Myths and the man

The American classics of John Ford

by Jeffrey Gantz

"JOHN FORD: A MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE," At the Harvard Film Archive, June 1 through July 28.

Forget George Lucas and Star Wars -- the real American mythmaker of this century is John Ford. Like Hawthorne, Melville, and Charles Ives, he probed the dark recesses of the New World's interior in search of the solitude at the heart of the American dream. His heroes are American versions of Moses, leading their people from the wilderness to the promised land but unable to cross the river Jordan and take their place in the society they helped create. He delineated their search, and their suffering, in bold, complex comic-strip films -- as the newspaper editor explains in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." His critics -- and they were many -- dismissed his oeuvre as formula fare, stereotype Westerns and war movies that glorified the aggressive white male at the expense of women, Indians, and blacks. But like the "other" John Ford (the Jacobean playwright), or for that matter Shakespeare, Ford was a master of high art that looks like mere entertainment; My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are as subtly subversive as Henry V. or 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. You can experience the real Force starting this Tuesday when the Harvard Film Archive opens a two-month, 18-film retrospective of America's greatest filmmaker.

Much of John Ford's oeuvre was mere entertainment -- after all, the man turned out more than 100 movies, most under the constraints of the Hollywood studio system. And as the HFA's generous selection (the one significant omission is the World War II film They Were Expendable) shows, he tended to retreat after pushing himself to the edge of the abyss. The big-business-denouncing anger of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) gives way to the wistful nostalgia of How Green Was My Valley (1941); the explosive sexual tensions of Fort Apache (1948) dissipate through She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950) before disappearing altogether in Wagon Master (1950); the veiled hysteria of The Searchers (1956) turns to PC reassurance in Cheyenne Autumn (1964). The early masterpiece Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) confronts America's lynch-mob mentality and lack of integrity, and Henry Fonda's Abe is more articulate talking to the grave of his lost Ann Rutledge than to living women. Ford's next film, Drums Along the Mohawk (1939; not in the retrospective), was a glossy color production with Fonda and Claudette Colbert as a postcard-perfect young couple in Revolutionary-era upstate New York.

The Retrospective Cheyenne Autumn (1964): June 1 (7:30 p.m.) The Informer (1935): June 2 (7 p.m.) Judge Priest (1934): June 2 (9 p.m.) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): June 7 (7 p.m.) Mogambo (1953): June 7 (9:15 p.m.) Rio Grande (1950): June 9 (9 p.m.) Fort Apache (1948): June 14 (7 p.m.) Stagecoach (1939): June 16 (7 p.m.), June 20 (3 p.m.) The Sun Shines Bright (1953): June 16 (9 p.m.) The Searchers (1956): June 21 (7 & 9:15 p.m.), June 23 (7 & 9:15 p.m.), June 27 (3 p.m.) The Grapes of Wrath (1940): June 28 (9 p.m.), June 30 (9 p.m.) My Darling Clementine (1946): July 6 (7 p.m.) The Long Voyage Home (1940): July 7 (9:15 p.m.) How Green Was My Valley (1941): July 11 (3 p.m.), July 13 (7 p.m.) Wagon Master (1950): July 14 (9 p.m.), July 18 (3 p.m.) Young Mr. Lincoln (1939): July 20 (7 p.m.) She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949): July 20 (9 p.m.), July 21 (9:15 p.m.) The Quiet Man (1952): July 27 (7 p.m.), July 28 (9:15 p.m.)

But even Ford's second-line films -- and second-line doesn't mean second-rate -- expound his abiding theme of paradise lost. The earliest entry in the HFA selection, Judge Priest (1934), is an enjoyable melodrama set in 1890s Kentucky, with folksy Will Rogers in the title role defending the old Southern way of life against the serpents in his garden, stuffed-shirt carpetbaggers and teetotalers. Ford's remake/sequel, The Sun Shines Bright (1953), improves on Judge Priest's climactic "Dixie" parade with a moving silent funeral procession, and the concluding shot -- in which the judge (here Charles Winninger) disappears inside his house, with just the company of the bottle, while young lovers Arleen Whelan and John Russell look on from the front gate -- presages in reverse the famous concluding shot of The Searchers three years later.

Paradise for Gypo Nolan (Victor McLaglen) in The Informer (1935) is America, but Gypo's shortcomings -- he betrays his IRA pal for the fare to take his girl to America, then drinks up the money -- absolve everyone else, including the audience. Paradise in The Long Voyage Home (1940) is a myth: most of the seamen in this film (including John Wayne as a Swede!) have no homes they want to go to, and their long voyage comes to an end only with burial at sea. It's a disturbing premise, but Ford keeps his characters at a distance; even Wayne barely registers. In How Green Was My Valley, paradise is Huw Morgan's lost childhood; the serpents in his garden are the mine owners. And though there's a dark side to Henry Fonda's manslaughtering Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, the director's wrath targets institutions: the banks that leave sharecroppers homeless, the companies that exploit migrant workers.

