3 Bad Men - 1925

“3 Bad Men” (1925) is notable for the lovely union of 1920s filmmaking and present day film scoring. This John Ford directed silent Western was restored, with a new musical soundtrack added in 2007. The modern music composed by Dana Kaproff is extraordinarily evocative of American Western themes, and deeply moving in the way it re-interprets this old silent movie for a new audience.

(We recently discussed modern scoring of silents in the comments section of this post on “The Freshman” - see here.)

There are the traditional feathery piano chord plunking, standard for silent movies, to be sure, but this score soars with the use of guitar and fiddle. One particular musical theme which is repeated throughout the film is used to illustrate the feelings of the main character, Bull Stanley (played with great sensitivity by Tom Santchi.) He is one of the three bad men, and his loneliness, his sadness, and his redemption are all carried to us effortlessly through music.

The film takes us to the 1877 land rush. John Ford sets the scene with proclamations by President Ulysses S. Grant, shots of a three-masted bark carrying immigrants over the ocean to the new country. There are a few ethic slurs throughout this film, which Ford seems to attempt to balance out with a tribute to the diverse ethnic groups that come to settle the Midwest. This is not a pontificating film, however, in the style of perhaps D. W. Griffith. On the contrary, the film is actually very funny, with title cards that convey the same kind of dry wit Ford’s actors will speak in his later films.

We see American Indians also, and though they thankfully are not treated with the same kind of ethnic ribbing the newcomers get, still they are not fleshed out as human beings. They are used here seemingly only as symbols of a presumably dying culture, signposts to show us we are in the West, and the West is still wild but not for long.


Dan O’Malley, played by George O’Brien, is a devil-may-care Irish immigrant who encounters Miss Lee Carleton and her father, former Confederate Major Carleton crossing the prairie in their enormous Conestoga wagon, leading a small heard of thoroughbred racehorses. Miss Lee, played by Olive Borden is a lady by birth, even though the only time we ever see her out of trousers, boots, and cowboy hat is when she takes a bath. She is flashing-eyed beauty, independent, and sassy.


Bull, and his pardners Spade and Mike, played by J. Farrell MacDonald (who, like Santchi, played in over 300 films, last seen here in “My Darling Clementine” - 1946), are desperados, horse thieves, and overall ne’er do wells. But these old no-account saddle tramps have a lovable quality of humor that throws the audience for a loop and makes them reconsider what is “bad”. Bull, it will be slowly revealed throughout the film, has a sorrowful back story, wherein his beloved little sister ran off with a man who “promised” to marry her. Bull is looking for her, and for the man who took her away.


The man is Layne Hunter, a dishonest sheriff in a ramshackle gold mining town. He and his gang attack Lee and her father to steal their horses, just when Bull and his boys wanted to steal them. Bull and his boys counter-attack and chase off the horse thieves, but Lee’s father is killed. When Lee buries her face on Bull’s chest in tears, we see the beginning of a transformation for Bull, who is reminded of his failure to protect his younger sister. He and his boys, become Lee’s guardian angels for the rest of the film.

What is interesting is that Ford never makes these scenes too maudlin. There is a bit of overplaying here and there, as was the acting style in silents, but from the director’s point of view there is occasionally a startling cynicism to the film. The bad sheriff wears a white hat, and one senses this was Ford’s way of twisting our film Western iconic imagery. When Bull first comes up behind Lee, he thinks she is a man and intends to rob her at gunpoint, only lowering his gun in astonishment when she removes her hat and her hair falls to her shoulders. Dan O’Malley, who will eventually be Lee’s romantic interest, at first displays no interest in being her hero. In a muddy gold camp where cutthroats and dandies cross paths with prostitutes, only the new Protestant minister, whom an immigrant clothier with all due respect comically refers to as “Rabbi”, is all good, and the sheriff in the white hat, is all bad. Everybody else is drawn in shades of gray.

There are impressive long shots of a massive expanse of prairie filled with wagon trains and cattle. The scenes of the land rush look so familiar, perhaps because they have been duplicated many times elsewhere. There are shots of charging wagons, toppling over each other, axels breaking, wagon wheels falling off, wagons charging right over the camera, and a shot of a man on a large-wheeled bicycle being towed by a horse. Many of these images you might also recognize in a similar land rush in “Far and Away” (1992) with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.


