This "mother of all classic DVD sets," in the words of one Amazon.com consumer, is an event in several ways. First, it's huge: 21 discs in all, comprising around 25 films (there are two edits of "The Iron Horse," as well as a new feature documentary). This encompasses just about half of the 50 titles the legendary director John Ford made for Fox studios between 1920 and 1952. So it's a generous sampling of the 150-or-so movies Ford directed in his half-century career (1917-66), including titles that have become household words and some that have never been heard of.
It's not necessary to believe that John Ford was - is - America's greatest director; you wanna disagree with Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks, go ahead. Nor need we dwell on the factoid that Ford collected an unmatched four Oscars as best director of the year (1935, 1940, 1941 and 1952) - especially since he made a goodly number of movies even better than those he won for.
What matters is that Ford was a giant who created a world on film that is recognizably his, whether the particular window onto that world was a cavalry Western, a small-town comedy, a social-realist problem picture or a battlefield documentary. In a very real sense, he filmed, if not precisely the history of America, then the Idea of America. And he did so with a genius as breathtaking for its naturalness as for the beauty and power it achieved.
He worked for, or at, every studio in Hollywood - sometimes under contract, sometimes as a free agent. The steady but nonexclusive relationship with Fox lasted longest, starting with "Just Pals" in 1920 and running through the 1952 remake of Raoul Walsh's silent classic "What Price Glory." Under the benign aegis of William Fox, the studio was the most director-friendly in the '20s, fostering the distinctive talents of not only Ford and Walsh but also Frank Borzage and the German émigré F.W. Murnau (the first year of the Academy Awards, Murnau's "Sunrise" and Borzage's "Seventh Heaven" and "Street Angel" dominated the field).
Mr. Fox's operation foundered in the early sound era and he was forced out. But in 1935 Fox Films merged with 20th Century, a young company headed by the already-proven dynamo Darryl F. Zanuck. At 20th Century-Fox, Zanuck and Ford were to make beautiful music together.
Nowadays, when the credits of most movies feature multiple production companies jockeying for pride of place, and studios are more concerned with acquisition and marketing than with making movies, it's hard to appreciate what a deep sense of identity and craft once attached to Fox, MGM, Warner Bros., et al. They were factories, and the continuity of personnel and working philosophy in the camera, art, costume and music departments - not to mention a contract stable of players, directors and writers - made for clearly recognizable product. To be sure, often the results were formulaic; but a good journeyman director (Henry King, Henry Hathaway) could rely on first-rate artisans to help him make a sturdy entertainment, and a great director could make the team his own and carve out a fiefdom.
Fox was a good place for Ford because it specialized in Americana (Zanuck himself hailed from Wahoo, Neb.), and because art directors like Richard Day and Thomas Little could create towns and streets and houses that looked like real places where people led mythically appropriate lives, and because Bert Glennon and Arthur Miller (no relation to the playwright) were great cameramen who could make you believe their soundstages were lit with raw sunlight. Screenwriters Lamar Trotti and Nunnally Johnson (coincidentally, both Georgians with journalism backgrounds) were dab hands at conjuring rural or small-town storylines with affection, respect and a gentle brush of whimsy; it was Trotti who wrote the original screenplay for Ford's first masterpiece, "Young Mr. Lincoln" (1939), and Johnson who adapted "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940) to the screen without betraying it.
But above all, there was Zanuck. The only studio head in Hollywood capable of creatively collaborating on the films issuing from his factory, Zanuck knew he had a good thing in Ford and rarely interfered. (Of course, Ford had a reputation for "cutting in the camera" - shooting only the angles he wanted at the length he wanted, so that if an editor, or a studio boss, tried to rearrange things, there was no extra footage to fiddle with.) Like any other contract director, Ford shot some movies he probably had scant interest in, and some are in this set: "The World Moves On" (1934), surely, and probably the quite likable Boys' Own Adventure movie "Four Men and a Prayer" (1938). But after that job of work, in 1939-41 Ford got to do "Young Mr. Lincoln," "Drums Along the Mohawk," "The Grapes of Wrath," "Tobacco Road" and "How Green Was My Valley" - not to mention the non-Fox "Stagecoach" and "The Long Voyage Home." Name another director who's had three years like that.
