Hey, it's my January movie list!

New year's wishes are too belated to express now, but I don't care, Happy New Year 2009! Already one twelfth of the year has gone by. To commemorate the month I begin below with the year's first monthly recap, all of the movies that flickered before my eyes in January 2009.

This is a fresh start to a year using the monthly-recap format that was adopted halfway through 2008. Before the format of Seen was a jotting down of thoughts on every film on my queue; the trouble with the old idea comes in its sheer volume. There simply was not enough time to complete a mini-review of every movie that I saw. By April of 2008 I had converted to monthly lists that considered my movie queue as a collective.

In the next 11 months my aim is to make those collectives a little meatier than they have been in the past. Many previous films received only a simple mention of their title accompanied by a still image; and while this was an easy way to complete a list of lackluster movies that did not give me much to contemplate (The Incredible Hulk, 2008; Sex and the City, 2008; La Vie en Rose, 2007), it diminished the status of movies that deserved attention and considered thoughts (Advise and Consent, 1962; WALL-E, 2008; Coming Home, 1978; Step Brothers, 2008).

If there is anything to take away from this little film journal, it's that it is a work in progress. I refuse to absolutely resolve to fuller thoughts on all movies--I'm already feeling the constraints of time--but I do promise to try. Especially for the cinematic gems that incite real viewing pleasure.

One note on the contents of the January 2009 movie queue. With the new class I am teaching on Film History (at the U of Chi. Graham School), you will notice an influx in the viewing of early cinema and silent era films. Not only do these screenings alter the usual, that is more contemporary, landscape of the Seen queue, each has served as a fantastic refresh on my perspective of movies overall. Some of these early silent pictures I had not seen in years, displacing my memory of them to what is written in popular film history texts. Seeing them again with fresh eyes turned out to be a real joy and an affirmation of my love for movies then and now. A delightful way to ring in the new year!

Oh, and by partaking in multiple viewings of the same films (in preparation for each week's class, then the in-class screening itself) I watched 30+ whole movies this January. Thank you, 15 second Thomas Edison short films!


The First of the Month

Chungking Express - (1994) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, January 1, 2009
Many moons ago I met a good friend at the Telluride Film Festival who wrote about this movie in an essay that answered, "If you could bring one movie into the future, what would it be?" He, among a short list of other friends I met at the festival's Student Symposium, each swapped the titles of our topic films so we could watch them on our own. Six-and-a-half years later I have done that, and my goodness I should have done it sooner. Wong Kar-Wai's curiously intimate picture of fate and love was another one of those blocks of consecutive hours where you don't have a single complaint about life (maybe this is why I like the movies so much); and is a nice retrospective on the director's now rather lustrous career. It has great energy. I can see why my friend would want to bring that to the future.


The Secret of My Succe$s - (1987) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, January 3, 2009
Yes, the title is actually spelled with a dollar sign for an "s." Remember how much you loved Alex P. Keaton? Trust me when I say Brantley Foster's version of Michael J. Fox's popular capitalist character will wear off much of that bloom. The movie is almost completely unwatchable. In my defense, my boyfriend's parents gave this to us as a stocking stuffer, so I was only giving the movie the justice it deserved a la the thoughtfulness of relatives.

But let's take a look at this poster! Okay, downtown New York City skyline circa mid-1980s, so that means Wall Street, subtext: money. Second, a magnificently bloated phallus, the champagne bottle; hands with vampy red-painted nails are wrapped firmly around its shaft, and who is this at the top, riding the wave of ejaculatory discharge? Oh! It's Brantley Foster (Michael J. Fox), the country boy turned cunning businessman in tennies. Male-centric, women-objectifying, money grubbing, sex hungry. And that is all you need to know about this movie. If you ever do watch it, look out for the particularly pornographic closeup of Helen Slater taking a drink at the water fountain. Kind of backpedals on the whole women progressing in the workplace thing.



Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters - (1985) - DVD (new Criterion edition!)
Seen: Saturday, January 3, 2009
Quite a different look at 1980s cinema we've got with Paul Schrader's '85 masterpiece following the M.J. Fox pic. I have lightly written about Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters before, so I will let those posts suffice in the place of anything here. At left is the cover of the new Criterion Collection DVD (released last June) that I can proudly say brightens up my still-growing DVD library. I would like to publicly thank my great friend in West Hollywood for giving this to me at Christmastime. (I adore it, Ms. Knox!)