Bull, Mike, and Spade drive Lee’s wagon and horses into the gold camp, and when Lee is approached by the flirtatious Sheriff Hunter, Bull gets protective and stands between them. The smarmy sheriff announces the unsavory reputations of Bull and his boys, unmasking them and hoping to shock Lee, who was ignorant that her protectors are desperadoes. What follows is another unusual scene, when Lee shows her tolerance as well as her moxie by cavalierly shrugging this off, “Come my three bad men, it’s time we were making camp.” She is a trooper, and when they agree to work for her for nothing, she asks with wonder, “Then you’ll be my men?”

They remove their hats with hesitant gallantry and nod, consenting to be owned. Seeing her holding another woman’s baby, Bull gets another pang of protectiveness, his slow guitar waltz plays, and we seem to see into his troubled soul.


Deciding she needs a better family than they, her men decide to go husband hunting for her. Spade and Mike, who are the more comic relief of the trio, tackle this, and their thirst, at the saloon, but Dan O’Malley eventually arrives in the gold camp, and resumes his attentions to Lee. He has Bull’s approval, because Bull has seen him punch his way out of the saloon. Therefore, he is a good man.

Conversely, we see here, and in other Ford Westerns, that women are depicted as the civilizing influence over the men and the bringers of civilization to the West. It is a romantic notion, but Ford, for all his macho movie fist-fighting, was really a romantic.

Bull is eventually reunited with his lost younger sister, Millie, who was shunted away by Sheriff Hunter among his prostitutes. Hunter’s gang tries to put down a revolt led by Bull against his abuse of power, and in the melee, Millie is shot. Their reunion is brief, and tragic. When Bull realizes that Sheriff Hunter was the man who led her astray, he punches through several doors trying to get to him.

When the minister, Bull, Mike, and Spade attend Millie’s grave the next morning, the wind whips their clothing, and it dawns on June 25, 1877, the day the land rush will begin at noon with the booming of Army cannon.

Life does not stand still, even for the grieving. Bull, Mike, and Spade, who have no personal interest in the land rush, continue to assist Lee and Dan to their promised land, and score revenge on Hunter, who is after them.


Each of the men, in separate acts of bravery, gives his life for the future of Lee and Dan, and so the three bad men are redeemed. In the final shot, a lump in your throat moment when we see their ghosts on horseback on the dim horizon are forever watching out for “our gal.”

The stunning action sequences are enhanced by a spirited fiddle reel, but the real soul of this film is so beautifully displayed in Bull’s theme of the slow guitar waltz. The classic Western is ironically made more classic with a modern touch. Despite Ford’s imprint and some laudable camera work, I can’t believe this film could have as much emotional impact without this lovely music.

Drums Along the Mohawk - 1939

“Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939) leads us into our weekend celebrations of Independence Day, and is one of the few movies of Hollywood’s heyday to deal with the American Revolution. Surprisingly so, since one would expect that the intrigue and drama of the era, not to say the very patriotism of the theme, would lend itself to films of the day. Perhaps the studios perceived the subject was too remote, too far past to be appealing to modern audiences, the people and manners too colorless. Director John Ford’s vibrant movie does much to dispel the ideal that the forefathers were saintly heroes and the Revolution a foregone conclusion.

This early Technicolor film is beautifully shot, and the muted pastel tones are much more realistic and pleasing to look at than the garish “red shirt photography” of the 1940s musicals that would follow. The score is peppered with 18th century fife and drum music, and country fiddle tunes (and a liberal smattering of “In an English Country Garden” to designate the gentility of Claudette Colbert’s refined family heritage).

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert are frontier newlyweds when the frontier was still in New York. Fonda looks good in knee breeches and always looks authentic in period settings, no matter what the period. Claudette Colbert, even more like a porcelain doll in this rough setting of log cabin, appears as she always does; a loveliness of no certain age, but perhaps a bit too glamorous.

The movie is stolen outright by Edna May Oliver, who received an Oscar nomination for her role as the feisty widow who the young newlyweds come to work for as servants when the Indians burn their own homestead and crops to the ground.

