John Ford - S/D

previously lost ford silent film discovered in new zealand (along w/ a trailer for another lost ford film, amongst other treasures):

http://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/new-zealand-project-films-highlights

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962)

Great moments and scenes.

Wonderful performance from Wayne, but what a sad ending. Stewart's character has been a good man throughout the film, yet is left with a sense of unfulfilment.

being a Man of Civilization has its price

Jeff Wells in Monument Valley:

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2012/08/changeup_settle.php

apparently sergio leone hasnt seen 3 bad men:

With John Ford, people look out of the window with hope. Me, I show people who are scared to even open the door. And if they do, they tend to get a bullet right between the eyes.

Jonathan Lethem on his cinematic influences and Ford in particular:

I came to film in a backward way. Thanks to my parents’ cosmopolitan/bohemian appetites, with the exception of [Alfred] Hitchcock, I watched a lot of European cinema before I watched a lot of classical Hollywood cinema. I really knew [Jean-Luc] Godard and [Francois] Truffaut and [Michelangelo] Antonioni and a bunch of other stuff. Then, of course, I was aware of contemporary English language films that were exciting to my parents and me. Films by [Stanley] Kubrick and [Robert] Altman. I knew all the stuff that you’d see in a New York art house environment as a teenager. Then, in my twenties, I had to go back and figured out how the body of American classical cinema was terrifically important to me. It was really film noir that drew me back. That was when I watched [Howard] Hawks and Ford and [Orson] Welles. The American Fritz Lang films and all these things became really, really powerful and defining for me. I didn’t grow up with them, mostly. Ford was a great discovery of my twenties and I became consumingly interested in him. He’s a counterpoint, in a way, to the narrower stylistic and emotional intensity of film noir or even of someone like Hawks or Welles. He had more of literary amplitude. He’s like a [Charles] Dickens. He puts all of life into the story and he’s not afraid of sentiment in certain ways that the others have to ‘hard boil’ it in order to tolerate it. The Searchers meant a lot to me, in some ways, as an embarrassing but really compelling antidote to the cool of film noir. It probably helped lead me through Girl in Landscape then into the more diverse and sprawling canvas of something like Fortress of Solitude and what I’m working on now. It becomes excruciating hearing myself have to claim the influence, exactly. What mattered was that I loved the movies. I just started to want to devour every Ford film I could see. I probably, to this day, can’t even say why it mattered so much to me then or why they continue to matter to me in retrospect. He just became really moving to me. Someone who I wanted to be around. His voice and his sensibility, even though, obviously, there are great variations. They’re not all as paradoxical. You could study The Searchers forever. You can study The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance forever. Or you can go back to something like Long Voyage Home or Wagon Master and just breathe it in endlessly because it’s so perfect. Then there are a lot of really homely or strange or incomplete pieces like Two Rode Together. This is a movie I wouldn’t recommend to anyone, necessarily. But it all mattered to me at one point.

http://www.fandor.com/blog/spontaneous-similitude-jonathan-lethem

RIP Harry Carey Jr

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-harry-carey-jr-1921-2012

RIP.

In (Three Godfathers), Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and Carey Jr, as the Abilene Kid, are three "wise" bank-robbing bandits on the run in the desert, who rescue a baby after the death of his mother. Carey sings Streets of Laredo as a lullaby and has a moving death scene in which he lapses back into childhood to recite the Lord's Prayer. According to Carey, after the first take of the death scene, which he fluffed, Ford left him to bake in the scorching heat of Death Valley for 30 minutes. When the director returned, a near delirious Carey delivered his speech, his mouth so dry he could not swallow and with a voice that resembled the croaking of a dying man. "Why didn't you do that the first time?" a grinning Ford asked Carey. "See how easy it was? You done good! That's a wrap!"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/30/harry-carey-jr

Saw Cheyenne Autumn again, had to tell laughing 'hipsters' at Lincoln Center to shut up when they lol'd at Dolores del Rio wailing over corpses.

Watch it, then read this by Toshi Fujiwara:

http://www.fipresci.org/undercurrent/issue_0509/cheyenne.htm

The centerpiece sequence with James Stewart as Wyatt Earp is a slapstick sketch of white settlement as an amok devolution: Manifest Idiocy.

Dave Kehr on the new Blu-rays of How Green Was My Valley & The Quiet Man:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/movies/homevideo/new-dvds-how-green-was-my-valley-and-quiet-man.html

The scene where the brothers confront Crisp about unionizing is a marvel.

I'm glad Kent Jones was the one to administer this scholarly spanking:

The Searchers is about the toll of vengeance on actual human beings, while Tarantino’s recent work is about the celebration of orgiastic vengeance as a symbolic correction of history. Ford’s film has had a vast and long-lasting effect on American cinema, while the impact of Tarantino’s film has, I suspect, already come and gone.

