By DAVE KEHR
Film culture in this country has long been in need of a paradigm shift, a way of saving old films from the swamp of nostalgia and seeing them as vital cultural products rather than quaint artifacts of another age. People don’t read Faulkner’s “Light in August” to be reminded of their lost youth, but most studios continue to market their library titles (when they bother to market them at all) as so many trips down memory lane.
That approach might have worked at the dawn of home video in the late 1970s, but for obvious reasons the nostalgia audience for prewar films is not a growing market segment. What the home video industry needs is something that book publishers have had for a century: a sense of the backlist as a living body of work that merits and rewards the attention of each new generation.
“Ford at Fox,” a gargantuan set that assembles 24 of the 50-some films John Ford made for the studio that was his most consistent home, may be just the nudge the old paradigm needs. Other studios, notably Warner Brothers with Stanley Kubrick and Universal with Alfred Hitchcock, have produced collections devoted to single directors, but no previous effort has matched what Fox has put into this impressive undertaking.
Reviving some extremely rare works in fully restored versions, presenting critical editions of the major titles (in three instances, complete with alternate cuts) and reintroducing several overlooked masterworks, “Ford at Fox” finally does for a filmmaker what the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade in France and our homegrown Library of America have long done for writers. Scattered, individual films have been recast into a body of work — an oeuvre — easily accessible for the first time.
Accessible, but not cheap. The “Ford at Fox” box carries a retail price of $299.98, though online discounters are offering it for up to a third less. And for those who may already have some of the films, several stand-alone titles and subdivided sets drawn from the big box are available, among them “John Ford’s Silent Epics” (five films, $49.98); “John Ford’s American Comedies” (six films, $49.98); and “The Essential John Ford Collection” (six films, $49.98).
A few titles in “Ford at Fox” are reprints: Besides “My Darling Clementine” (1946) the boxed set’s versions of “Steamboat Round the Bend” (1935), “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940), “How Green Was My Valley” (1941) and “What Price Glory” (1952) are identical to previously issued discs. Three others have received major upgrades: “The Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936) has improved image stability and contrast over the version available in Britain; “Wee Willie Winkie” (1937), a Shirley Temple vehicle that Ford turned to surprisingly personal ends, is present in both newly restored black-and-white and sepia-toned versions; and “Drums Along the Mohawk,” the 1939 Revolutionary War saga that was Ford’s first use of Technicolor, is back in a razor-sharp new restoration financed by the Film Foundation.
But the heart of the project consists of the films making their debuts — or at least, their first officially sanctioned, above-ground appearance — on American DVD. Least familiar to most will be the five silents included here. Ford’s first film for Fox, “Just Pals” (1920), already displays his innate, impeccable sense of composition and his manner of moving fluidly and invisibly from shot to shot, each angle and edit calculated to shape the audience’s impressions without calling the slightest attention to technique.
“The Iron Horse” (1924), a sweeping account of the construction of the first transcontinental railroad, established Ford as a major director. It is presented here, a bit confusingly, in two different versions: an “international version” that runs 2 hours 12 minutes and a “U.S. version” with a running time of 2 hours 29 minutes. Though the export version has been subjected to extensive digital restoration and will probably look more pleasing to the casual viewer, the domestic, taken from a print held by the Museum of Modern Art, is the one to see. It has more scratches and speckles but is truer to Ford’s intentions. The 1926 film “3 Bad Men” is an even greater work, with a thematic complexity that anticipates Ford’s postwar westerns. A commercial failure, it would be his last western for 13 years, until he returned with “Stagecoach” in 1939.
In 1927 the great German filmmaker F. W. Murnau came to Fox’s Hollywood studios to make his masterpiece, “Sunrise,” a study in lighting and camera movement that left a profound impression on American moviemaking in general and young John Ford in particular. Ford incorporated elements of Murnau’s technique into his “Hangman’s House” (1928) and, supremely, “Four Sons,” a devastating 1928 antiwar film that made creative use of Movietone, Fox’s new sound-on-film technology. Unfortunately, because of music rights clearance problems, the original Movietone soundtrack has not been used here, though, like “The Iron Horse,” it is accompanied by a fine, newly commissioned orchestral score by Christopher Caliendo.
As Ford moved into the new world of sound, his artistry continued to expand. The set includes “Born Reckless,” his eccentric 1930 contribution to the gangster films of the early Depression; the prison comedy “Up the River” (also 1930), featuring Ford’s discovery, Spencer Tracy, in his first film (and Humphrey Bogart in his second); the naval adventure “Seas Beneath” (1931); and the astonishing “Pilgrimage” (1933), another antiwar fable that is perhaps Ford’s most experimental film.
Here too are Ford’s great Will Rogers comedies, “Doctor Bull” (1933), “Judge Priest” (1934) and “Steamboat Round the Bend” — a stirring, informal trilogy about a vanished rural America. And of course there are some minor films in the mix: the labored generational drama “The World Moves On” (1934); the glossy, superficial “Four Men and a Prayer” (1938); the grotesque, half-hearted “Tobacco Road” (1941); the lightly likable military comedy “When Willie Comes Marching Home” (1950). When you have directed more than 140 films, they can’t all be classics.
As weighty as “Ford at Fox” may be — it also contains a hardcover book of stills and posters from his films; a new documentary, “Becoming John Ford,” by Nick Redman; and reproductions of the souvenir programs for “The Iron Horse” and “Four Sons” — it’s sobering to realize that it still does not include every extant film Ford made at the studio. Most conspicuous among the missing are Ford’s first all-talking feature, “The Black Watch” (1929), and the submarine drama “Men Without Women” (1930). Such is the richness of Ford’s career that even this enormous compilation can’t contain it. Save room on the shelf for “Ford at Fox, Volume 2.”
via Bruno de Andrade