“Stagecoach” (1939)
A landmark film, a defining Western, a career-reinvigorating title for Ford and a star-making one for John Wayne —if “Stagecoach” is not Ford’s most complex or challenging film, it may well be his most complete. A 96-minute long film school, if you choose to take it that way (and among others Orson Welles certainly did, reportedly watching it 40 times over in preparation for “Citizen Kane“), it’s simply peerless in the nuts-and-bolts of its construction. The staging of the action is clear and thrilling, the choreography is deceptively clever —considering Ford is often contending with a single, enclosed location— and the editing is fluid and graceful but also relentlessly engaging: aside from all the other superlatives, this is a film of perfect pacing. And within all this technical excellence, it feels like the ensemble cast truly rise to the occasion —of course, it’s a lot due to Dudley Nichols‘ crackling script, but it’s astonishing to witness the sublimation of so many character archetypes, from Dallas, the hooker with the heart of gold (Claire Trevor, in arguably the best female performance Ford ever elicited), to the Ringo Kid, the unexpectedly noble bad guy hero (Wayne) to the best of Ford’s many drunken Irish sidekicks, Doc (Thomas Mitchell, who incidentally had a hell of a 1939, also appearing in “Gone With The Wind,” “Only Angels Have Wings,” “Mr Smith Goes to Washington,” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”). It’s helped by the egalitarian tendencies of the screenplay, in which each of the stagecoach’s occupants gets their own story, even the travelling salesman in his deerstalker (Donald Meek), and the untrustworthy gambler (John Carradine) who has a perverse code that sees him shun Dallas but instinctively try to protect the “respectable” pregnant colonel’s wife (Louise Platt). Somehow this ensemble approach, as well as increasing the stakes as the stagecoach inevitably comes under attack by Indians (Ford’s humanism does not extend to them), gives “Stagecoach” a modern edge —it feels almost subversive of the standard classical Hollywood approach where there are leads and supporting characters, and never the twain shall meet. The casting of Wayne against all advice is the element that assures “Stagecoach”‘s place in cinema history, but as a complete package, which garnered seven Oscar nominations and two wins, it’s the rare anointed classic that is also an unalloyed joy to rewatch seven and a half decades after its release.
“The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)
Considering the vast impact it had on the nation’s development, there are surprisingly few films that take America’s Great Depression as their overt subject matter —certainly compared to, for example, the plethora of movies that detail U.S. involvement in World War II. That’s largely because of the nature of the narratives: the winning of the war is easily cast as an inspiring story of comprehensible heroes and villains, where the Depression was a morass of misery and degradation that had no single architect one could, cinematically speaking, sock in the jaw. But it might also partly be because Ford’s Oscar-winning, monumental “The Grapes of Wrath,” was for a long time considered pretty much the last word on the subject. It’s an almost indecently beautiful, yet stylistically realist picture (genius cinematographer Gregg Toland would go on to shoot “Citizen Kane” the following year  —the film that only gradually came to supplant ‘Wrath’ as the canonical Greatest Movie Ever Made) and that is not an idle observation: it’s key to what makes the film move fluidly, compelling us to keep watching despite the inevitable downward trajectory of what is after all a portrait of human dignity under unceasing attack. But it also boasts one of Henry Fonda‘s best performances, for Ford or any other filmmaker, as the fractured but idealistic ex-con Tom Joad. Indeed, with Ford seemingly not interested in presenting the Joad clan as anything other than a kind of misty-eyed idealization of the fundamentally decent American family united against adversity, it’s a small miracle that Fonda’s performance is as nuanced and human as it is. But if elsewhere Ford’s handle on his characters sometimes falters so that they become less living individuals than representatives of whole classes of people, it’s only because he has bigger fish to fry: perhaps no other American director could have told this story on the same scale as John Steinbeck‘s epic, quasi-biblical novel (though the film’s ending differs considerably from the thunderclap finale of the book). The subsequent waning of its reputation, due a lot to the overt socialism of its message (ironic seeing as Ford is often considered, erroneously, as the most right-wing of directors) means that it’s relatively less seen than many of his other films. But even for those of us allergic to the kind of theatrical speechifying it sometimes lapses into, there is a magnificence to “The Grapes of Wrath” in the breadth of its ambition, which still makes it the definitive cinematic take on one of America’s most defining epochs.
“They Were Expendable” (1945)
Aside from its actual content, which is a fascinatingly verité-style look at WWII small boat crews tasked with taking down Japanese vessels in the Pacific Ocean around the Philippines, “They Were Expendable” occupies a nearly unique place in the annals of film history because of timing. Developed and rapidly shot at a point in time when the war in the Pacific was certainly not going the U.S.’ way, the film was released in December 1945, by which stage, of course, the war was over, with the U.S. definitively on the winning side. So with the film’s distinctly Fordian themes of the nobility of sacrifice and the heroism of the (probably doomed) ordinary serviceman, it arrived distinctly out of step with the general elation of the immediate post-war period —it’s in many ways an elegy for a noble retreat that could well have been a famous turning point had the war subsequently gone differently and had events immediately, to use a tasteless pun, not blown it out of the water. Perhaps in some ways that makes the film even more valuable a document —the role of small boats in the Pacific theater is an aspect of the U.S. war that is little known. But historical relativism aside, ‘Expendable’ still occupies a prime slot in Ford’s pantheon for the film it inherently is —coupling grainy realism with a trio of strong performances from Robert Montgomery, John Wayne and Donna Reed, it feels like a excellent marriage of Ford’s classical impulses and his documentary instincts (“The Battle of Midway” being the most famous, Oscar-winning example of the 87 non-fiction films the wartime field photography unit made on Ford’s watch). It’s also a great example of Wayne’s wartime persona, and the contradictory nature of that image: he attained his lasting stardom during the war and came to personify the everyday heroism of the all-American patriot serving his country on screen, but Wayne himself never served. In fact, the story goes that Ford, notorious for on-set arguments due to his dictatorial style (he’d later clash with Henry Fonda, also at sea, during the production of “Mister Roberts“) had a rare falling out with Wayne over just that issue, and even now it’s somewhat pointed that the film’s credits list Ford’s and Montgomery’s military rankings, whereas Wayne’s name appears unadorned.