The story is comprised of events, rather than a linear beginning, middle and conclusion. The frontier settlement, always battling the Indians, gets word of the colonists’ revolt against the English king. They think it’s a swell idea, and drill in ragtag formation, ready to fire upon any redcoats, but the British domination of North America in this movie is just John Carradine as a menacing Tory leading bands of Indians in waves against the township’s lonely fort.

Miss Colbert, the daughter of a fine family, must adjust to the roughhewn ways of her new neighbors and her new life. She and Fonda suffer privations and tragedies. Their bond, as actually occurred with many frontier couples, is strengthened from necessity of self reliance as much as from being in love.


There are humorous moments in the film, such as when the minister, Arthur Shields, half prays for and half reprimands a local girl for keeping company with a New Englander, “he’s a Massachusetts man, Lord, and Thou knowest no good can come of that.” He also prays for a man with the flux “real bad” and gives a commercial for a local merchant. And when he announces that the militia be formed, “Every man failing to report for duty will be promptly hanged. Amen.”

Ward Bond, another Ford regular, is the lusty, barrel-chested, booming-voiced bachelor who teases Edna May Oliver, and she gives it right back to him. John Ford always seemed to have given as much attention to the character actors as to the stars, which may be why they are so memorable in his films. At one point Bond, some 20 years her junior, playfully plants a kiss on a surprised Miss Oliver that, in its ferocity and very length is probably one of the most passionate kisses on the silver screen. I half expect that if the couple were Fonda and Colbert, the Code would not have allowed the kiss to last that long, but because the characters are supposed to be comic, Ford, and Bond and Oliver, get away with it.

But Edna May Oliver is more than just comic foil in this movie. She gets a chance to display her considerable dramatic talents, and the inherent drama in her each slight movement provides depth and texture to her role. Sometimes the ability to make a moment seem both comic and dramatic at the same time is like laying a perfect bunt down the third base line. It’s a thing of tantalizing beauty when it works.

Miss Oliver does this in such scenes as when Fonda is about to join a column of troops passing by her stone cottage, and she bids him goodbye first so that he can spend another few moments with his wife.

“I’m going to kiss you, so I better do it now so’s you won’t go off with the taste of a widow on your mouth.” Afterward, she comes indoors to keep from watching the men march away, reminded of her late husband, “Sometimes he’d wave…ten to one he didn’t even see me.” Her voice drops wearily, and the comic moment becomes tension-filled, and then simply philosophical.

Another moment finds both Colbert and Oliver on a porch at night, waiting for news of the battle. Colbert paces, finally is persuaded to sit on the step of the porch as Oliver, planted in a chair behind her, flaps a palmetto fan at mosquitoes. The contrast between the two actresses is interesting. Colbert is still, like a pristine statue, looking dreamily off. Miss Oliver hunches forward, her legs spread apart under her long skirts, resting her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hand in a brooding manner much less lady-like. She uses her whole body. Miss Oliver is living her role, while Miss Colbert is seems merely posed for the camera.

But the comedy is never too deeply buried, and bubbles up in Miss Oliver like a stream, as when the tobacco-chewing frontiersman comes to her door and tells her all families must flee to the fort. It’s a tense moment, but seeing he needs to spit his tobacco juice, Edna gets irritably practical,

“Go on and spit, man! Spit and get it over with!” She shoves him out the door so he can do so outside, and then mutters, trying to conceal her alarm about the approaching enemy, “Fool. He can’t even spit by himself.” In her crusty way, she is sensitive to life where Colbert is only hypersensitive to sounds and smells, and possible danger.

When Fonda and the troops march off in the distance, Colbert watches in the foreground, her back to us, from the rise of a sunny meadow. It’s a scene repeated in other Ford films like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Fort Apache”, and “My Darling Clementine.”

The film turns from a study of frontier life to an action flick. Fonda, dragged from the rain and the mud, babbles to himself as he describes the gore of battle while Colbert tries to stop his bleeding and tries not to listen to him. It is her best scene where, distracted from posing, she appears most natural.

A man, sent to get help, is captured and tortured, and the horrified minister shoots him to keep him from suffering when the Indians burn him to death. Fonda is sent next to get help, and the women huddled in the fort don men’s uniforms to make the enemy think the fort is well defended by soldiers. This has precedence in many instances during the Revolution and in the French and Indian War when women took on a soldier’s role, sometimes donning soldier’s uniforms.

