John Ford is considered by many to be one of the greatest
filmmakers of all time. His sphere of influence touched
contemporaries such as Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles; as well
as George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. For much
of his early career, Ford's home was Twentieth Century Fox where
he made more than 50 films for the studio from 1920 through 1952,
including such classics as The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling
Clementine, Drums Along the Mohawk and How Green Was My Valley.
It was one of the most productive director/studio relationships
in the history of American film. Celebrating the legacy of the
collected works of John Ford and their part in the Studio's
heritage and pedigree, Ford at Fox: The Collection features 24
films as well as the new documentary "Becoming John Ford" by
Academy Award nominated documentary maker and Ford historian Nick
Redman. The beautifully packaged collection also includes an
exclusive hard-cover book which features rare, unpublished
photographs from Ford's career, lobby card reproductions,
production stills and an in-depth look at this maverick's work.
Disc 1: WHAT PRICE GLORY Disc 2: MY DARLING CLEMENTINE Disc 3:
HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY Disc 4: ROAD Disc 5: GRAPES OF
WRATH Disc 6: DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK Disc 7: WEE WILLIE WINKIE
Disc 8: YOUNG MR. LINCOLN Disc 9: PRISONER ON SHARK ISLAND Disc
10: STEAMBOAT AROUND THE BEND Disc 11: WORLD MOVES ON Disc 12:
PILGRIMAGE/BORN RECKLESS Disc 13: DOCTOR BULL/JUDGE PRIEST Disc
14: FOUR MEN AND A PRAYER/SEAS BENEATH Disc 15: WHEN WILLIE COMES
HOME/UP THE RIVER Disc 16: FOUR SONS Disc 17: THREE BAD
MEN/HANGMAN'S HOUSE Disc 18: JUST PALS Disc 19: BECOMING JOHN
FORD DOCUMENTARY Disc 20: THE IRON HORSE SPECIAL EDITION UK
VERSION DISC 1 Disc 21: THE IRON HORSE US VERSION: DISC 2
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For anyone with a passion for vintage American cinema, it's
difficult to imagine a more spectacular or more deeply gratifying
occasion than the DVD release of Ford at Fox: The Collection.
This mega-box is like a film archive unto itself ... or maybe
permanent browsing rights over a wing of the Library of Congress.
To be sure, there have been plenty directorial boxed sets,
including several devoted to John Ford; and Ford made quite a bit
of film history--and many of his best movies--away from Fox Films
and its post-1935 avatar, 20th CenturyFox. But this treasure
trove of 21 discs, encompassing just about half of the 50 titles
Ford directed for Fox between 1920 and 1952, is unparalleled.
It isn't just the career highlights, though those have been
treated royally. The Iron Horse, the epic 1924 Western that
became a breakout success for its 30-year-old director, is
presented in two editions, a British release version and the
American version. Three Bad Men (1926), Ford's even better, last
silent Western, is here, as well as the two pictures that brought
him back-to-back best director Os in 1940-41, The Grapes of
Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. The Grapes of Wrath has been
newly restored, and you'll find three other towering
collaborations with Henry Fonda: Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums
Along the Mohawk (1939), and My Darling Clementine (1946)--both
the director's preview cut and the release version.
Yet the real richness of Ford at Fox isn't limited to the known
masterpieces. Some of it has to do with the dozen-and-a-half
titles that are far from household words--the movies that put us
in touch with the self-described "picture man" who did a "job of
work" for the studio where he was under contract for much of the
three decades beginning with Just Pals in 1920. Some of these are
great films awaiting proper re. But even the least among
them give off the ozone snap of discovery, affording simultaneous
ins into the evolution of an artist, a medium, and a
distinctive studio.
In this regard, the new feature-length documentary Becoming John
Ford is an invaluable element of the set. Premier Ford biographer
Joseph McBride, screenwriter Lem Dobbs, Peter Fonda, and others
astutely testify about not only the life, artistry, and
cantankerous personality of the director but also Fox studios and
the mogul who served as a key Ford collaborator, Darryl F.
Zanuck. Ford famously despised producers, but he respected
Zanuck's movie sense and was content to leave the cutting of
their films to him. (To the nighttime scene in The Grapes of
Wrath when Tom Joad wanders outside the fruit-pickers' barracks
and finds the strikers' encampment, Zanuck added the sound of
crickets--a touch that made the superbly composed and lighted
moment more "Fordian" than ever.)
