately their sacrifice which benefits the American community and society as a whole. This theme arises time and again in Ford movies, from Young Mr. Lincoln (for what is Lincoln in the end but an American misfit who sacrificed for the whole of the country) to Dr. Bull, Stagecoach, Three Godfathers, Wagon Master, andThe Searchers. The spiritual overtones of the final shot in Three Bad Men also point to Ford’s commitment to expressing his faith through his cinema without ever being sanctimonious, cynical, or didactic (like say Cecil B. DeMille). Because Ford was a true believer who nevertheless seemed to understand the obnoxiousness of preaching, the passages in his movies about God and spirituality always feel simple and sincere. You can take them or leave them but it’ s hard to doubt their deeply felt authenticity.
All three of these movies show Ford, an already talented and able craftsperson, exploring the potential of hiss skill through constant variation and work. In the 21st century, a film director is lucky to make a feature movie every two to three years. Ford routinely made two to three pictures a year for most of his career. And in the silent era, he was making even more when you include his one reelers. Such an apprenticeship allows a truly gifted genius the added benefit of the earned confidence of trial and error practice and execution. Ford’s experience would help him produce transcendent masterpieces when the time came. And he would have the hard earned confidence of the seasoned professional. All the better to hide the sensitive heart of the poet.
CHAPTER 8: Ford Assignments of the 1930’s
John Ford was an intellect smart enough to execute his assignment movies with a gruff professionalism that still allowed for discovered poetry. In his movies from the 1930’s like Dr. Bull, Judge Priest, and Wee Willie Winkie, we see a top notch director still willing to learn things from his actors and material.
In the 1930’s, Ford made arguably three or four top tier masterpieces-The Lost Patrol, The Informer, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Stagecoach. But some of his often overlooked assignment pictures show a director willing to take material and actors not of his choosing and learn from the unexpected challenges posed by such projects.
While Ford was an artist and, on some level, must have known he was one, he was NOT a precious artist. The expectations of the “auteur” director has been the bane of the past few generations of moviemaker. One often hears directors of the 1970’s and beyond speak disparagingly of “assignment” pictures or the pictures they did for money or out of desperation. And one can’t be too hard on them. The entire “auteur” culture would often deride a Scorsese for making The Color of Money (one of this writer’s personal favorite Scorsese’s) even though it allowed Scorsese to make The Last Temptation of Christ. Scorsese has even talked about how his approach to surviving in the American movie industry was modeled after John Ford. Ford had the hard earned wisdom to know you had to make “one for them” if you wanted to make “one for yourself”. And he had the added wisdom to find joy in the sheer making of a picture. And he used this alternating strategy to great effect through the end of his career. If Ford ever made a flop or a movie considered “too artsy” (like say 1947’s Henry Fonda starring The Fugitive), he would immediately re-prove his bankability and contribution to the bottom line by directing hit movies he’d bring in under budget and under schedule (like 1948’s Fort Apache and Three Godfathers). And this would in turn allow him to build up enough cache to make a Wagon Master or The Quiet Man.
In the mid 1930’s, Ford made a trilogy of pictures with American humorist Will Rogers. Doctor Bull (1933) follows a folksy and seemingly absent minded small town New England doctor who has to battle small town hypocrisy at the same time he fights a typhoid epidemic with innoculations. Judge Priest (1934) is about a widowed former Confederate soldier turned Judge trying to practice tolerance in a Southern culture that values tradition, appearance, and wealth over anything else. Both are top notch Ford. The third, Steamboat Around the Bend (1935), is very funny but feels minor, possibly because, as Ford said, the studio cut out a lot of scenes they found trivial or problematic following Rogers’ death in an airplane accident just before the movie’s release. Ford was always very vocal about how much he enjoyed his collaboration with Will Rogers and how much he learned from Rogers about the importance of improvisation and making a script one’s own.
While John Ford certainly knew this before Will Rogers, Dr. Bull and Judge Priest show Ford deepening his trust of finding “agrammatical behavior and grace notes” within a scene. The hilarious scene where Dr. Bull delivers a baby in the apartment of an Italian family or the “taffy pulling” scene in Judge Priest show Ford and Rogers willing to explore and digress within a scene without actually losing the forward momentum of the story. Judge Priest is an especially difficult piece to fully appreciate today given its dated sympathetic view of a Confederacy that most likely never really existed and in its extremely backwards representations of African-Americans in the post-Civil War South. Still, looked at through the lens of the 1930’s, Judge Priest is actually an extremely progressive piece of work. At a time when segregation, lynching, and open racial hatred were still accepted by a large portion of white America, Ford and Rogers crafted a story where black actors like Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel are given the majority of screen time over almost everyone but Rogers himself and established as peers of Judge Priest. The Black Actors are never shown as being close minded hypocrites the way the white Anglo-Saxon townsfolk are in the picture. Still, if one is intellectually honest, one has to admit that Ford struggled with how to understand and represent minorities in his cinema. It took Ford another 26 years before he made a truly enlightened picture about America’s treatment of Black Americans (Sergeant Rutledge).
Finally though, Judge Priest finds Ford honing his melancholic themes of tolerant people dealing with death and loss while trying to help the community around them. A very touching scene midway through the movie finds Judge Priest talking to a portrait of his dead wife then visiting her grave to continue the conversation. In a Ford movie, the living are always communicating with the dead.
Another overlooked Ford delight of the 1930’s is his collaboration with child star Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie (1937). Rumored to have been assigned to Ford as a kind of perverse joke by studio head Daryl Zanuck who sensed Ford would hate having to work with a child star, Wee Willie Winkie turned out to be one of Ford’s most purely enjoyable pictures. Temple plays Priscilla “Winkie” Williams who comes to India to stay on the base of her grandfather who runs it. Gruff Sergeant McDuff (Victor Mclaglen) gets conscripted to watch over her. This movie has always played as a kind of rough draft of Fort Apache for this writer. Like Fort Apache, it shows how diplomacy and cross-cultural understanding are vastly preferable to racial prejudice and ignorance in the pursuit of “empire”. There is also in Wee Willie Winkie (as there is in Fort Apache) an understanding of how colonial conquest leads to senseless violence and genocide that the colonial power refuses to acknowledge.
Now, again, this writer doesn’t want to oversell that. The movie does have Cesar Romero playing a Muslim warlord and it does traffic in a still idealized view of British soldiers in India “doing their duty”. BUT. . .and importantly, it gives the Indians equality of dignity and purpose. And it outlines why the Indian rebels are fighting the colonial British. And we empathize with their very understandable reasons. Something almost no other Hollywood movie of the day would dare to do to an audience that didn’t want to hear such a message.
Ford also came to love working with Temple who he was delighted to discover was as much a hard working professional as Ford himself was. And Ford discovered the importance of taking advantage of unexpected gifts from the universe when he decided to stage a full scale military funeral (unscripted) on a particularly gorgeous day after a blustery storm to take advantage of the dramatic lighting.
Ultimately, when one looks at Ford’s assignment projects of the 1930’s and beyond, it’s hard not to take a little lesson away about the importance of working as often as one can on varied material to push, challenge, grow one’s own talents. Working on projects one would not chose for oneself might actually be the key to growing one’s cinematic vocabulary of empathy and technique.
Ford, in not being precious or too combative about material he was assigned, won a double victory. He continued to hone his craft and he came to be seen as a reliable, no nonsense director who could be entrusted with any material, would take it seriously, and would deliver a finished project on schedule and on budget.
Key lessons for anyone who wants to survive in an industry that loves to slaughter its poets the moment they start to rhyme in public.
Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.