The DVD Report #33

Finally! I now have my copy of the Ford at Fox box set. It is the DVD collection of the year, and well worth waiting for, but I have to caution that it is not for everyone. The casual collector will probably be satisfied with the previously available Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and My Darling Clementine, and perhaps a few of the other 19 titles, most likely The Prisoner of Shark Island and Wee Willie Winkie. The rest of the titles are for serious film buffs and historians who want to delve further into Ford.

It will take me a while to get through it all, but thus far I have seen the restored versions of Drums Along the Mohawk and My Darling Clementine, both of which are breathtaking. I’ve also managed to see a few Ford films I’d either never seen or seen so long ago I’d forgotten much about them.

Although Ford had directed more than fifty films by the time he saw F.W. Murnau’s Sunrisein 1927, he was so taken with the German impressionistic filmmaker’s work that it was to influence all of his future work. Though the touches would become more subtle over the years, his copying of Murnau’s style is clearly evident in Four Sons, made almost immediately after Ford saw Sunrise and is filmed on some of the same sets.

The early establishing scenes of Four Sons may remind today’s viewers of the long opening scenes of such later films as The Godfather and The Deer Hunter. Ford takes a long time getting to the point, but everything Ford does has a purpose. There is a reason for those early scenes of happy, innocent townspeople in a Bavaria looking more like it belonged in a production of The Student Prince than in a war movie. The innocence will be shattered soon enough, for this 1928 war movie is very much an anti-war movie in the vein of King Vidor’s The Big Parade in 1925, a cycle that would reach its zenith with three 1930 films, Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, James Whale’s Journey’s End and Howard Hawks’ The Dawn Patrol.

The anti-war message is just part of what Ford is up to in Four Sons. At its heart is Ford’s basic theme of the intrusion of outside forces on the comforts of home and family. It also touches on immigration in a manner that would be copied somewhat by the Swedish epics, The Emigrants and The New Land more than forty years later. For those in the small German town of the film, America is the land of opportunity where the streets are paved with gold. For one son of the film’s central character, a beloved little old lady, life in the States has indeed been fortunate. That’s not the case with the three brothers he left behind or his darling mother who hasn’t heard from him since the World War broke out.

There are many unforgettable scenes that take place during the war, from the delivery of the first black-bordered telegram that devastates the family to the death of a soldier two days before the armistice. The film then shifts focus and deals with the confusion of the emigrants at Ellis Island and in the vast caverns of New York City. It all ends happily though, with the uniting of three generations.

The starring role in Four Sons was played by 60-year-old Margaret Mann, a bit player whose next most significant screen role would be as Queen Victoria in the following year’s Disraeli, after which she continued to play bit parts, mostly uncredited until her death in 1941. She was later the wax figure of Queen Victoria in Mystery of the Wax Museum, the Mother Superior in the Garbo version of The Painted Veil, Grandma in Theodora Goes Wild and the nun with the cheering orphan boys in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Mann had one of her uncredited bit parts in Pilgrimage, Ford’s 1933 film about another old lady, a not-so-loving Arkansas mother who has her son drafted in order to break up his romance with a young girl she feels isn’t good enough for him. Even after he is killed, she refuses to have anything to do with the girl or the girl’s son, her own grandson. One day she is unexpectedly gifted with a trip, along with other mothers of sons killed in the war, to the French cemetery where he is buried. It is on that trip, that she meets another young man and a girl in similar circumstances as her son’s and sees the errors of her ways.

Like Four Sons, Pilgrimage is filled with German expressionistic touches. The small Arkansas town where the characters of Pilgrimage lived might just as well have been over the hill from the town in Bavaria where the family of Four Sons dwelled. What is unusual about it is that the mother, a saintly figure in most Ford films, is mean and cold for most of the film.

The mother in Pilgrimage is played by then 71-year-old veteran stage actress Henrietta Crosman, best known on screen as the matriarch in The Royal Family of Broadway and later as Warner Oland’s seemingly foolish friend in Charlie Chan’s Secret. It’s the kind of role that a Helen Hayes or Bette Davis might have played in their later years had it been remade.

Widely regarded as Shirley Temple’s best film, Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie is his entry in the British Raj films that were so popular in the 1930s. Released exactly halfway between 1935’s The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and 1939’s Gunga Din, the film, like Gunga Din, is taken from a story by Rudyard Kipling. In it, Temple and her widowed mother come to live under the protection of British regimental leader played by Sir C. Aubrey Smith. The film deals with the familial relationship between Temple and Smith, as well as her mother’s romance with a brash young captain and the threat of attack by rebel Indians led by Cesar Romero. The film has been restored to its original length in two versions, one a handsome black and white print, the other a restoration of the sepia print of the film’s original. Since the restoration was made from several sources, there are a few minutes in the sepia version where the tone shifts to black and white. It’s rather jarring. Stick with the black and white which is easier on modern eyes anyway.