Even Daisy, Miss Oliver’s black house servant, dons a uniform and loads muskets. Edna May fires her gun, and takes an arrow in the chest, takes it like a man.

One wonders if the Indians were surprised that the “soldiers” were still wearing their frilly day caps underneath their tricorn hats.

The Indians depicted here are all “savages” except one; that is the character called Blue Back, played by Chief John Big Tree. He is a Christian convert, what were once called “praying Indians”, and so is friendly to the settlers. One could excuse Ford’s making the enemy Indians “savages” and the “good Indian” as the one who befriends the settlers, because that is how English-speaking settlers in the 18th century would have viewed the matter themselves. The year 1939, when this film was made, was too early for the revisionist history that attempts to make modern films on historical subjects less bigoted, if perhaps also sometimes less accurate in depicting the true (if sometimes repugnant) feelings of our ancestors.


However, Blue Back could have been a stronger, more well-rounded character, and Ford might have shown the immense conflict of what it must have been to have his feet planted in two different worlds. Unfortunately, Blue Back is little more than a clown who hollers “Hallelujah” at unexpected moments. Ironically, as a member of the Seneca nation, Chief John Big Tree is probably the most authentic link to the locale of the film.

The film ends with the fort being saved and the news that the British surrendered. That means the British lost the war. What they do not know, and the colonists all might have wondered for at least another generation, was who won the war? Who were the Americans?

John Ford brings the film to a rousing close with the strains of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (which since those lyrics had not been written yet, was still “God Save the King”, an odd choice), and the camera pans on the Americans of this frontier outpost admiring the raising of their new American flag atop the church steeple. Separation of church and state hadn’t been invented yet.

The camera lingers on, among others, the smiling face of Daisy, the African-American servant of Edna May Oliver, played by Beulah Hall Jones (in the last of only a few films she made). Daisy could have been a freewoman, but at this time it is more likely she was a slave. Her expression of breathless hope and satisfaction looking at the new flag is quite surprisingly moving. The camera lingers on Chief John Big Tree, also admiring the flag. Is it Ford’s way of showing we’re all happy Americans now, or Ford’s subtle irony that “freedom” and “equality” would have to wait for some people? Flawed, and diverse, if not equal, they all take in the moment to celebrate the new nation.

I hope you can take a moment this weekend to celebrate it, too. By the way, among the flags that finale color guard is holding appears to be the flag of New England (see this post from my New England Travels blog). Apparently, the reverend’s warning against consorting with New Englanders (or perhaps only Massachusetts men) was suspended for the moment.

My Darling Clementine (1946)

This week we’ll discuss a couple of movies that, while both of wildly different subjects and settings, are similar in the poetic way they tell their stories. The poetic quality in the first, “My Darling Clementine” (1946) is blatant and on purpose. Director John Ford, however hard-nosed he preferred to appear in real life, had a romantic view of the West. He does not trouble to conceal the rhapsody of his storytelling. He exploits it.

In the second film that we’ll save for Thursday, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (1945), novice director Elia Kazan tells a gritty, unsentimental story in a manner that is both beautiful and memorable. Curiously and ironically, he later expressed disappointment in what he felt was a lack of realism.

Beginning with the weathered signpost style credits in “My Darling Clementine”, and the song played as part of a medley of American folk music and hymns we will hear in the background of this film, Ford launches a tale of the Old West that uses familiar themes and settings, but is never cliché.

The true story of Wyatt Earp, his brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Clanton gang facing off in a gunfight at the OK Corral is gussied up with a lot of incidents and subplots that are not true. Ford is a storyteller, not an historian. We might note here with tongue in cheek on behalf of Mr. Ford’s Irish roots that a word for both storyteller and historian in Irish (and Scots) Gaelic is Shanachie, an economy of language which might intimate the ability to get the facts right is not necessarily held higher than the ability to tell a story.

Henry Fonda plays Wyatt Earp, a famous lawman who for the moment has given up being a sheriff for driving cattle with his three brothers on their way to California. We are shown a large herd of cattle crossing the favorite Ford setting of Monument Valley, a harsh and barren country Fonda remarks is “like no country I ever seen.” We have the chuck wagon, the guitar plucking in the background, the sage brush, and the raucous town of Tombstone, Arizona, where three of the Earp brothers head for a shave.