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/intolerance-quentin-tarantino-john-ford

yeah, QT is really full of shit there.

yeah that's one of jones's best essays IMO

quentin, racism in movies is like tap-dancing in movies

it's like anything else, quentin

it's cinema

a lovely paragraph:

The idea of the American West was always more a matter of solitude and space and the balance between individualism and community than a matter of conquest. Along with the city as theater of life in the Thirties or bourgeois existence as genteel prison in the Fifties, the idea belonged to no director or writer, and the culture breathed it long before the movies began. That the idea was built on the backs of indigenous Americans who were, in Ford’s own words, “cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else,” was not exactly hidden from view, but relegated to the background of the story that the culture was telling itself through paintings and dime novels and traveling shows and, finally, movies—albeit never quite as comfortably as is now imagined. It’s curious that American culture and history are still so commonly viewed through a New Left prism, by means of which 1964 or thereabouts has become a Year Zero of political enlightenment; as a consequence, the preferred stance remains that of the outsider looking in, or in this case back, at a supposedly gullible and delusional pre-Sixties America. It’s certainly preferable to right-wing orthodoxy, but that’s hardly a compliment. The New Left is now very old but its rhetoric lives on, many times removed from its original context, and that rhetoric seems to have found a welcome home in film criticism.

however:

yet another revenge fantasy—that makes five in a row.

dunno if Jackie Brown is a revenge fantasy. It strikes me as a suburban California picture.

suburban California fantasy

seems dlh is volunteering for Jones's "fool's errand"

i am parodying qt on violence; it is not a fair equivalency but on the other hand fuck him

think the general stuff about view-of-history here (as in alfred's graf or the one right after it) is rly important

ok, I admit I avoid the Q's words whenever I can.

caught how green was my valley for like the third time a couple weeks back but for some reason it really hit me on a emotional level this time, also the cinematography was just stunning. kudos, arthur c miller

A well written piece, and this guy is mostly right on in his defence of Ford, but his apologetic stance towards Birth of a Nation bothers me far more than the fact that he obviously hasn't seen Jackie Brown.

yet another revenge fantasy—that makes five in a row.

dunno if Jackie Brown is a revenge fantasy. It strikes me as a suburban California picture.

― A deeper shade of lol (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, May 3, 2013 8:15 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

1. kill bill 1
2. kill bill 2
3. death proof
4. inglorious basterds
5. django unchained

caught how green was my valley for like the third time a couple weeks back but for some reason it really hit me on a emotional level this time, also the cinematography was just stunning. kudos, arthur c miller

― buzza, Friday, May 3, 2013 8:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a slept-on ford/miller collab is wee willie winkie. it's an awesome movie, and it is stunningly shot. i've seen a 35mm print twice (one tinted, the other not) and I can't imagine the DVD provides the same effect but it should probably still be pretty impressive.

sarris says it's a better move than the informer and he's right

i have to admit i didn't quite follow some of jones's stuff about BoaN not being "propaganda." not in the strictest sense, no, but it does essentially advocate race war. and i think it's unfair to griffith if we think he was somehow unaware of or indifferent to that. i also think it's important to remember that many people in 1915 felt the film was an abomination (notably the emergent NAACP, which published a pamphlet against it). so it's at as though condemning it is simply holding it to an anachronistic standard, not that jones makes this argument.

anyway i do think he acknowledges the vile racism in BoaN, but it seems like he's distancing that from griffith a little bit. i wouldn't call him an apologist for BoaN, maybe a _slight_ apologist for DWG.

i also think he understates the extent to which indian/white encounters (and violence) were central to the western genre in literature and film. it's right there, in much of its complexity, in last of the mohicans.

but overall his points are well-taken and i think it's a lovely, bracing corrective not just to tarantino but to all the other folks (including henry louis gates, who was interviewing tarantino) who would make stupid assumptions/generalizations about the western in general and john ford in particular.

god I forgot Death Proof

I think what he's saying is we have to reckon with the racism in BoaN, not come to reductive conclusions that lead us to make movies like QT's.

That Kent Jones piece is great and was a long time in coming.

I've seen a lot of westerns in my day. I grew up in the Golden Age of tv westerns. They were on prime time every night, and the old movie western serials from the 30s and 40s still got a lot of play in off hours. Certainly, native americans were often protrayed as sneaky, untrustworthy and bloodthisty savages, although not always. As the presence of living native americans receded to the far margins of the American scene, 'good indians' started to appear in westerns more often.

Casting my mind back, I'd say that nasty evil white men FAR outnumbered the injuns when it came to who were the prominently featured bad guys, by at least 50:1. This makes perfect sense when you realize just how limited your plot possibilities are when your bad guys live entirely outside the culture of your good guys. It's very hard to bring them together into the same scene.

watching The Prisoner of Shark Island tonight.

Dave Kehr on the 5-film Columbia box:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/movies/homevideo/tcm-offers-john-ford-the-columbia-films-collection.html

Two Rode Together is essential, and I like The Last Hurrah and Gideon's Day. Never have caught The Whole Town's Talking.

"when you shoot, kill a man!"

"If they move...kill 'em!"

Sorry, wrong thread

Watched They Were Expendable last week after finishing Mark Harris' new book. A flop on release, and I can see why: it lacks grand flourishes, concentrating on men entering and exiting destroyers and battleships and shit.

Never watched that one. Eager to know how you liked that book, Alfred.

Harris on Pappy and the war (I reserved it at the liberry):

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2014/04/image-of-the-day-41114.html

that book was very enjoyable and prompted me to watch the long voyage home which was good and not just because of john wayne's attempted swedish accent

Ford at Fox megabox for $50 today only (GRAPES code)

http://www.foxconnect.com/ford-at-fox-the-collection.html

"when you shoot, kill a man!"

― espring (amateurist), Tuesday, March 25, 2014 5:09 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

is this walter brennan horsewhipping his boys in my darling clementine? Evil Walter Brennan is the best fucking idea in the history of movies.

yup

morbius, i have to thank you for that. wow.

just payin it fwd, saddlebritches

When you do, it will be a magnificent obsession.

Sorry, wrong thread.