A Fine, Good Place to Be: Four Sons (1928)

1928 // USA // John Ford // April 8, 2013 // DVD - 2007 (Fox) 

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.] 

Although John Ford’s surviving early films adhere quite rigorously—even stuffily, at times—to the parameters of Silent Era Hollywood melodrama, the director always seemed to find opportunities to inject idiosyncratic moments into his features. In Just Pals (1920) and The Iron Horse (1924), such moments manifested chiefly as striking formal flourishes or shamelessly lovely shots dropped into lulls in the action. With 3 Bad Men (1926), Ford and the writers at Fox began to doodle a bit more at the edges of story, indulging in just enough digressions from the usual America cinematic formulae to leave a faint impression of artistic restiveness. A touch of both visual and screenwriting verve is in evidence in the 1928 continent-spanning family epic Four Sons, adapted by Philip Klein and Herman Bing with titles by H.H. Caldwell and Katherine Hilliker.

The film’s source is the 1926 Saturday Evening Post short story “Grandmother Bernie Learns Her Letters” by now-obscure Australian-British-American novelist I. A. R. Wylie. The prolific Wylie was one of the more widely adapted female authors of the early twentieth century, although she is most renowned for penning the work that became George Cukor’s 1942 tragedy about American fascism, Keeper of the Flame. In “Grandmother Bernie”, Klein and company find an appealing, sentimental tale of the U.S. Melting Pot, a promised land of second chances and subsumed (but retained) ethnic identity. Four Sons is therefore of a piece with the generalized nationalist myth-making that characterizes Ford’s prior films, particularly The Iron Horse. In the case of the Four Sons, the celebration of America’s patchwork, prosperous character is quite explicit, but also intertwined with a modest anti-war and pro-immgrant message.

The film opens at the dawn of the Great War in an idyllic Bavarian village, a tidy picture postcard settlement populated with fresh-faced Teutonic lads and lasses (the former all in lederhosen, naturally) and provincial comic relief characters. These include: a doddering Burgomeister (August Tollaire); a bookish Schoolmaster (Frank Reicher); a blustering, rotund Innkeeper (Hughie Mack); and an overweening yet kind-hearted Postman (Albert Gran) who is constantly fiddling with his impressive handlebar mustache. The unofficial center of village life is Mother Bernie (Margaret Mann), an elderly widow with four strapping sons and a bottomless supply of misty-eyed maternal devotion. Naturally, the Bernie Boys are uniformly handsome but divergent in their character. Eldest son Joseph (James Hall) is an upstanding soldier in the imperial garrison, Johann (Charles Morton) a fun-loving layabout, Franz (Ralph Bushman) a hard-working blacksmith, and Andreas (George Meeker) a gentle shepherd. Raising such fine specimens of Bavarian manhood is sufficient to earn Mother Bernie the lasting admiration of her fellow villagers, and her sweet, devout disposition and accomplished talents as a baker elevate her to the status of local saint.

A shadow begins to encroach on this pastoral paradise, however, with the arrival of the new commander of the garrison, the aristocratic Major von Stomm (Earle Fox). The officer is quickly revealed as a high-handed and bloodthirsty bastard, eager to turn Bavaria’s sons into hardened cogs in the Kaiser’s war machine. (He even wears a monocle, cinematic shorthand for Cartoonishly Evil German Officer until Grand Illusion’s von Rauffenstein came along.) Following an unpleasant run-in with the Major, shiftless Son Number Two Johann receives a letter from an American friend, and thereafter confesses to his mother a desire to cross the Atlantic in search of a fresh start. Mother Bernie, being a selfless parent, slips Johann the money he needs for the journey from her own modest stash of funds. In short order, the fresh-off-the-boat Johann is settling in as a delicatessen worker in New York City, wooing a vivacious American girl named Annabelle (June Collyer), and sending letters home that enthuse on the golden opportunities of Yankee life.

Back in Bavaria, however, the Great War reaches into Mother Bernie’s household and spirits both Joseph and Franz off to the front lines, leaving only Andreas to look after his old Mutter.  Eventually the day comes that Mother Bernie feared but did not dare contemplate: the Postman, head downcast, delivers the dreaded black-bordered envelope reserved for official letters of condolences from the German Army. The loss of Joseph and Franz casts an undeniable pall over Mother Bernie's now-lonely household and the village as a whole, but the widow endures through her grief. Meanwhile, Johann has thoroughly assimilated into American life, taking over as owner of the delicatessen, marrying his beloved Annabelle, and fathering a son of his own. When the U.S. finally enters the War, Johann anxiously but willingly answers the call, shipping off to Europe to stand against the nation of his birth.