We get a first glimpse of the fastidious barber at the Bon Ton Tonsorial Parlor who will return later in the film for a funny bit with Fonda. While they are gone, their cattle are rustled and their brother who remained guard is murdered. Now Wyatt Earp takes for himself the job of sheriff of Tombstone to get some justice.


Gunslinger Doc Holliday haunts a local gambling parlor. He is played very well by Victor Mature, whose performance as the doomed man is understated, brooding, and emotional despite the mask of fatalistic acceptance. He and Fonda have a relationship that is adversarial and also one of comradeship, a terrific balance of male bonding and suspicion of each other. When Mature and Fonda share their first drink together at the saloon, Mature erupts into a coughing fit, whipping out a white handkerchief and hacking ferociously into it. This is our signal that he is a dying man.

Whenever somebody coughs into a hanky in the movies, they’re going to die. It happened to Greta Garbo in “Camille”, it happened to Victor Mature in “My Darling Clementine.” Just make sure it doesn’t happen to you.

Mr. Ford treats us to long slow shots of the wide open spaces, the clear sky, and a western town with growing pains. The town actually looks authentic, without that movie set look that a lot of towns have in western films. We are also treated to a lot of wonderful close-ups, studies of grizzled beards in the rain, of the complex emotions of Victor Mature and Henry Fonda, and of the simmering Linda Darnell, who plays a feisty saloon singer with the irresistibly funny name of Chihuahua.

Miss Darnell, who is Doc Holliday’s lover, gets some competition when his former love arrives, a respectable lady from Boston, whose name is Clementine. Mr. Mature, knowing his ultimate fate from coughing into his hanky, tries to save Clementine, played by Kathy Downs, by driving her away. Mr. Fonda, meanwhile, is smitten with her.

In between all the justice seeking and whiskey drinking and poker playing and wooing of females, there is the subliminal message that the West is changing. Towns like Tombstone are becoming civilized. As much as the inhabitants of these towns long for the same stability they had Back East, there is a mournful note as well. The irony is that the West represents individualism and freedom, but without laws and rules, it is also seen as a cesspool of anarchy.


Fonda sits at the grave of his murdered younger brother and says to the name carved on the wooden grave marker, “Maybe when we leave this country young kids like you will be able to grow up and live safe.” This could be a cheesy scene, but Ford handles it beautifully, with the help of cinematographer Joseph MacDonald. In their hands, this is not a saccharine sentiment. Intentionally poetic perhaps, but also realistic. How many of us have spoken aloud our thoughts to headstones in moments of grief? It’s a cheesy thing to do, but we do it.

There are many moments of humor interspersed as well, when Mr. Fonda dumps his poker chips into his hat, and then puts the hat on, and then proceeds to his first encounter with Doc Holliday. The scene where the barber, played by Ben Hall, sprays a startled Fonda with cologne, and when anyone thereafter remarks about the scent of honeysuckle in the springtime air, Fonda must abashedly confess that the lovely smell is him.

Later, when walking with Clementine on his arm, Fonda passes the barber who gives him a brief but very funny “I told you so” look of satisfied superiority, as if the cologne is responsible for Fonda’s success with females.

One comic moment turns in to a powerful scene of longing, and sadness, and pondering the meaning of life. A traveling actor drinks a bit too much, and then stands upon a poker table in the saloon while the wonderful Walter Brennan, father of the Clanton thugs, and his mean spirited boys, who all seem to resemble Bluto, threaten the actor into entertaining them. The drunken tragedian proudly launches into Hamlet's soliloquy.

Mature and Fonda come to rescue him, and watch. We see that Mature is fascinated by the actor’s performance. When the tired old Hamlet cannot remember the rest of his lines, Mr. Mature takes over, delivering Shakespeare’s words with simple dignity. Since we have already seen him cough into his hanky, we know that the lines about whether it is nobler to take arms against of sea of troubles, about dying and sleeping, has a deeper and more profound meaning for the doomed Doc Holliday. Fonda sees it, too.

More reminders that the West is changing occur when a flurry of activity assembles at the new church in town. Just the floor is completed, and a dance is held to raise money for the rest. After a bit of square dancing, Fonda leads Clementine in a spirited Texas two-step, while a couple of American flags flutter in the breeze. It is pure American tableau, and Mr. Ford knows that, that’s why he does it.

