Stagecoach (John Ford, 1939)

John Wayne in Stagecoach

Ringo Kid: John Wayne
Dallas: Claire Trevor
Doc Boone: Thomas Mitchell
Hatfield: John Carradine
Curley: George Bancroft
Buck: Andy Devine
Lucy Mallory: Louise Platt
Samuel Peacock: Donald Meek
Gatewood: Berton Churchill
Lt. Blanchard: Tim Holt
Luke Plummer: Tom Tyler

Director: John Ford
Screenplay: Dudley Nichols
Based on a story by Ernest Haycox
Cinematography: Bert Glennon
Art direction: Alexander Toluboff
Film editing: Otho Lovering, Dorothy Spencer
Music: Gerard Carbonara

Stagecoach breaks a lot of rules: The celebrated sequence in which the Apaches chase the stagecoach is filmed from various angles instead of adhering to the practice of keeping the action moving in one direction across the screen. Some of its climactic moments, such as the final showdown between Ringo and the Plummer brothers, occur offscreen. And the whole film is a bewilderment of locations, with John Ford's beloved Monument Valley showing up whenever Ford wants to use it, and not when it matches the location of the previous shots. The great example of this last is the introduction of the Ringo Kid himself, a flourish of camerawork that zooms in on Ringo with a Monument Valley butte in the background, no matter that neither lighting nor lenses nor the ordinary scrubby landscape of the scenes that frame this moment match up. Clearly, Ford wanted to give the moment a special magic, establishing the character as the film's hero -- even though John Wayne, a veteran of B-movies, was forced to take second billing to the better-known Claire Trevor. The magic worked, to be sure: Wayne became a central figure in the American mythology. If Stagecoach had been a flop, American movies would have been quite different. John Ford would have been known as a director of solid "prestige" films like The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941), three of the record-setting four pictures for which won the best director Oscar.* and not as the man who turned the Western into the essential American genre. John Wayne might have stayed in B-movies, at least until the outbreak of World War II made him a good catch for war pictures. But Stagecoach would never have been a flop: It's too cannily written, directed, and cast not to succeed. It is essential entertainment, cliché-ridden and sometimes clumsy, too obvious by half, but it draws you in irresistibly with its revenge plotting, its damsels in distress, and its social commentary -- the blustering crooked banker Gatewood is far more of a lefty caricature than Wayne or even Ford would have wanted to be associated with later in their careers, and probably owes more to Dudley Nichols's political leanings than to Ford's.

*The fourth, of course, was The Quiet Man (1952), which like the other three was not a Western, even though it starred John Wayne. That Ford never won for a Western is one of the many anomalies of the Academy Awards.

The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford, 1940)

Did Tom Joad's descendants vote for Donald Trump? Do Marfa Lapkina's support Vladmir Putin? John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath begins with a tractor pushing people from the land they've worked, while The Old and the New (Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov, 1929) ends with a tractor helping people harvest their crops. It's just coincidence that I watched two movies about oppressed farm laborers on consecutive nights, but the juxtaposition set me thinking about the ways in which movies lie to us about matters of politics, history, and social justice (among other things). In both cases, a core of truth was pushed through filters: in Eisenstein's, that of the Soviet state, in Ford's that of a Hollywood studio. So in the case of The Old and the New we get a fable about the wonders of collectivism and technology, whereas in The Grapes of Wrath we get a feel-good affirmation of the myth that "we're the people" and that we'll be there "wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat." Both films are good, but neither, despite many claims especially for The Grapes of Wrath, is great, largely because their messages overwhelm their medium. Movies are greatest when they immerse us in people's lives, thoughts, and emotions, not when they preach at us about them. It's what makes William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying a greater novel than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Both are superficially about the odysseys of two poor white families, but Faulkner lets us live in and with the Bundrens while Steinbeck turns the Joads into illustrated sociology. Ford won the second of his record-setting four Oscars for best director for this film, and it displays some of his strengths: direct, unaffected storytelling and a feeling for people and the way they can be tied to the land. It has some masterly cinematography by Gregg Toland and a documentary-like realism in the use of settings along Route 66. The actors, including such Ford stock-company players as John Carradine, John Qualen, and Ward Bond, never let Hollywood gloss show through their rags and stubble -- although I think the kids are a little too clean. Nunnally Johnson's screenplay mutes Steinbeck's determination to go for the symbolic at every opportunity -- we are spared, probably thanks for once to the censors, the novel's ending, in which Rosasharn breastfeeds an old man. But there's a sort of slackness to the film, a feeling that the kind of exuberance of which Ford was capable in movies like Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) has been smothered under producer Darryl F. Zanuck's need to make a Big Important Film. I like Henry Fonda in the movie, but I don't think he's ever allowed to turn Tom Joad into a real character; it's as if he spends the whole movie just hanging around waiting to give his big farewell speech to Ma (Jane Darwell, whose own film-concluding speech won her an Oscar).

Swamp Water (Jean Renoir, 1941)

Swamp Water has a few things working against it other than its title. For one, having a cast of familiar Hollywood stars pretending to be farmers, hunters, and trappers living on the edge of the Okefenokee swamp, and saying things like "I brung her" and "He got losted," makes for a certain lack of authenticity. And at 32, its leading man, Dana Andrews is about a decade too old to be playing the callow youth he's supposed to be in the movie. Add to that the director, Jean Renoir, is a wartime exile from France, making his first film in Hollywood, and you might expect the worst. Fortunately, it has a screenplay by a master, Dudley Nichols, and an eminently watchable cast that includes Walter Brennan, Walter Huston, Anne Baxter, John Carradine, Ward Bond, and Eugene Pallette, who while they may never quite convince us that they're Georgia swamp-folk, do their professional best. It turns out to be a thoroughly entertaining movie that, while it doesn't add any luster to Renoir's career, doesn't detract from it either. This was Andrews's second year in movies, and he gives the kind of energetic performance that mostly overcomes miscasting. Born in Mississippi and raised in Texas, he also seems to know the character he's called on to play, perhaps a little better than the city-bred Baxter, whose efforts at being the village outcast are a bit forced. Brennan as usual plays an old coot, but without overdoing the mannerisms -- it's a slyly engaging performance. Much of the footage was shot by cinematographer J. Peverell Marley and the uncredited Lucien Ballard in the actual swamp and environs near Waycross, Georgia. There is some obvious failure to match the location footage with that shot back in the 20th Century-Fox studio, but it's not terribly distracting.