Woman Is the Future of Man - (2004) - DVD
Seen: Sunday, January 4, 2009
Woman Is The Future of Man became my second experience in the Hong Sang-soo filmography, and is it possible to call something emotionally wrenching and peaceful simultaneously? If so, that's the shorthand description I'd like to give this 2004 movie about two old friends fighting over one woman. The South Korean director has an eye for everyday spaces that convey intimacy like you are watching a home movie; there is something about the settings in his film overall--spaces, props, costumes, and the ultra-bright light of day/florescent interior lights--that for lack of better phrasing, have a tangible look of the world I know.

Bear with me as I try to elucidate this idea more. Looking at the still above, the table is littered with items specific to the characters' national culture, and some that I recognize first-hand: the green liquor bottle and a Pringles potato chip can, respectively. The table itself is like none at which I have ever dined, low to the ground with its characters surrounding it on the floor. There is both symmetry and chaos in this frame. The characters are equally balanced in the shot, but they surround an asymmetrical mess below. I look at my desk at which I write this, the monitor stands in the middle, a lamp at left, a file organizer of similar dimensions at right. But while there is balance with regard to the primary objects atop the desk (like the characters surrounding the dining table in the still shot above) there are papers, books, pens, cords, and more, cluttering the area in between. I guess what I am trying to get at with this humble analysis of space, is simply that Hong Sang-soo's settings look very real and very relatable, to the extent that even the objects that I have never seen or touched before (i.e. the small green liquor bottles) have a sense of importance about them; there is a universality to their mere existence in the frame just as they are, completely unstylized. And that is sort of what it's like to watch a Hong Sang-soo film.




Frost/Nixon - (2008) - Film
Seen: Thursday, January 8, 2009
If you know me you know I am a Nixon junkie; if you don't know me, let me introduce myself: my name is Pamela and I am a Richard Nixon junkie. My feelings on old Tricky Dick are well documented on this site and finally (one of the greater feats of 2008), in book form, "Violating Time: History, Memory, and Nostalgia in Cinema" Ed. Christina Lee, by Continuum Press. You can find my piece "Zero Percent Chance of Rain: The Watergate History and All The President's Men" in chapter 3. I think that book has gone down in price on Amazon.com, but if you're still strapped for cash, wait for the cheaper paperback.

Anyway, to touch on the movie at hand, Frost/Nixon, I have a few ideas about this movie that primarily concern the question of "why?" I'm currently developing more formal thoughts on this and the greater topic of Nixon, so stay tuned for that. We'll see what happens with it. At the very least I'll post it here for your reading pleasure at a later date.




The Red Shoes - (1948) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, January 10, 2009
For years dancer friends would remind me of how no movie about dance is ever really about dance, in either rehearsal or production form. Though I can think of movies that have been stamped with the dancer's satisfactory approval (The Company, 2003), I can think of many more that dancers despise for its untruthful portrayal of the process (Center Stage, 2000; Save the Last Dance, 2001). For me, a mere wanna-be ballerina twirling on her living room floor in tube socks, the task is simpler; and I have to be frank when I say that movies starring dancers as characters in a narrative have been, for me, less about dance than they have been about love, politics, social class, or the exuberant expression of emotion; dance is usually just the occasion from which a story or character evolves.

Before I watched Powell-Pressburger's ballerina film The Red Shoes (1948) I had one expectation: color, bright, vivid Technicolor, an expectation that it met and exceeded. Its chromatic aesthetics aside, it's a movie whose dance is analogous to the rises and falls of its characters; in other words, it's a story as much as it is a story about dance. Perhaps it does not present you with a display that says it is an exact replication of the day in the life of a dancer, but it describes it subtly enough to satisfy, and then bombards you with a love story as magical as its filmic reconstruction of staged ballet sequences. Mwah!




Milk - (2008) - Film
Seen: Sunday, January 11, 2009
I wrote, as a good film scholar friend has dubbed it, a "brain dump" on Gus van Sant's late 2008 release Milk at my other blog, Scarlett Cinema. I want to talk more about this in the scope of the wider biopic genre (is it technically a genre?), but for the sake of time I have to hold off on that until a little later.









Let's Watch Lumiere!

Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday, January 17, 2009

The wonderful compilation of early cinema pictures on Kino's The Movies Begin, Vol. 1 disc is essential to watch and rewatch, then rewatch again. Come on, almost all of these movies are a matter of seconds in length, I know you've got the time. I watched each Louis and Auguste Lumiere film on the disc, but the ones below are favorites, a few of which were shown in class (all released from 1895-1896):

• Workers Leaving the Lumiere Factory
• Baby's Breakfast
• Swimming In The Sea
• Children Digging For Clams

On the same disc are whole swaths of Thomas Edison/W. K. L. Dickson shorts too. Here are the predictable highlights (all released between 1894-1897):

• The Kiss
• Serpentine Dances
• Sandow
• Seminary Girls

I also caught up with George Melies's short film fantastique, A Trip To The Moon (1902). My first acquaintance with this movie was made sometime in 1996 with the Smashing Pumpkins music video that is based on it, "Tonight, Tonight." It's a great song, and a fantastic contemporary reproduction of a movie long forgotten and erased from popular memory. Of course, when my own film school days came later it hit me like a ton of bricks that the MTV video wasn't an original idea. But looking at Melies's movie now in 2009 for the first time in a number of years I found it easier to watch and had a greater appreciation of its inventive stop-motion technique. Previous versions of the movie were screened for me in classes sans voice-over narration, which is one of the original elements of the film when it was screened in 1902. So this truly was a moment of seeing a movie again for the first time.


And Then There Was Griffith

Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday, January 17, 2009

Griffith, Griffith, Griffith, oh, D.W. Griffith--what is it about you, how did you just get cinema right off the bat? You just got it. Here we are now, almost 100 years out from the time your movies were made, and your depth of composition is jaw dropping, your actors magnificent (especially the sublime Gish sisters), your subject matter so provocative. You did it, David Wark!

Also from Kino is an equally important and well-put-together DVD of Griffith's Biograph films. Below is a list of those that I watched, and one--A Corner In Wheat--that was screened in class:

• Those Awful Hats (1909)
• A Corner In Wheat (1909)
• The New York Hat (1912)
• The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912)

And a Picture Diary of the Rest

Silent Clowns

Police - (1916) - DVD
Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday, January 17, 2009








Cops - (1922) - DVD
Seen: Monday, January 12 - Saturday January 17, 2009













Silent Ford!

3 Bad Men - (1926) - DVD (from the "Ford at Fox" set! Wow!)
Seen: Sunday, January 18, 2009
Ah, this is Johnny Ford. (I couldn't find a decent still of 3 Bad Men...)

















Dancing on Air

Swing Time - (1936) - DVD
Seen: Wednesday, January 21, 2009























It's so surreal...

Un Chien andalou - (1929) - DVD
Seen: Friday, January 23 and Saturday, January 24, 2009




















MONTAGE!

The Man With A Movie Camera - (1929) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, January 22 and Saturday, January 24, 2009




















Somnambulistastic

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - (1919, 1920) - DVD
Seen: Friday, January 23 and Saturday, January 24, 2009





















Old Story/New Western

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford - (2007) - DVD
Seen: Saturday, January 24, 2009



















A Biopic Masterwork

Che - (2008) - Film (double-bill roadshow version!)
Seen: Sunday, January 25, 2009
More thoughts to come quickly on this...
























Good Mornin'!

Singin' In The Rain - (1952) - DVD
Seen: Tuesday, January 27 and Wednesday, January 28, 2009




















Portraits of the American Land

The Plow That Broke The Plains - (1936) - DVD
Seen: Thursday, January 29 and Saturday, January 31, 2009
























Stagecoach - (1939) - DVD
Seen: Wednesday, January 28 and Saturday January 31, 2009


















See you at the end of February!

The Wings of Eagles - 1957 - DVD

Sunday, April 8, 2007

The Wings of Eagles is practically a remake of The Long Gray Line, or even a story reminiscent of Mister Roberts considering the sentiment for the military Ford repeats through each. It's movies like this that disrupts my joy for Ford, because it's just too damn patriotic. I think Ford fares better working with Westerns, where he can be just as patriotic but with a rougher edge. By virtue of the cowboy setting his characters are going to be angrier and a lot more vulnerable, but once he frames clean-cut soldiers in a sterile modern military environment, they're sort of dull.

John Wayne plays Frank W. 'Spig' Wead, a Navy man at odds with a rival in the Army. The interactions between each ringleader and their posse is cartoonish. Their fights are staged under the whip of tight choreography: their fighting in one room leads them linearly into and across other rooms; a door opens and they fall into the obstacles that room has in store, in once instance a swimming pool. Scenes like these are funny, but they're taken out of time. The slapstick scenes are almost too clever for their own good, because it's too overwhelming to return to the droning military drama when they're over.