“Church bells in Tombstone!” is exclaimed with disbelief, another sign of the encroaching civilization.

Mac the bartender, played by J. Farrell MacDonald, who we’ve seen in a number of films, is one of those stalwart character actors without whom no film of Hollywood’s heyday could have been made. There are a number of them in the Ford gang, including Ward Bond, Jane Darwell, Russell Simpson, and former silent star Mae Marsh in a brief scene. We will see Mr. MacDonald in another bit part on Thursday in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” where he played Carney the junkman.

“You ever been in love, Mac?” lovelorn Fonda asks the bartender.

“No, I been a bartender all me life.” Not quite. Mr. MacDonald’s been a lot people, in a lot of movies but only for bits of screen time in each one. Still, he is noticeable and we remember him when we see him.


Judgment day at last arrives, and a showdown between Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday and their men against mean old Walter Brennan and his boys. When Victor Mature is shot down, his hanky, which he always carries in his right hand, gets snagged on the rail fence, and hangs there, fluttering in the breeze like a flag of truce.


When peace is restored, Fonda bids goodbye to Clementine with a chaste kiss on the cheek and the hope of returning someday. She will remain here, this transplanted Bostonian who was told earlier that her kind did not belong here. She is to be the new schoolma'arm. Another sign of encroaching civilization. Clementine brings an end to the roughness of Tombstone not with a pair of six shooters, but with perfumed toilet water and soft spoken manners.

It is not an historically accurate film, but it is a tidy story, well told, and at times, quite beautiful.

We will see on Thursday that though the veteran director Ford seems to embrace poetry; the novice Kazan, whose films will launch a new style of movies in the coming decade, eschews it, yet manages to create a most beautiful film himself.

Movies about the Presidents

As we celebrate tomorrow the inauguration of our 44th President, it’s interesting to consider that there really haven’t been a lot of movies made about our Presidents.

Hollywood’s heyday covered a lot of historic figures in movies that dramatized fact and fiction, sometimes without seeming importance for one over the other. In this parade of historical figures, the Presidents have been given short shrift. I can think of only a handful:

“The Flag” (1927) covered in this earlier blog post, Francis X. Bushman plays a brief role as a dashing George Washington in a story that is really more about Betsy Ross.

“Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), Henry Fonda plays Honest Abe in this John Ford film.

“Abe Lincoln in Illinois” (1940). Raymond Massey, who many feel owned the role of Lincoln after portraying him in Robert Sherwood’s Broadway play, takes the helm as Commander in Chief in this John Cromwell film. Ruth Gordon plays Mary Todd Lincoln.

“Wilson” (1944), Alexander Knox plays Woodrow Wilson in this wartime-inspired patriotic piece.

“The President’s Lady” (1953). Charlton Heston plays Andrew Jackson the film about Old Hickory’s courtship with his wife, Rachel.

“PT 109” (1963). Cliff Robertson plays a pre-Presidential Navy Lieutenant John F. Kennedy.

The best I’ve seen among Presidential biographies belongs not to Hollywood’s Golden Age, but to HBO’s magnificent series on “John Adams” last year, based on the book by David McCullough. It’s a good thing to be reminded of our heritage from time to time, our strengths as well as our weaknesses, and biographical dramatizations help stir our imaginations if they cannot stir our memories. As the saying goes, you have to know where you’ve been to know where you’re going.

Hail to the Chief.

Two Views of Ireland

Director John Ford came up with two representations of the Irish in film, and they show both ends of the spectrum between the violent circle of vengeance that has plagued that culture for hundreds of years, and the sentimental portrait of a witty caricature. “The Informer” (1935) and “The Quiet Man” (1952) give us not necessarily opposing views of Ireland, both show repressive aspects to their society, but between them give a fuller picture so much so that they should probably be shown together.

Both are excellent films, and despite being the products of Hollywood, because both are directed by a man whose family came from Ireland, who spoke Irish Gaelic himself, they carry an authenticity that most Hollywood films do not have when depicting a foreign land. “The Informer” is gritty, stark, and reflective of the German expressionist school of film. Victor McLaglen, who won the Academy Award for his performance, is a bumbling, flawed, irascible man, a man of little intelligence, whose betrayal to the police of a friend turns him into a haunted, and hunted, man. He turned in the fellow for the reward money, to finance immigration for himself and his prostitute girlfriend to America. He squanders the money instead, his guilt chasing him through the foggy night. In the end, confessing his crime to the betrayed man’s mother, played by Una O’Connor, the IRA catches up with McLaglen and shoots him like a dog. His arms held out in rapture for being forgiven by the Madonna-like sorrowing O’Connor, this lowly, lying, desperate ape of a man becomes Christ-like, and dies for his own sins.