The strangest film Ford ever directed, 1941’s Tobacco Road, was taken from the sensationalistic Broadway play that was itself taken from the even more sensationalistic best seller by Erskine Caldwell. No other director of the day could have gotten away with the sexual innuendoes and outright lasciviousness that Ford does. Charley Grapewin is the lazy, no account Georgia farmer who pimps one daughter after another to “son-in-law” Ward Bond whose “wives” (all of them Grapewin’s daughters) keep running off. Marjorie Rambeau is the horny, middle-aged preacher woman who lusts after Grapewin’s twenty-year-old nitwit son (William Tracy) who she then marries. Elizabeth Patterson is Grapewin’s long-suffering wife and Gene Tierney is his last remaining daughter, deemed too old by Bond at 23 to make a good wife. The best thing about the film is the gorgeous cinematography by Arthur Miller who would go on to greater heights with Ford’s next film, How Green Was My Valley.

Ford’s penultimate film for Fox, 1950’s When Willie Comes Marching Home, starts out as a variation on Preston Sturges’ Hail the Conquering Hero, but soon turns into something darker. Dan Dailey is the eager-to-serve soldier who is the first from his New Jersey town to enlist the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hailed at first as a hero by the town, the whole town, including his parents, turn nasty when, through no fault of his own, he is forced to remain at a local air base as an expert trainer while other sons of the town are put in harm’s way. He proves a hero on a secret mission in France, but is unable to talk about it. This is another unusual film in the Ford canon in that the parents, played by Sturges regulars William Demarest and Evelyn Varden are not the ideal parents of most Ford films. Ford had much more success at the box office with his next film, Republic’s Rio Grandein which John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara are truer to the Ford ideal as the bickering but loving parents of Claude Jarman Jr.

The new biography, Becoming John Ford, doesn’t really tell us much we don’t already know about the contrarian Ford, a true visionary behind the camera, but a mean drunk when not working. It covers his love-hate relationships with Daryl Zanuck, Henry Fonda and others, and provides ample scenes from his principal Fox films, The Iron Horse, Four Sons, Pilgrimage, The Prisoner of Shark Island, Wee Willie Winkie, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and My Darling Clementine. What is new is the extensive coverage his World War II service. As a bonus, the disc includes his Oscar winning wartime documentaries, The Battle of Midway and December 7th as well as Torpedo Squadron. It also includes additional footage filmed for The Battle of Midway. The version of December 7th is the shortened Oscar winning version, not the full-length film which is available elsewhere as I mentioned last week.

Wee Willie Winkie and Tobacco Road are only available in the Ford at Fox collection. Most of the others, including Becoming John Ford, are available separately.

Among the new films released on DVD is The Bourne Ultimatum, from the novel by Robert Ludlum. I read most of Ludlum’s novels in the 1970s and 1980s before losing interest in him. Sadly, I’ve never been impressed with any of the films made from those novels. The Bourne Ultimatum is no exception. Hailed by critics and audiences alike, the film, to my mind, is one soulless chase scene after another as it goes around the world from Moscow to Morocco to New York. Director Paul Greengrass’ style is cold and frenetic and this film, like his Oscar-nominated United 93, is wildly over-praised.

Matt Damon is as believable as the script allows, but this is not one of his most memorable performances, though he certainly holds his own against a host of co-stars including Julia Styles, David Strathairn, Scott Glenn, Joan Allen, Paddy Considine and Albert Finney, all of whom deserve a better script.

Just in time for Christmas, comes the heartwarming Australian film, December Boys, about four orphans vying to be adopted by the same family. This charming coming-of-age story was barely given an international theatrical release in September. It probably would have escaped notice entirely if it weren’t for the fact that it stars Daniel Radcliffe in his first non-Harry Potter role since 2001’s The Tailor of Panama. Radcliffe, a last-minute replacement for Freddie Highmore, is terrific as the oldest of the boys who has long since given up hope of ever being adopted. Beautifully filmed on Australia’s Kangaroo Island, the central story takes place in the late 1960s but contains a lovely epilogue set in the present day. Warner Bros. is releasing it on DVD in conjunction with the release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It’s well worth checking out.

Until next time, keep on looking for good movies on DVD.

Peter J. Patrick (December 18, 2007)