One point of interest, however, is the stock footage from Navy filmstrips and direct clips from his earlier military-sponsored film, The Battle of Midway.

The Wings of Eagles was made in cooperation with the U.S. Navy.

The Long Gray Line - 1955 - DVD

Monday, March 12, 2007

The Long Gray Line is perfectly John Ford. It takes a historical subject and splices it with comedy (including a bit of slapstick) into what begins as an awkward biopic, but ends with grace, nostalgia, and wholeness. It's the life story of Marty Maher (Tyrone Power) at West Point; the clumsy day-to-day of an Irish immigrant who falls in love with Mary O'Donnell (Maureen O'Hara) at first sight, and documents their married life from year-to-year. Eventually Marty becomes a non-commissioned officer, a big step for a guy who was doing dishes at his entrance into the academy. The narrative is as awkward as Powers' foreign character: new characters pop into the story with as much grace as Bush Jr. reading poetry, and then are suddenly gone only to reappear scenes later. As you work through the story none of it seems to be going anywhere, and you're not sure why Who and What is important to the movie. Then by the last half hour of the movie it all culminates into a beautiful picture of personal history. A recurring scene of soldiers marching in formation in the field is a mirror of what Marty saw years past; the same image of Marty's memory is played out in the plane of space before him. With a lot of nostalgia, the seams of Marty's life are blended into two final scenes that assure his place into the collective memory of his counterparts, and into history as a whole. It's a surprising tearjerker ending of a film that only scenes earlier didn't make sense.

Mister Roberts - 1955 - DVD

Sunday, February 11, 2007



Mister Roberts is set on a WWII supply ship, headed by a brass Captain Morton (James Cagney) who hasn't let his crew off ship for nearly a year. His booming voice (though we don't yet know it is his) thunders above the ship deck instructing the crew; it's a eerie, monotonous sound that feels disconnected from the ship, God-like, as if it encompasses the sea and surrounding sky. It's a weird opening scene with the ship separated from anything else on the horizon. As far as we know from the first few minutes it very well could be abandoned; the voice an imagined sound from the grave. A glimps of the shore appears a few moments later and it's clear the ship is set just off the mainland, and from here the absurdity of the ship's positioning begins.

Naturally charming, and alternately quiet and witty, William Powell plays Lt. "Doc," who is Lt. Roberts' (Henry Fonda) confidant and friend on their lonely, droning time in the service. Most of the time there is literally nothing for the soldiers to do but wait until the warring soldiers at sea need supplies. They sit idle, desperate for a diversion, even a fight. Things are so laid back that Lt. Roberts is addressed as "Mister Roberts," the crew's father figure. He keeps them sane; they peep through their binoculars at the nurses' station on land, and he lets them to peel their shirts off in the hot sun--all against Navy protocol, and of course much to the dismay and anger of Captain Morton. Harry Carey, Jr. plays Stefanowski, one of the many seemingly pubescent soldiers on ship--you can't miss him with his glistening white waves of hair.

Ward Bond is "Chief Petty Officer Dowdy," as usual a gruff but tenderhearted authority figure who seems more dimensional against the foil of Cagney, Powell, and Fonda. Jack Lemmon plays funny-man and slacker Ensign Pulver, who talks a lot of smack but rarely has the gaul to live up to his words. Once Lemmon enters the mood naturally lightens—particularly in the scene where he, Doc, and Roberts concoct their own brand of whiskey, made of none other than water and a few liquids from the medicine cabinet.

John Wayne's second son Patrick also has a part as a soldier, though it is small so pay attention whenever the larger group of soldiers is on screen. Working with Ford really is like being a part of a family; he's screened generations of his best actors, Harry Carey and Harry Carey, Jr; the Duke and his son Patrick, not to mention his own brother Frank in earlier films (who also used John when he was a director himself in the silent days). Beside these players are his unofficial family, the recurring actors like Fonda, Cagney, and Ward Bond, all smack into the Closterphobic space of this ship stuck at sea. They even bicker like family.

Mister Roberts has the same apathetic and frustrated tone as some recent war movies, like Jarhead (2005), for example, where Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal) is bored to numbness in Iraq. It's full of pent-up anxiety that longs to be unleashed against an enemy that for them doesn't exist.

Also, if you were an AMC junkie in the past, you might be familiar with the movie Ensign Pulver (1964)--they played this movie almost as regularly as Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid (1969). Ensign is a remake of Mister Roberts with Walter Matthau as "Doc," and a slender Jack Nicholson as a shipmate.

