Product Description
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John Ford Film Collection, The (DVD) (5-Pack)
WHV celebrates on of the true masters of American cinema with the
release of The John Ford Collection. Four-time Academy Award
Winning director John Ford is perhaps best known for his Westerns
and collaborations with John Wayne, however, this Ford collection
runs the gamut of genres and shows the diversity and genius of
John Ford at his most impressive. Featured here will be the DVD
debuts of five classic titles - all will be exclusive to the
five-disc boxed set.
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John Ford remains the consensus choice as America's greatest
director, and his critical eminence dates from two films in this
set. By 1934 he had been directing for 17 years, building a solid
reputation as a Hollywood professional with maybe the best eye in
the movie business. With The Lost Patrol (1934) and The Informer
(1935)--made for RKO rather than his accustomed studio base,
Fox--he took a decisive step toward establishing himself as a
personal, at least semi-independent artist. Both films were stark
dramas free of box-office compromise, glib heroics, or any
expectation of facile happy endings. They were also more
relentlessly stylized than anything Ford had done before ...
which both distinguished them in their day and left them
vulnerable to dating when some of their experimentation proved
rather dead-ended.
The Lost Patrol began Ford's association with producer Merian C.
Cooper, a partnership that would lead to the independent
production company Argosy and the making of such fine,
ultrapersonal films as The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and Ford's
celebrated cavalry trilogy. The story, by Philip MacDonald,
concerns a handful of British soldiers cornered at an oasis in
the Mesopotamian Desert (now Iraq) during World War I and slowly
decimated by an unseen enemy. The strong visuals--baking sun, the
undulating vastness of the dunes, the drift of ghostly
mirages--befit a crucible of character-testing, with an unnamed
Sergeant (Victor McLaglen) striving to keep at least one man
alive as desperation, madness, and implacable Arab snipers take
their toll. This DVD release restores six minutes of footage cut
for a 1949 rerelease and rarely seen since.
Ford won the first of his four best-director Os for The
Informer, an intense tale of "one night in strife-torn Dublin,
1922" when a slow-witted I.R.A. strongman named Gypo Nolan sells
out his best friend for 20 British pounds. On a budget that
obliged him to obscure canvas sets with deep shadows and a
persistent fog that underscores Gypo's mental and spiritual
confusion, Ford created a visual world akin to the German
Expressionist classics of the 1920s. But the film's inventive use
of sound and an ambitious music score (by Max Steiner)
commingling leitmotifs for half a dozen key characters also
encouraged '30s critics to hail it as the first classic of the
sound era. That was overstating it (and more than a little
amnesiac on the critics' part!). Overstated, too, was Ford's
relentless Christ symbolism paralleling Gypo's betrayal to that
of Judas. Still, Victor McLaglen's portrayal of the title
character remains a triumph (McLaglen won an O as well), and
the film abounds in brilliant strokes: the silhouette of a
British soldier shining his flashlight on the wanted of
Gypo's friend, while Gypo lurks just outside the beam; the giant
Nolan forever knocking his head on hanging signs or seeming to be
crushed by low ceilings; the cacophony of cries and fire, and
then cing silence, as the Black and Tan raid the I.R.A.
rebel's home. Initially overrated, then relegated to museum
status, The Informer awaits rediscovery as a dynamic motion
picture.
The John Ford Collection includes one more mid-'30s RKO endeavor,
Mary of Scotland (1936). Although handsome, this adaptation of a
Maxwell Anderson blank-verse play about Queen Elizabeth's
northern rival never finds credible footing as a movie. Andrew
Sarris is dead right in lamenting Ford's version of Mary, Queen
of Scots, as "a madonna of the Scottish moors"--Katharine
Hepburn, inevitably. The most interesting thing about the
production is the offscreen story, that Ford and Hepburn fell
passionately in love, yet (perhaps) resisted becoming lovers.
From there we leap to the 1960s and two Westerns made under the
aegis of Warner Bros. (Warner now owns the RKO library, hence
this rather arbitrary set.) Sergeant Rutledge (1960) has markedly
improved with age, with what once seemed creaky dramaturgy now
playing as bold stylization. Using a jagged flashback structure
occasioned by a court-martial at a Southwest outpost, Ford took
an unflinching look at the legacy of race in America. The
then-unknown black actor Woody Strode has a showcase role as a
magnificent "Buffalo soldier" accused of the rape-murder of his
commanding officer's blond, white daughter and the murder of the
commandant himself. Unfortunately, Ford's once-masterly handling
of character actors had grown lax, and he indulged some tedious
bombast from Willis Bouchey and Carleton Young as the presiding
judge and prosecutor, respectively; and Jeffrey Hunter, however
effective in The Searchers, made a weak protagonist as Rutledge's
defense counsel. But the veteran cameraman Bert Glennon almost
winds things back to Stagecoach days, occasionally turning the
film's Technicolor to very nearly black and white.
Another debt to race relations is addressed in Cheyenne Autumn
(1964), a beautiful title to grace John Ford's final Western. The
film has moments of grandeur as Ford attempts at long last to
"tell the story from the Indians' point of view," and it's a
pleasure to report that William H. Clothier's majestic
Technicolor compositions have been restored to their Panavision
dimensions on the DVD. Ford is unambiguously supportive of the
Cheyennes' resolve to bolt their reservation in the desert
Southwest and trek north to their ancestral lands. By contrast,
most of white society, the , the bureaucracy, and the
sensationalist press are portrayed as insensitive, foolish, or
hateful. However, the Cheyenne are nobly wooden, with all key
roles played by non-Indians: Ricardo Montalban, Gilbert Roland,
Sal Mineo, Victor Jory, and Dolores Del Rio (breathtakingly
beautiful as ever). As for point of view, it's sympathetic
cavalry officer Richard Widmark and Quaker missionary Carroll
Baker through whose eyes most of the epic narrative unfolds.
--Richard T. Jameson