088 REVIEW
e’re barely out of the starting blocks and 2020 already has a
frontrunner for home ents release of the year. This Indicator box
set of John Ford’s various collaborations with Columbia Studios (he was
predominantly a Fox man for the most part) is a model of clever curation
and contextual innovation. What’s interesting about this collection is
evidence of the vast tonal range achieved in work from a director who
famously styled himself as a maker of westerns. There’s a real sense
that Ford adapted his style to meet the demands of the script and the
actors cast in the lead roles. The earliest title here is the knockabout
1935 screwball comedy, The Whole Town’s Talking, in which meek office
drone Arthur “Jonesy” Jones (Edward G Robinson) discovers that,
unfortunately, he is the exact physical double of violent bank robber
Manion, whose mugshot has just been printed on the front page. It’s
a deftly handled, manically edited urban farce with the side pleasure
of Jean Arthur funning things up as Jonsey’s fast-talking romantic
ideal. The concept of two actors playing separate characters and then
interacting with one another has become a staple of modern cinema,
but the clever camera tricks employed here by Ford blow modern green
screen and digital imposition techniques out of the water.
We now skip forward 20 years to 1955’s The Long Gray Line, a title that
refers to the infinite columns of gray-clad, red-cheeked troops filling out
the procession lines at America’s foremost military academy West Point.
There’s an argument to be made that this stands among Ford’s top-tier
masterworks, as it tells of salty Tipperary expat Martin Maher (Tyrone
Power) who falls into the role of shambling army instructor, only to see his
young, battle-moulded creations return home as coldly typeset names on
a list of war casualties. A subplot involving Maher’s own attempts to start
a family with his brassy, eminently sensible wife Mary (Maureen O’Hara)
lift the film from pained critique of military bluster to a searching, horribly
moving study of life’s futile purpose. It genuinely begins as one of the
director’s all-out goofiest films, with pratfalls and monkeyshines a-plenty,
until it embraces a seam of intense melancholy and dashes towards a
crooked finish line of all-consuming existential terror.
1958 bought a fiery twofer in the dark, London-set poicier, Gideon of
Scotland Yard, and the profile of an ageing political firebrand, The Last
Hurrah, headlined by a perfectly cast Spencer Tracy. The former, again,
is the kind of film that, in lesser hands, could’ve ended up as a hum-drum
potboiler (it’s based on a series of police procedural novels by JJ Marric)
that just sinks into a directorial CV as a transitional money-earner. Yet the
subtle innovation of following Jack Hawkins’ pipe-chomping Commander
George Gideon across a single day and numerous overlapping cases,
makes for a far more interesting and remarkable example of counter-
intuitive screen storytelling. The Last Hurrah, meanwhile, is the rousing
sketch of a dyed-in-the-wool politico attempting to preserve his legacy for
future generations of likeminded souls. He does this by mounting one last
fight against rival candidates representing big business and the media, and
sees his ‘man-of-the-people’ chram tested to its limit. Each of these films
comes with a bounty of extras, including new video essays from one of
the great Ford scholars, Tag Gallagher, and new appreciations by some
of the best critics on the circuit. This is, finally, a collection to enjoy in
the reflected knowledge of Ford’s canonical triumphs, but also a sneaky
entry-point into one of cinema’s biggest, most artistic and poetically
robust oeuvres out there. DAVID JENKINSJohn Ford at
Columbia,
1935-1958
W
Directed by
JOHN FORDStarring
SPENCER TRACY
EDWARD G ROBINSON
TYRONE POWER1935-58
Released 2O APRILBlu-ray