David Vining's Blog, page 136

Donovan’s Reef

Essentially just an excuse for John Ford, John Wayne, and Lee Marvin to have a paid vacation in Hawaii while Ford said goodbye to his yacht which he had to give up to help pay some taxes, Donovan’s Reef is a movie in search of a story, meandering from one scene to the next, buoyed almost entirely by its cast and an ending that’s just so good-natured that it’s hard not to say something nice about it. It’s not enough to save the film as a whole, but I didn’t hate the experience of watching it....

How the West Was Won

This is a product of a studio trying to make huge spectacle with MGM using the Cinerama process to create what Abel Gance did in 1927 with his Napoleon epic, essentially using a tryptic of full frames to create an ultra-wide view. It has three directors (including John Ford, the reason I’m watching this), a couple of dozen major actors, several of whom could have been considered real stars at the time of the release, and it purports to tell the story in the title, an expansive epic of a gran...

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Contemporaneous reviews of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance applaud its first two-thirds and then feel like the final third just took too long to get to the point, robbing it of the kind of drama they’re expecting. I’ve even seen comparisons to an episode of Gunsmoke. The contemporary view of the film seems to have been that it was just a Western drama, but it’s so much more. This is one of the great American movies. I don’t mean that it’s one of the great movies made by Americans in America...

Two Rode Together

John Ford made this film under duress, almost. He hated the script he was given, brought in his regular writing partner Frank Nugent to help, and threw up his hands because he felt it was unsalvageable. He still made the movie out of a sense of loyalty to the Columbia executive Harry Cohn, who had died a few years earlier. It does cover some of the same ground as his masterpiece The Searchers, but it’s really no more than a surface level plot resemblance. The end result feels like a script p...

Sergeant Rutledge

There was a moment about halfway through this film when I thought it was going to stand as one of John Ford’s greatest triumphs. If the movie had simply kept to the actual story it was trying to tell, I probably would have kept onto that opinion, but the decision to make a courtroom drama out of it and falling into some of the worst tropes of the genre hobbled it far too much. The overall movie ends up a good look at a complex situation with wonderfully drawn and performed characters, but th...

The Horse Soldiers

A Civil War film where the history of the Civil War is all just jumbled together into a pastiche of life in the South while an unconvincing love affair bubbles up between a Union officer and Confederate woman, an oddly built feud between two Union officers breaks out, and the movie just kind of stops because an on set accident let to a death that sapped the director’s enthusiasm for the project and he never filmed the ending, The Horse Soldiers is John Ford phoning the effort in. Talked into...

The Last Hurrah

John Ford knew he was getting old. You don’t make this kind of movie if you think you’re young. The story of a long serving mayor of “a New England city” and his latest run for re-election, it’s about looking back at a full life full of both friends and enemies and finding some kind of peace in a world that’s changing all around you. Anchored by the wonderfully affable performance of Spencer Tracy that ends up giving surprising gravity to the film in the end, The Last Hurrah is a vivacious a...

Gideon’s Day (or Gideon of Scotland Yard)

It seems as though Ford went to Ireland to make The Rising of the Moon and just decided to pop over to London to make another movie. This film, based on a novel by John Creasey, purports to show the day in the life of a police inspector at Scotland Yard, and it is one of those movie days that are just so chock full of events that they beggar belief. Being a sort of slice of life picture, it ends up feeling rather limp in telling the audience how one many can oversee so many swirling bits of ...

The Rising of the Moon

A trio of short films about Ireland, introduced by Irish-American actor Tyrone Power, The Rising of the Moon can best be described as nice. Based on three works of Irish fiction and theater written by Frank O’Connor, Martin McHugh, and Lady Gregory, while taking its title from the original title of the third work, it’s a trilogy of pastiches that try to paint the Irish character that John Ford loved. It doesn’t never gets the depth of feeling or sheer entertainment value as Ford’s The Quiet ...

The Wings of Eagles

This almost feels like an admission that John Ford was getting old. This cinematic ode to a man Ford knew and obviously admired approaches the movement of a history that intersects with his own with the expected warmth and humanity that Ford often brought to his films. It also never forgets that the talent and dedication of its main character was countered by a certain heartlessness towards those in his personal life. In addition, it’s a biopic that tries to capture the full scope of a life,...