Shortly after word of Johann’s enlistment in the American ranks arrives in Bavaria, Major von Stromm appears at Mother Bernie’s home to convey his official contempt for her son’s treasonous ways. To Mother Bernie’s anguish, von Stromm orders that Andreas must be drafted in order to compensate the Fatherland for Johann’s betrayal.  Some weeks later, as new American doughboy Johann hunkers down in the mist-shrouded trenches of a muddy battlefield, he hears a fatally wounded German soldier calling out in agony for his mother. Moved by the man’s cries, Johann crosses the No Man’s Land and discovers—shocker!—that the dying man is his youngest brother Andreas. Armistice Day follows soon after, and the reviled von Stromm finds himself facing a de facto fragging: his mutinous enlisted men offer him a loaded pistol, urge him to “do the right thing,” and shut the door with a smirk. The War’s end should be a joyous occasion for Mother Bernie, but another black-bordered letter arrives, announcing Andreas’ death and nearly extinguishing what little maternal strength she still possesses.

The war-weary Johann arrives back in the U.S. to find that his newborn son has grown into a fine boy and his business ventures have thrived under Annabelle’s shrewd oversight. Now that his brothers are gone, Johann is resolved to bring his mother to America’s blessed shores to live out the remainder of her days in comfort. Mother Bernie finally receives some overdue good news from the Postman with the arrival of Johann’s letter, initiating the film’s final act. It’s at this point that the tone of Four Sons shifts from a wrenching wartime tearjerker to a mildly screwball tale of Old World to New World hiccups. The U.S.’ literacy regulations for new citizens necessitate that Mother Bernie learn the alphabet, resulting in a sweet and silly scene where the local children provide clandestine support during her schoolroom quiz. Eventually, Mother Bernie makes the crossing and alights at Ellis Island, where her nerves get the better of her during the examination, resulting in an overnight detention. Johann arrives to demand that his parent be released, but due to a series of mix-ups, Mother Bernie slips away into the streets of New York City. The widow wanders Manhattan in a daze, asking random passers-by in broken English if they know her Johann. Fortunately, her odyssey does not last long. The police deposit Mother Bernie at the doorstep of her son’s swanky apartment, where Johann and Annabelle later find her snoozing before the fireplace, with her grandchild cuddled in her lap.

First and foremost, Four Sons is a moralizing celebration of maternal love as the most righteous of emotions. A mother's devotion might be battered by unthinkable tragedy but will ultimately be rewarded for its purity and perseverance.  The film also functions as an earnest paean to post-War American ideals, one that shines an unmistakably positive light on the immigrant's can-do spirit and their eventual absorption into the national fabric. To contemporary eyes, such a stance might seem mildly paternalistic, but in 1928, Ford’s film would likely have been seen as progressive in its portrayal of “good” German-Americans. World War-era nativist loathing for the “filthy Hun” was at its peak only a decade prior. While Four Sons goes out of its way to lionize Johann’s efforts to Americanize—he changes his establishment’s name from “German-American Deli” to “Liberty Deli” after April 1917—it also offers an empathetic view of the German people that calls attention to the universal nature of their virtues and foibles. (What could be more catholic than a mother’s love, after all?) This is consistent with the broad affection that Ford often displayed for “hyphenated-Americans” in his early films—evidenced in his depiction of the rough-edged nobility of the Irish in The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men—while also presaging the manner in which the director’s work would wrestle with racism in the ensuing decades. 

Four Sons cannot be properly regarded as a war picture, as the actual battlefield sequences comprise only a fraction of the picture’s 96-minute running time. All the same, the film contains an undeniable (if ambiguous) streak of anti-war sentiment that emerges from the same moral locus as its humane portrayal of the German people. The loss of Mother Bernie’s three sons is depicted as a senseless waste, one that results from patrician lust for wartime glory and the hubris of German commanders who thought their armies invincible. The film’s sympathies are unequivocally with the grief-stricken mothers who are left behind, rather than with the warmongers who insist that it is sweet and right for Bavarian boys to die for their country. One can’t say with a straight face that the film is exactly searing in its indictment of war—All Quiet on the Western Front it’s not. At one point the intertitles even regress to the romanticism of Ford’s earlier pictures in describing the war as a “great adventure”. Still, there is a potent sense of empathy for the Enemy that pervades the script. In one of the film’s most delicately forlorn moments, a fellow American soldier quietly observes to Johann as Andreas’ wails drift across the lines: “I guess those fellows have mothers too.”