Mr. McLaglen returns in “The Quiet Man” as a boasting, selfish, brawler, the bossy brother of Maureen O’Hara, without whose permission she cannot marry John Wayne. McLaglen, despite similar attributes to his bedeviled character in “The Informer” is here a comic figure, and actually likable despite his irascibility. Maureen O’Hara is a spitfire, able to hold her own with her bullying brother, and John Wayne is the American who has returned to the land of his birth to settle down. This time it is Wayne who is the haunted character, an ex-boxer who caused the death of a competitor in the ring, and who runs from his guilt, and all violence, to this peaceful Irish countryside.

Though we have dependable Ward Bond along as the parish priest, the rest of the cast are Irish, members of the distinguished Abbey Players. They, more than the color picture postcard scenery, give this film its charm. The stereotype of the hard-drinking, brawling Irish is more than winked at. Particularly in the famous scene where Mr. Wayne drags Miss O’Hara across the hills and fields, as townspeople swarm to watch, and the sweet village lady graciously offers Mr. Wayne a stick, “to beat the lovely lady,” we know we are being gloriously kidded by a culture that delights especially in laughing at itself.

Soon Mr. Wayne trades Maureen O’Hara for Victor McLaglen in a cross-country boxing match that wildly entertains the locals and ironically squares things between him and his brother-in-law. Barry Fitzgerald as the village matchmaker and bookie is a gem in this film. His coy smile at Maureen O’Hara as she sings at the spinet and suddenly bursts into what must have been genuine laughter at him, is delightful. The kindly act of brotherly love when the Catholics of the neighborhood pretend to be Protestants so that the visiting Church of Ireland bishop won’t remove the local vicar, played by Fitzgerald’s real-life brother Arthur Shields, and cheer him as he drives by, is a reminder that enmity and vengeance are not part of everyday life for everyone on this island.

“The Informer” is bleak; “The Quiet Man” is romantic confection, and both films together illustrate a more complete picture of a culture of fierce nationalism, religious passion, humor, oppression and human flaws than they would taken separately. Ford and his vision of his ancestral homeland is the glue. It is through his skeptical, and romantic, eye that we see this culture which has come to personify this feast day of a Christian saint.

John Wayne - 100th Anniversary

I once met an Arizona cowboy, a real cowboy, not a film one, who said he wanted to vote for John Wayne as President. That Wayne had entered politics only on the sidelines and not a candidate, and the fact that he had been deceased for some years, did not detract this cowboy from his belief that Mr. Wayne was somehow eternal, and somehow eternally the right answer to America’s problems.

John Wayne had a remarkable career, and his image on screen as someone stalwart, moral, and dispensing no-nonsense justice was, and is, appealing in a world where we have many doubts about where our society is going and who we can really trust. The 100th anniversary of John Wayne’s birth, on May 26th, will undoubtedly give us a chance to watch some of his films and remember again what made him so likeable, and so iconic an American figure.

His long career, begun in the 1920s, really took off after John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (1939), and the 1940s saw Wayne’s career blossom, from war films to westerns. By the end of the decade, he was firmly ensconced in the public’s, and the film industry’s mind as the man who made things right just by showing up. The posse and the cavalry were just there for support.

But that is image, and film is first and foremost, all about illusion. John Wayne did not bravely fight the enemy in World War II, no matter how many times he did it on the soundstage. In truth, he applied for a deferment and never served, even though many of his fellow actors, men with families and careers that were just as important to them, joined the armed forces. At the time, Mr. Wayne was criticized as caring more about his career than his country, and was disparaged as a coward, just as he would accuse men who would not serve in the armed forces during the Vietnam War of cowardice. Some have suggested that this period of his life in Hollywood during the war may have helped make him such a vocal supporter of investigations against communists in Hollywood in the 1950s and an advocate of right-wing politics in the future. Whether his later actions were because of, or in spite of, the personal choice he made during World War II not to serve, he remained a heroic figure on film, and some of his best work was when the film was less about a message and more about the man he was playing.