Mister Roberts was co-directed with Mervyn Leroy, and uncredited as director is Joshua Logan, the film's screenwriter and later director of its remake, Ensign Pulver.

The Sun Shines Bright - 1953 - VHS

Sunday, January 14, 2007



I think there must be no more than one copy of this movie in the Chicago area, and I was lucky enough to persuade some friends of mine that it was the most important movie to see on our movie night, which took place almost two weeks ago. It was serendipitous that the folks I was gathering with were apathetic about the movie selection, because John Ford's The Sun Shines Bright (1953) was the very next movie in my queue for this never-ending Ford Film Marathon (dude, it's been going on since September). No surprise that this very scarce movie can't be found on DVD (at least not to my knowledge), so we had to deal with the metallic fuzz of a VHS tape, which had to have originated some time in the 80s.

But who cares, because this is the film of Ford's that Rosenbaum and others say is his best. Yep, that's right, they say it's even better than The Searchers or Clementine, or even Stagecoach. The movie was shot on black and white film stock rather than color stock, which was standard by the time of the film's release. It's headlining actors are all non-stars, and if you didn't know about Ford from the credits, it might initially look to be a cheapie B-movie from a no-name director. All of Ford's hits are studded with stars like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Katherine Hepburn--all of the big guys. So why the heck did he retreat to such simple style?

Well, I have no idea. Though, it lived up to a lot of its hype, despite its racist portrayal of blacks in a turn of the century south, and some rather dense and hard to hear dialogue. A number of times we had to stop and rewind the tape to figure out what the characters where saying, and the conflict was dealt with so subtly that all of us were never entirely sure what was wrong, and which character was connected to which. The general story, however, concerns a daughter whose mother's identity is hidden from her. Sadly, with the passage of two week's time, and the starts and stops of the screening, I get a little hazy relaying exactly why this was so.



Suffice it to say for now that it is about a family caught between two social worlds: one that is progressive in dealing with a post-war southern society, and one that is distinctly rooted in antebellum culture. Ford is the man of Westerns, and in The Searchers, for instance, the final shot frames Ethan (John Wayne) in a doorway, looking outdoors. He staggers, we guess aimlessly, into the dusty west alone and unsure. Then, comes The Sun Shines Bright that shows its main character in one of the film's final shots, from the opposite angle: he slowly walks into the house away from the outside world, presumably where the culture and history with which he identifies remains intact. How's that for a history lesson? Aahh, the good old days.


Also, please note my absence from the week of January 15th-January 22nd. I traveled back to New York for my sister's wedding, which brings me to this: Congrats to Amanda and my new brother (in-law), Marc! Cheers, you two!

Mogambo - 1953 - DVD

Thursday, January 11, 2007



Mogambo is sexist, misogynistic, and plain offensive in its portrayal of women. Yet, John Ford manages to make it look good. It stars Eva Gardner, Grace Kelly, and Clark Gable in the African countryside, all of them looking fine except for a slightly rotund Gable. He's graying and mean in this film. He always has a condescending smirk across his face as one of the two leading ladies throws themselves mercilessly in his arms (God help them. Under normal circumstances I would say, "go girl!" but Gable is nothing but offensive in appearance and attitude this time around.)

Set against the African landscape, Mogambo essentially is a western. The jungles and hills of eastern Africa are featured prominently in Ford's compositions, aligning it with the American western landscape. Instead of cowboys we've got hunters and tourists. Gable is a hunter by trade. He keeps caged lions and tigers and other animals with large fangs and a growl right there on his property, just outside his front door. Inside he's got a pet snake (a huge phallus if there ever was one) named Joe. Plus he is angry. Not the snake, Gable, and when Ava suddenly appears for a quick vaca from the city (she's from New York, you can tell by her snarky accent) he lets her know it.

The two sort of hit it off. If by "hit it off" you mean "Ava is desperately lusty for Gable but he is too macho and mean to acknowledge her affection as more than a childish adoration." In that case, yes, they really do hit it off. Ava's traipsing around in a deep, scoop neck green shirt that keeps falling off her shoulders, and is barely kept up by the points of her breasts, which are also prominent features in the film. She's wearing high heels and a long draped skirt, not exactly the right look for some African R&R. Though, Ava's body is precisely the point of her being there anyway; she is sex on two long, balletic legs. If only she'd use them to kick Gable where it counts.