If Four Sons has a narrative misfire, it lies in the eventual evolution into a mildly farcical story about Mother Bernie’s journey to the United States. The stumble is not one of tone, as the film exhibits throughout its running time an affinity for employing both sincere emotion and broad comic silliness, often in the same scene. It’s simply that the “Mother Bernie Comes to America” scenes feel almost entirely like wheel-spinning, an effort to delay the old widow’s just reward for her motherly faithfulness in the name of dramatic effect. Granted, the entire film is constructed to highlight the poignancy of Mother Bernie’s sufferings, often by exploiting knowledge that the viewer possesses but the characters do not. (The arrival of the letter announcing Andreas’ death on Armistice Day is a especially sadistic slow-motion stab in the heart.) Accordingly, what’s problematic about the film’s later propensity to throw up obstacles to the mother-son reunion is not its cruelty but its tiresomeness. Four Sons is, after all, a 1920s Hollywood picture, meaning that it is not a question of whether there will be a happy ending, but how exactly it will play out. Eventually, one just wants to see Johann and his mother embrace and be done with it.

In keeping with Ford’s other surviving silent features, Four Sons boasts quite a few strange little gestures that mark it as the work of a filmmaker of increasing confidence and imagination. There are too many to catalog exhaustively, but a few are worth highlighting due to the significant impression they make on the viewer in the moment. There’s the authentic joy that the director conveys in the depiction of Johann’s early domestic bliss, particularly when his chubby, squirming newborn son knocks over a water basin to the exasperation and amusement of his parents.  There is phantom slap from Major von Stromm that strikes Johann when he reads a newspaper account of German military movements—a ghostly memory from across the Atlantic that prompts the immigrant to rub his cheek absently. And, most memorably, there is the mesmerizing comic mugging of a German soldier as he coaxes von Stromm to suicide, punctated with an almost vaudevillian exit through the door. In addition to Ford’s astonishing ease with a complex, world-spanning story, it’s terrific moments such as these that make Four Sons a pleasure, turning run-of-the-mill Silent Era drama into something more indelible.

A Fine, Good Place to Be: 3 Bad Men (1926)

1926 // USA // John Ford // January 26, 2013 // DVD - Fox (2007)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.]

When considering films that were created three generations ago, it’s often all too easy to assume a stance of jaded dismissal towards the proximal pleasures of story and characters. In the present age of irony, there’s a temptation to sidestep an older film’s most obvious narrative features and proceed to a discussion of formal qualities, thematic subtleties, and cultural context. It’s not an unreasonable act of negligence: films of a "certain vintage" can seem simplistic by contemporary standards of storytelling, relying overwhelmingly on stock situations, broad character archetypes, and a comforting predictability in the resolution of conflicts. (On second thought, maybe old films aren’t that different from today’s cinematic offerings...) However, when the most compelling thing about a particular Silent Era feature is its plot, the critic who fails to engage with the story in a straightforward manner does the film in question a senseless disservice.

Case in point: John Ford’s 3 Bad Men from 1926, an undeniably solid work of silent filmmaking that spins a warm, rousing tale of Western gallantry, dotted with rumpled frivolity and bittersweet moments. Given that it is a Hollywood tale of the Old West, Ford’s film naturally features a romance between a dashing frontier hero and the sassy maiden who catches his eye. In the case of 3 Bad Men, the cowpoke in question is Dan O’Malley (George O’Brien), a somewhat shiftless but clean-cut adventurer who has recently journeyed to the Dakota Territory with a throng of gold-hungry pioneers. Shortly before arriving in the unsavory boomtown of Custer, Dan stops to assist a damsel in distress, Lee Carlton (Olive Borden). Southern horse-breeders, Lee and her father are headed to Custer to sell their stock to settlers, who will need speedy mounts during the upcoming government-sponsored land rush. Initially, Dan attempts to play the droll loner, while Lee regards him with narrowed eyes, but sparks of passion begin to fly between the pair in short order.