One of his best in this vein was in “The Quiet Man” (1952) where John Wayne plays the lone American in an Irish village, out to put a violent past behind him, only to find more exasperating, and much more comic, battles ahead of him before he finds happiness with Maureen O’Hara. He is as much the rugged individualist in the rain-swept ruins of an Irish castle, vainly trying to protect from the rain Miss O’Hara, who nestles against him in a beautifully filmed wordless scene, as he ever is leading a cavalry charge in Monument Valley.

His cross-country fistfight with Victor McLaglen is the most entertaining pummeling we are likely to see on film, and director John Ford’s stock actors, including Ward Bond, Barry Fitzgerald, Mildred Natwick, and a riotous flock of actors from Irish theater make Wayne’s Irish-born but American-raised character seem as if he is truly a man without a country.

In a world today where Americans are so disparaged abroad, it is especially poignant to see Wayne in this foreign setting, bewildered and misunderstood, but managing to fit in at last while losing none of his American individualism. He still stands tall. (At 6’4½ ” he should.) If John Wayne means different things to different people, then that is as it should be. Being allowed to express your own perspective is one of the best things about being American.

That’s all for this week. See you Monday.

Some Movie Icons

Grace Kelly became a 1950s acting icon, after appearing in only 11 films and also in a number of early television guest roles. Audrey Hepburn appeared in about 30 films, reaching icon status almost immediately and staying there. Katharine Hepburn, who appeared in less than 50 films, is so iconic I’m surprised there hasn’t been a commemorative quarter released even if she wasn’t a President.

Running the gamut between character actor and icon is perhaps only John Wayne, amazingly with over 170 roles, who got his start playing extras in the 1920s. Though he became a B-western cowboy in the 1930s and finally got to say lines, it probably wasn’t until John Ford’s “Stagecoach” (1939) when Wayne steps into our popular consciousness, casting a long shadow and making him a star, eventually an icon in his own right. Before that, he spent a lot of time in the crowd scenes.

What turned John Wayne from an extra in a silent film about college football to The Duke, whose fans would carve him on Mount Rushmore if they could, never mind put him on a quarter? What makes an icon, if one person becomes one instantly and another slowly morphs into one after decades? What do they share? We do not see ourselves in these people, as we might with character actors. We see something more, something perhaps we would like to be ourselves, something perhaps unattainable, yet a quality that we think we understand and admire.

John Qualen - Character Actor

John Qualen’s portrayal of Muley Graves is one of the iconic features in “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940). He had the ability to play types and folksy caricatures without making them seem caricatures. He aimed at the soul of the character, and that shot through the comedic Scandinavian accent bit parts and the grime and utter hopelessness of Muley Graves.

Qualen played Berger in “Casablanca” (1943), the fellow who introduces himself to Paul Henried while pretending to sell him a ring. He is one of the many European refugees in the Rick’s Café Americain, and a member of the underground resistance.

He also played Axel Swanson in “The Long Voyage Home” (1941), and though he distinguished himself as a prolific character actor with various roles in a career of well over 100 movies, most were like his walk-on as the subway night watchman in “The Mad Miss Manton” (1938). He appears from nowhere, leaves an impression, and moves on, presumably to the next movie.

Qualen was brought to Hollywood in “Street Scene” (1931), taken from the Broadway cast to reprise his role as the Swedish janitor.

Most of his films did not afford him much screen time, but he is recognizable and memorable. John Ford used him repeatedly in his stable of actors, and it is in Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” where Qualen gets to dig a little deeper and touch us with something so simple as crouching to the wind-whipped soil of a repossessed farm, grasp the dry dirt in his fist and let it slip through his fingers as he fights tears, telling us, “That’s what makes in ourn, being born on it, and working on it, and dying…dying on it. And not no piece of paper with writing on it …” as he breaks down. In his own way, he is as important as Tom Joad in telling us, in his desperate, somewhat crazed mood of a man on the very edge of losing his mind just as he has lost everything else, the plight of the Okies and the horrors of rural America during the Great Depression. Tom is an observer, but Muley has lived it. Muley’s voice is authentic, and John Qualen makes it so.