I must inject one anecdote I love about the Zanuck-Ford partnership. Ford was directing "The Grapes of Wrath" and Zanuck was screening the rushes. On came a beautifully composed night scene of Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) wandering away from the stalag-like pickers' camp, crossing a small bridge and looking down toward the moonlit creek to see a tent. The tent houses Tom's old pal Preacher Casy (John Carradine), and the outcome of the scene will be horrific. But for now, something was missing. Zanuck considered for a moment, then dictated: "Needs crickets." Yes, it did. Crickets were added on the soundtrack and the scene became more "Fordian" than ever.
Ford won the second and third of his four Oscars for "The Grapes of Wrath" and "How Green Was My Valley," two heartbreaking accounts of families torn apart by economic and ecological catastrophe, and these films, though previously available on DVD, have been remastered for this big box. So has "Drums Along the Mohawk," Ford's first movie in Technicolor and one of the few ever made about the Revolutionary War era. That's grand, but what makes this set such a valuable occasion is the opportunity it affords to get to know less familiar, and not necessarily less worthy, Ford titles.
Take the three pictures Ford made in the early '30s with the beloved actor, comedian and political scold Will Rogers. "Doctor Bull" (1933) is a scrappy adaptation of a James Gould Cozzens novel, notable chiefly for its New England atmosphere (Ford was a native Down Easter), but "Judge Priest" (1934) and "Steamboat Round the Bend" (1935) are luminous fables from the rural South. "Judge Priest" is especially remarkable for its subversive playing-off of Rogers' persona against the sly Stepin Fetchit in profoundly egalitarian comic scenes; the movie has been shamefully neglected because of Fetchit's infamous political incorrectness.
Or consider "Pilgrimage" (1933), in which a stern Gold Star Mother (Henrietta Crosman) from the rural South makes a redemptive journey to Europe, and the grave of the soldier son she drove to enlist in order to break up his romance with a girl she disapproved of. This knockout drama lacks marquee names but has Ford's heart and some of his most powerfully visualized sequences.
"The Prisoner of Shark Island" (1936) portrays the martyrdom of Dr. Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter) after he unwittingly set the broken leg of John Wilkes Booth post-assassination of Lincoln; in particular, the image of Lincoln's death, the president virtually passing into history in a single shot, is a mystical triumph by Ford and cinematographer Bert Glennon. "Up the River" (1930), "Born Reckless" (1930) and "The Seas Beneath" (1931) all show Ford coping with the coming of sound, and as a bonus, "Up the River" (which survives only by way of a very splicey studio print) happens to mark the feature acting debuts of both Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart. There are also three key Westerns, the genre for which Ford is best known: the magnificent, if historically inaccurate, Wyatt-Earp-in-Tombstone movie "My Darling Clementine" (1946); "The Iron Horse" (1924), the building-of-the-railroad epic that represented the 30-year-old director's first triumph; and "Three Bad Men" (1926), Ford's finest silent Western, and the last Western he'd make till "Stagecoach" 13 years later.
It would be ever so swell if legions of classic movie fans bought up "Ford at Fox" and encouraged Twentieth Century Fox Video to think about bringing out the other half of Ford's Fox legacy-but first, doing "Borzage at Fox," and "Walsh at Fox"! Of course, the price tag is upwards of $200 ... but you have the option of purchasing much of the same material in less costly subsets: "John Ford's Silent Epics" ("Just Pals," "The Iron Horse," "Three Bad Men," "Four Sons," "Hangman's House"), "The Essential John Ford Collection" (all the Fox biggies plus two cuts of "My Darling Clementine" and Allan Dwan's earlier, B-movie version of the story, "Frontier Marshal"), "John Ford's American Comedies" (the Rogers films plus "Up the River," "When Willie Comes Marching Home" and "What Price Glory"), as well as "Pilgrimage" and "Born Reckless" double-featured, "Three Bad Men" and "Hangman's House" ditto, and "The Prisoner of Shark Island" on its own.[[In-content Ad]]