Borden gives an alluring performance as Lee, despite the fact that the film occasionally wedges her toughened, self-assured character into a moment of uncharacteristic virginal quavering. Still, it’s a scrumptious little role, quite bold and nuanced by the standards of female leads in 1920s Westerns. The scenario by John Stone and titles by Ralph Spence and Malcolm Stuart Boylan do a fine job of economically conveying the character’s blend of Dixie delicacy and Western ruggedness, trusting Borden to sell it with an arched eyebrow here and a crooked pout there. O’Malley’s performance as Dan is not as memorable as his lead turn in Ford’s 1924 epic The Iron Horse, where the actor had a gleaming Boy Scout presence that centered the sprawling story. In 3 Bad Men, O’Malley’s character is more of a bland do-gooder than a paragon of manliness, though this has less to do with the actor than with the film that surrounds him. Ford and his scenarists just don’t have much time to spare for Dan, relying on his status as the handsome hero to hold the viewer’s attention.

While the romantic dance between Dan and Lee is charming in its way, it is likely that 3 Bad Men would have been a much shallower, less compelling film had it presented the couple’s courtship in a straightforward manner. What makes Ford’s film so intriguing as a cinematic narrative is that the love story is approached diagonally, through the eyes of a trio of horse-rustling, hard-drinking, tender-hearted scalawags: “Bull” Stanley (Tom Santschi), Mike Costigan (J. Farrell MacDonald), and “Spade” Allen (Frank Campeau). Slightly over-the-hill and a little ragged at the edges, Bull and his partners are a good-natured breed of outlaw. Notwithstanding their affection for fighting, cards, and whiskey, they are more rascally than wicked, preferring crimes that can be pulled off without undue violence. (That said, the scoundrels do seem to glean a childlike delight from the prospect of gunplay, especially when the odds are stacked against them.) What’s more, the trio harbors an almost chivalrous sense of honor. In an early scene, this code compels them to intervene when Lee and her herd are attacked by bandits, despite the fact that Bull and company had themselves been contemplating this exact deed of horse thievery.

The grateful Lee thereafter hires Bull, Mike, and Spade as foremen for the looming land rush in Custer, and before long the rogues are resolved to see their lovely, unattached employer married off to a proper husband. Consistent with the film’s admiring, humorous depiction of the outlaws, this compulsion is presented as simultaneously noble, affectionate, and exasperatingly presumptuous. A self-important middle-aged newspaper editor, a trembling dandy with barely a whisker on his chin, and various ethnic minorities are briefly considered and then discarded as possible grooms. Fortunately, a more acceptable candidate appears when Dan stumbles back into the picture in Custer, whereupon Bull persuades the bachelor to join the Carlton operation. The outlaw does not know, of course, that Dan and Lee have already met and been struck by Cupid’s arrow, and a dose of comedy-of-errors silliness ensues.

Meanwhile, an action-adventure plot unfolds in parallel with the romantic storyline. The horse rustlers who raided Lee’s herd are in fact the minions of Custer’s corrupt sheriff, Layne Hunter (Lou Tellegen). Unfortunately, the lawman develops a venomous grudge against Lee and her companions that boils over into a brushfire conflict filled with fistfights, shootouts, and explosions. Hunter is quite the fop—affecting a look that can only be described as “Roy Rogers’ Cabaret”—but he is also a gleefully vicious antagonist. The Sheriff is so accustomed to the cover afforded by his position that when his guileless sweetheart, Millie (Priscilla Bonner), presses him on the matter of marriage, he responds with cackling contempt. In keeping with the tidy plotting that is standard procedure in the Silent Era, Millie just happens to be the long-lost sister of Bull. The outlaw has been searching tirelessly for the silver-tongued snake who wooed his sibling away with false professions of love, and the cad in question is none other than the Sheriff.

This is already quite a bit of story to pack into 92 minutes, and the film throws in another subplot for good measure. A righteous preacher (Alec Francis) has recently arrived in Custer with the intention of rectifying the town’s wanton ways, a mission that naturally attracts the wrath of the Sheriff. In an apparent attempt to establish his credentials as an unmitigated bastard, the Sheriff at one point sets the local church ablaze while the preacher and his parishioners are huddled inside, requiring Bull, Mike, and Spade to ride to the rescue. The film’s various storylines eventually intersect in the climactic land rush set piece, where Lee’s group takes an early lead and the Sheriff and his lackeys close in to gun down the whole lot of them in cold blood.