"We're the people," says Ma Joad, and John Ford made uplifting films about the people; but his great works are about individuals, especially those larger-than-life Americans for whom the serpent rears its head from within and the blossoming West seems like forbidden fruit. Larger-than-life characters require larger-than-life performers, so it's no surprise that Ford's best films star either John Wayne or Henry Fonda, actors who had the capacity to explore not just the wilderness of America but the wilderness of the American soul. Ford's heroes are men of discipline, men of honor, men of few words; the prospect of women's love and companionship leaves them tongue-tied and lock-limbed. In Stagecoach (1939), John Wayne's Ringo just barely gets his proposal to Dallas (Claire Trevor) out (and without benefit of the word "love" or "marriage"). Henry Fonda's Abe Lincoln can neither talk to Mary Todd (Marjorie Weaver) nor dance with her. How Green Was My Valley's Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) puts practicality above passion in declining to marry Angharad Morgan (Maureen O'Hara); Rusty (John Wayne) is adolescent-awkward in front of Sandy (Donna Reed) in They Were Expendable. Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) does manage a polka with Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) in My Darling Clementine (1946), but at the end the best he can do is kiss her on the cheek, shake her hand, and promise that he "might" be back in Tombstone some day. It's no coincidence that Lincoln associates the river with Ann Rutledge, or that Wyatt and Clementine walk to church to the strains of "Shall We Gather at the River": the river in Ford is always the feminine principle that his men can't bring themselves to cross.

The soldiers of the "Cavalry Trilogy" likewise remain camped on their side of the river, lamenting the safely absent sweethearts of "The Girl I Left Behind Me" and "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon." Not that the waters aren't troubled. In Fort Apache (1948), the reaction of widower Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) to the budding romance of his daughter Philadelphia (Shirley Temple) seems almost like jealousy; and her callow suitor (John Agar) hardly looks a match for John Wayne's not-that-old Captain Yorke. (In one of Ford's most ambiguous and alarming endings, Yorke takes up Thursday's unyielding stance toward the Apache, though he knows it's wrong; he even dresses like Thursday.) In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru) has a pair of young men on her string, but when widower Captain Brittles (John Wayne) asks her who the yellow ribbon in her hair is for, she teases him with, "Why, for you, Captain." It's Olivia who brings Nathan a cyclamen for his wife's grave (like the young Lincoln, Captain Brittles talks to the dead) and who caps his "old soldiers" exit with "I'd like to stand up and cheer." In both films Agar's character gets the girl while Wayne's rides into the sunset, the apple always just out of reach, the river just a little too deep.

Ford takes a bite over the series's next four films, but not a big one. In the "Cavalry" wrap-up, Rio Grande (1950), John Wayne is a lieutenant colonel whose feisty estranged wife (Maureen O'Hara) doesn't like the military; Ford keeps the emotion in the shallows of shared concern over the couple's son, and as in Judge Priest everything's all right once the band strike up "Dixie." Wagon Master (1950) promotes Ben Johnson (Trooper Tyree in both She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande) to star billing and romance with Joanne Dru, but they can't fill the cardboard characters, and the only suspense the plot generates is whether Ward Bond as a Mormon elder will ever be able to stop swearing. The Quiet Man (1952) reunites Wayne and O'Hara in a Hollywood Irish story that's more about pride than love. The talky Mogambo (1953), with its edgy, brittle stars, Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, and Grace Kelly, could almost be a Howard Hawks film.

The Searchers, on the other hand, brings Ford ever closer to the serpent, the horror. When Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) tells Brad (Harry Carey Jr.) that Lucy (Pippa Scott) has been murdered by the Comanche, his first question is, "Did they . . . ? Was she . . . ?" -- as if it were his sexual prerogative that had been violated. And that's what Ethan has in mind when he vows to kill Debbie (Natalie Wood): not because she seems like an Indian but because "she's been with a buck." The door that shuts Ethan out from the bedroom of his brother and sister-in-law at the beginning closes on him once more at the end, but society's interiors (which Ford suggests by shots from inside caves as well as houses) are growing smaller and more claustrophobic, and the outside that's been ceded to Ethan has become more savage and more desolate. There's hardly any sign of water; "Shall We Gather at the River" is played for a wedding that doesn't take place.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is Ford's last great film, and his darkest. In his other great Westerns, Monument Valley is visible as a comforting symbol of permanence; here there's no Valley. And no comfort in America's most adored screen icons: cowpoke Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) takes Vera Miles's Hallie for granted and doesn't want to be rushed into marriage; fledgling lawyer Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) is naive and self-righteous and wouldn't have survived without Tom. Hallie herself is no Clementine Carter or Philadelphia Thursday. Rance brings water to the desert but not to his marriage; Hallie is left to place a cactus rose on Tom's coffin. The concluding shot shows a train snaking through the desert like an artificial river, and you can hear a snatch of a tune that sounds a little like "Some Sunday Morning," the same tune over which Abe Lincoln talked to Ann Rutledge, Ford winding back to where he began. Is paradise to be found in progress? Or in the past? Epics like Fort Apache and The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance don't say -- they just stand there like Monument Valley's sandstone megaliths, quiet, imposing, enduring.