Word: fords
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Ford became ill one week after the police bust of the University Hall occupation, and has not been involved in any University business since that time...
...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...
...TASK of writing critically about John Ford is made considerably easier now that several battles need no longer be fought: Ford is indisputably a giant of world cinema; his best films appeared during the second half of his career (after The Informer and Grapes of Wrath at any rate), and consist largely of the critically neglected late Westerns...
...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...