Word: films
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Ford's label in the great film cosmos is wonderfully ambiguous. The term "classical" is tossed around a lot ("classical" is what you say when you know someone is a great film-maker but can't explain why except in literary terms--Hawks being the prime example of a victim of creeping "classicism"). Strictly speaking there are two classical directors, Griffith and Eisenstein, both of whom continue to exert a major influence over all narrative film-making. In one sense all narrative is "classical" in that cutting dependent on continuity of movement is basic montage (two shots put together...
...Orson Welles Cinema acts devotedly and unselfishly by running over 20 of Ford's pictures within the next two weeks. The series includes all of Ford's greatest work, and several films unseen theatrically for years, and indispensable to both Ford and film enthusiasts. Nobody's films are as much fun as John Ford's. Their humor and excitement is exceeded only by a visual and dramatic richness on all levels. Becoming acquainted with Ford is a wondrous process ultimately involving a rediscovery of America through Ford's extraordinary vision. At best, Ford's films redeem America, as Hawks' films...
Take, for example, the last couple of reels of a minor Ford film, Prisoner of Shark Island (1936). Dr. Mudd, unjustly imprisoned on an American Devil's Island, is recruited to stop a Yellow Fever epidemic. He must rally the panic-stricken soldiers, who are shown to us initially in rapid montage of richly lit terrified faces (a characteristic Ford device seen in Four Men and a Prayer, The Fugitive, The Sun Shines Bright and other films, and an example of Eisensteinian Classicism). Next he airs out the sick ward as a windstorm accompanied by lightning flashes begins (expressionism...
FORD'S DRAMATIC vision is simultaneously forthright and elusive, and the interest of these introductory notes is only to mention two characteristics which permeate all his films. First, Ford is a master at the sudden juxtaposition of emotional quantities. Serious scenes will turn into comic ones, then revert suddenly to introspection. The greatness of this is that Ford carries the audience with him totally; we are rarely conscious of these shifts and instead experience them without question or intellectual judgment. In Donovan's Reef (1963)--a good film for examining this--the mood of each scene in the second half...
...deliberateness of physical movement through them, and the relationship of the auditorium seats to the main speaker and the flags that surround him. The last reel of Sun Shines Bright contains two of the most stunning sequences in all Ford: the funeral and the victory march that ends the film. The two processions absorb the energy of the people who participate--each person lends his force to the greater whole--and the consequent emotional power of the scenes becomes almost unbearable...