Jungle Book (Zoltan Korda, 1942)

Sabu in Jungle Book

Cast: Sabu, Joseph Calleia, John Qualen, Frank Puglia, Rosemary DeCamp, Patricia O'Rourke, Ralph Byrd, John Mather, Faith Brook, Noble Johnson. Screenplay: Laurence Stallings, based on a novel by Rudyard Kipling. Cinematography: Lee Garmes, W. Howard Greene. Production design: Vincent Korda. Film editing: William Hornbeck. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

If you can ignore the childish anthropomorphism that labels elephants "gentle" and tigers "evil," and tolerate the Anglo actors in brownface playing Indians, there's some fun to be had in Jungle Book. Sabu is a lively Mowgli, swinging on vines through the jungle and interacting well with the animal characters, both live and puppet. The sets and Technicolor cinematography are appropriately lush and vivid, and there's a spectacular forest fire at the film's end. But something in me prefers both the cel-animated Disney version of 1967 directed by Wolfgang Reitherman and its 2016 live/CGI remake by Jon Favreau. Is it just that in the fight between Shere Khan and Mowgli I found myself rooting for the beautiful tiger?

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).

The Searchers (John Ford, 1956)

Every time I watch The Searchers I find myself asking, is this really a great movie? It took seventh place on the 2012 Sight and Sound poll that ranks the best movies of all time. For my part, I think Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) a richer, more satisfying film -- and, incidentally, the one that taught John Ford that John Wayne could act. And among Ford films, I prefer Fort Apache (1948) and even Stagecoach (1939). The Searchers is riddled with too many stereotypes, from John Qualen's "by Yiminy" Swede to the "señorita" who clatters her castanets while Martin Pawley (Jeffery Hunter) is trying to eat his frijoles, but most egregiously the "squaw" (Beulah Archuletta) whom Martin accidentally buys as a wife. (Notably, the two most prominent Native American roles in the film are played by Archuletta, whose 31 IMDb credits are mostly as "Indian squaw," and Henry Brandon, who was born in Germany, as Scar.) There is too much not very funny horseplay in the film, a lot of it having to do with the humiliation of Martin by Ethan Edwards (Wayne). Martin also takes a drubbing from the woman who loves him, Laurie Jorgenson (Vera Miles). It's almost as if, dare I suggest, the 62-year-old Ford took a sadistic delight in beating up on handsome young men, since he does it again in the film with Patrick Wayne's callow young Lt. Greenhill. (Do I really need to explain the significance of the way Ward Bond's Reverend keeps belittling the lieutenant's sword as a "knife"?) And although Monument Valley, especially as photographed by Winton C. Hoch, is a spectacular setting, by the time of The Searchers Ford had used it so often as a stand-in for the entire American West that he has reduced it to the status of a prop. Yet by the time Ethan Edwards stands framed in the doorway, one of the great concluding images of American films, I'm resigned to the fact of the film's greatness. It consists in what the auteur critics most admired in directors: It is a very personal film, imbued in every frame with Ford's sensibility, rough-edged and wrong-headed as it may be. And Wayne's enigmatic Ethan Edwards is one of the great characters of American movies -- not to mention one of the great performances. We never find out what motivates his obsessive search for Debbie (Natalie Wood), leading some to speculate unnecessarily that she's really his daughter by Martha Edwards (Dorothy Jordan), his brother's wife. And his radical about-face when he finally lifts Debbie, a reprise of what he did with the child Debbie (Lana Wood) at the start of the film, and takes her home, after threatening to kill her throughout the film, is as enigmatic as the rest of his behavior. But it's a human enigma, and that's what matters. Ford's strength as a director always lay in his heart, not his head. In the end, The Searchers really tells us as much about John Ford as it does Ethan Edwards.

His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940)

I can never make a list of the ten best or my ten favorite movies because once I get started I keep remembering the ones that absolutely have to be on the list. But this is the one that always claims a place somewhere, higher or lower. It is maybe the one essential movie, the one without which life would be just a little poorer. The play on which it's based, The Front Page, was no slouch to start with. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur crafted the single best portrait of what it might have been like -- according to the accounts of others -- to be a newspaper reporter in the first half of the twentieth century, when there was neither television nor the Internet to make one's profession obsolescent. We don't have to believe that it was always like that, but just that occasionally reporters in the big cities had moments like the ones shown in the movie. And then Charles Lederer, with uncredited help from Howard Hawks and Morrie Ryskind, turned it into a romantic screwball comedy by changing the sex of one of the leads, Hildy Johnson, from male to female. And after lots of actresses who would have been just fine in the part (Katharine Hepburn, Carole Lombard, Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur) turned it down, Hawks cast Rosalind Russell in probably her greatest role. Is there a better matched team than Russell's Hildy and Cary Grant's Walter Burns? We can see both why they got divorced and why they could never be separated. And adding Ralph Bellamy as the patsy was a masterstroke, even though it's essentially the same role he had played three years earlier in The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937): the stuffy guy who loses out to Grant, perhaps because, as Burns observes, "He looks like that guy in the movies, you know ... Ralph Bellamy." The whole thing moves so brilliantly fast that you don't have time to reflect on the film's flaws, which include a racist gag about "pickaninnies" and a deep confusion about whether it's satirizing or valorizing its characters' callous indifference to other human beings -- notably the moment when Hildy sardonically refers to her fellow reporters as "Gentlemen of the press" after their harassment of Mollie Malloy (Helen Mack), but then immediately reverts to get-the-story-at-any-price behavior. What keeps it all skimming swiftly above reality is the astonishing skill of the leads (notice how long some of the takes are to realize how great their timing and command of dialogue was) and a gallery of the great character players of the Hollywood golden era: Gene Lockhart, Roscoe Karns, John Qualen, and especially the hilarious Billy Gilbert as Joe Pettibone: If you can tear your eyes away from him long enough, watch how hard Grant and Russell are working to keep from cracking up at his performance. Oh, hell, stop whatever you're doing and just go watch it.