The best (i.e. most offensive) part of the story happens when society girl Grace Kelly shows up with her husband, begging Gable to tour them through Gorilla country. Suddenly Kelly falls out of love with her husband and in love with Gable, but the order may be switched on that. I remain baffled why or how this attraction exists between Kelly and Gable. She has no reason to like this man. Perhaps it is because Gable embodies all that Kelly has been taught to fear or despise--is it this that makes him so terribly attractive to her? Either way, like a little girl, Kelly turns into her most naive persona ever seen on film; she behaves like a schoolgirl who has been betrayed by her crush. In the end Gable plays the two women at once, the fine gentleman that he isn't.

Here is a spoiler, so don't read this paragraph if you want the surprise. Grace Kelly shoots Gable when she catches them drunk and reeking of repressed sexual desire together. Shot him right in the arm, and you know what? He smiles when she does it. He turns to Ava and smiles, that condescending grin back across his face again as Ava fumbles with the first aid kit. Grace finally leaves with her hubby. You thought your relationship was dysfunctional.

Though, like I said, through all of this dysfunction and misogyny Ford does make the movie look beautiful. The stock footage of jungle animals gets a little clunky as it's intercut with the smoothness of his original shots, and on a formal note, the blocking of his images is painterly. There must be a mythic tale of the West hidden somewhere in the narrative, but I was too ticked-off by the characters' relationships to give a damn.

Also check out this poster for the movie printed in Spanish. The artist rendering makes Grace Kelly look like Kirk Douglas, and the gorilla look as big as King Kong. Awesome.

What Price Glory - 1952 - DVD

Thursday, January 4, 2007

I guess it is not a coincidence that in another John Ford movie I have found one of the best performances from an actor on screen. James Cagney, hailed by all, and for good reason with his multifaceted ability to sing, dance, and behave in accordance with a script and with his own jerky gestures and inflection intact, completely blows my mind in one defining scene as a soldier dies in his arms. How do you relate the tremors of death, the last instance of life before it flitters away into the intangible ether? How do you show what this physical tragedy does to a person emotionally and intellectually without sledging them over the head with sentimental rhetoric? I guess if you're John Ford you don't say much at all, and hold the scene in long shot as you watch James Cagney's character clench his teeth so hard, and in complete silence that the moment almost becomes separated from space. This is how Ford works, with a hyper-masculine minimalism that strips the scene from emotional elements like weeping and tears and replaces it with a physical thing so heavy you can't look away.

What Price Glory is gory and violent, at least by the standards of 1952 that never come close to the limb-loss, decapitations, and rivers of blood and wormy intestine spills that define war movies of late. Even better, the film subtly hints at the grotesque as Ford chooses to show us the faces of his characters, their reactions to the gore, instead. This is how the violence in The Searchers works as well, with Ethan (John Wayne) playing the canvas on which the macabre is expressed across his face; Ethan's subsequent bitter eruptions among his fellow cowboys (and remaining family members) is also the abstract expression of the human slaughter he witnesses. As previously mentioned in notes on 3 Godfathers, Wayne has the same platform to relate a complex matter, uncut and organic, with time provided by a long-take to show us how his character works through his thought; the expression changes on his face multiple times and the camera holds steady and shows each of Wayne's facial twitches and blinks.

Recently I viewed Peter Bogdanovich's Directed By John Ford (1976/2006), a testament from all of Ford's regular actors, including Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda, that the director kept up a high pressure atmosphere accented by an acerbic attitude that seemed to denote that if you couldn't perform to Ford's expectations you were a personal failure. Apparently, Ford had this mental power over his players, and for better or worse, with performances like Cagney's (and the uncountable moments with Wayne), it worked.



What Price Glory takes place in 1918 France during the first world war, and gives Ford the additional credit of an author who is aware of the enemy's face as much as those of his protagonists. There are numerous shots (some I believe in close-up) that show German soldiers behind barbed-wire trenches, and later the actual capture of a German Colonel. The enemies in this film are given character, which makes the muddy rubble of mortar rust and blood all the more devastating, and certainly more real. There are sound tools Ford uses, as well, that shape the gloomy mood of the soldiers' lives: from the start of the film faint rumblings of explosions linger through the ambiance; as the story progresses the explosions become louder, until finally the characters are in the depth of battle. Finally, and what is perhaps the singularly best shot of the film, is Ford's overhead camera that holds on a yard of American soldiers exercising to the cadence of their uniform chant, which then in one smooth motion pans across the fence to a separate yard of French school girls as they sing and stretch together. With all of its violence, What Price Glory is a war movie where people coexist peacefully.