Fox was the studio most identified with Americana, even before
Zanuck--the favorite son of Wahoo, Nebraska--took charge. And so
the legacy of Ford at Fox includes the three pictures he made
with the beloved actor, comedian, and national political scold
Will Rogers. Doctor Bull (1933) is a scrappy adaptation of a
James Gould Cozzens novel, notable chiefly for its wintry New
England atmosphere (Ford was a native Down Easter), but Judge
Priest (1934) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) are luminous
fables from the rural South. Judge Priest is especially
remarkable for its subversive playing-off of Rogers' wily-rascal
persona against the sly Stepin Fetchit in profoundly egalitarian
comic scenes; the movie has been neglected because of Fetchit's
infamous political incorrectness, but it has, and deserves, a
place of honor here.
Also very fine is the 1936 The Prisoner of Shark Island, about
the martyrdom of Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), who unwittingly
set the leg John Wilkes Booth broke following his assassination
of Abraham Lincoln. The moment of Lincoln's death, the president
virtually passing into history before our eyes, is a mystical
triumph by Ford and cinematographer Bert Glennon. Critic Joe
McBride cls Pilgrimage (1933) as one of Ford's early
masterpieces and likens the dark-hearted Hannah Jessop, played by
stage actress Henrietta Crosman, to the similarly driven Ethan
Edwards in The Searchers (not a Fox picture and not included in
this set). The setting is again the rural South, and to break up
her son's romance with a local girl, Hannah forces him to march
off to war in France--where he is killed. The rest of the film
becomes, spiritually and then literally, a redemptive journey for
Hannah. This stark character study lacks marquee names but has
Ford's heart and some of his most powerfully visualized
sequences.
Pilgrimage, like the late silents Four Sons and Hangman's House
(both 1928), displays evidence of how influenced Ford was in that
period by German director F.W. Murnau, who had come to Fox in
1927 to make Sunrise; Four Sons, a mostly German-set story, was
even on sets left over from the Murnau picture. The
essential Ford style was based on dynamism defined within a fixed
frame, but watching the director experiment here with elaborate
camera movement is fascinating. Similarly, the gangster movies Up
the River and Born Reckless (both 1930) and the WWI naval
adventure Seas Beneath (1931) take their interest not from their
slapdash scenarios but from Ford's c course in accommodating
the presence of sound. Seas Beneath is especially striking among
early talkies for being filmed almost entirely in the open air,
on the water and on picturesque Catalina Island, with astonishing
long-take, real-time coverage of submarines surfacing and
submerging, boats sinking, and a naval artillery duel
nerve-wracking in its relentless slowness.
For much of his tenure at Fox, Ford had little to say about what
films he'd be assigned, or who'd be cast in them. His response
was to fill the backgrounds of his movies with his personal stock
company of memorably ugly mugs (supremely, Jack Pennick), and to
improvise passages of visual poetry or comedy (a baseball game
amid the WWI section of Born Reckless!) to keep from getting
bored. Apart from some anthology-worthy battlefield sequences,
the 1934 The World Moves On is so diffuse and devoid of interest
in its rambling family saga, we suspect it might have been the
film that inspired one of the great Ford legends: how, advised by
the front office that his current production was falling behind,
he tore a handful of pages out of the script and said, "Now we're
back on schedule."
Mostly, though, the picture man triumphed in spite of himself.
Saddling John Ford with a Shirley Temple movie would seem to
border on insult, but the director turned the Kipling-based Wee
Willie Winkie (1937) into something enchanting instead of
cloying. Also partly set on the Indian frontier, Four Men and a
Prayer (1938)--a preous Boy's Own Adventure tale that hops
from India to England to Latin America to Egypt as the titular
quartet of British brothers try to clear their late her's
name--was just about Ford's last obligatory assignment before
embarking on the amazing 193941 streak of The Grapes of Wrath et
al.; he disliked the story (and the British), but he turned an
Indian saloon scene into a classic "Oirish" brawl, and invested a
night of civil war in a Latin American town with a memorably
surreal air of shock and terror.
How might Ford at Fox have evolved if WWII hadn't intervened?
The director spent the war years shooting documentaries (several
are included on the Becoming John Ford disc). Upon mustering out,
his ambitions focused on developing personal productions for
Argosy Pictures, the company he had formed with Merian C. (King
Kong) Cooper before the war. Apart from My Darling Clementine,
Ford directed only two more pictures for Fox, When Willie Comes
Marching Home (1950) and an inferior remake of the silent Raoul
Walsh classic What Price Glory (1952)--both semi-musicals
featuring Fox's new star Dan Dailey. So, anticlimactically, Ford
at Fox: The Collection ends there. But let's not dwell on that;
this big box is very full. "There is no fence round time," the
narrator says in How Green Was My Valley, "you can go back and
have of it what you will." The films of John Ford are forever.
--Richard T. Jameson