Despite the sheer amount of plot that unfolds in 3 Bad Men, the film hums along at a easygoing pace, rarely feeling rushed or perfunctory. The action sequences are appropriately exciting and frenetic, but the film also takes the time for humorous diversions and for extended shots of characters mulling over their fates. Bull, Mike, and Spade in particular are allowed more screen time than the other characters, permitting a sharp depiction of the honorable rogue archetype that they embody. The extent to which the film lingers on the outlaws to the exclusion of the romantic leads is novel, and it is this cock-eyed approach that elevates 3 Bad Men above its satisfying but standard-issue genre components. Indeed, the film that most recalls Ford’s feature is Walt Disney Production’s 1959 animated adaptation of Sleeping Beauty, another romantic adventure in which three comic characters nudge the leads together and perform the bulk of the heroics.

In the current era of darker, edgier, ambivalent anti-heroes, there’s something fresh and appealing about Bull, Mike, and Spade: unrepentant petty criminals who nonetheless possess a clear-eyed, almost conservative set of values. Santschi, MacDonald, and Campeau all do a remarkable job of conveying the trio’s shared traits, while using their individual quirks as character actors to provide subtle shadings. (Ford cunningly gives each member of the trio a hat with a distinctive silhouette, which not only permits some visual gags, but also adds a striking flourish to that classic Western visual idiom, the long shot of men on horseback at sunset.) Santschi presents Bull as the sternest and most wrung-out of the three—he is, after all, the one member of their band with a personal vendetta—while MacDonald and Campeau give Mike and Spade more mischievous, acerbic streaks.

All three outlaws, however, demonstrate an unhesitant nobility and selflessness when the chips are down, which in Mike’s case in particular veers into an almost jovial determination to sacrifice himself in a blaze of glory. Ford creates unexpected emotional resonance by maintaining the myriad, contrasting aspects of the trio's character throughout the film: their sardonic view of criminality and violence; their paternal affection for Lee; their bull-headed loyalty to one another; and their doleful recognition of their looming fate. These bold strokes mark the men as idiosyncratic Western heroes, and ultimately make 3 Bad Men a memorable work of character-centered filmmaking.

A Fine, Good Place to Be: The Iron Horse (1924)

1924 // USA // John Ford (Uncredited) // January 1, 2013 // DVD - Fox (2007)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.]

There is a sharp difference in scope between John Ford's 1920 debut at the Fox Film Company, the light-hearted buddy picture Just Pals, and his next surviving feature film, the sprawling 1924 historical epic The Iron Horse. A portion of this contrast may be an artifact of an incomplete twenty-first century vantage point. Remarkably, Ford directed at least fourteen other features in the four-year span between Just Pals and The Iron Horse, nine of them at Fox. However, given that those intervening films are either lost or fragmentary, it's difficult to say whetherThe Iron Horse represents Ford's first, dramatic foray into ambitious, D. W. Griffith-scale filmmaking, or merely the surviving endpoint of a transition from relatively small-bore features to lavish spectacles. The only contemporary expansion in production size under a single director that might compare is Peter Jackson's leap from 1996'sThe Frighteners to 2001'sThe Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Of course, in that five-year interregnum, Ford could have cranked out fifteen or twenty features.

Regardless, The Iron Horse is undeniably a grand film. The restored American cut encompasses 149 minutes, and the film stacks that running time with the sort of sweeping Hollywood extravagance not seen since Griffith's own Intolerance from 1916. The story presents a highly fictionalized retelling of the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad, as seen primarily through the eyes of Davy Brandon (George O'Brien), a wannabe-surveyor turned all-around frontier adventurer. Davy dreams dewily of a path that stretches across America from sea to shining sea, longing for it the way less rugged men might long for the love of a woman. There is a woman in The Iron Horse, of course, the fetching Miriam (Madge Bellamy), Davy's childhood sweetheart and daughter to prosperous railroad builder Thomas Marsh (Will Walling). Nonetheless, the film’s central romance is not between Davy and Miriam, but between the United States and the locomotive, that steam-powered vessel of the nation's economic might.

Hovering over the film is the sanctifying presence of Abraham Lincoln (Charles Edward Bull), who did in fact have a slender real-world connection to the Railroad's early development in his post-Congressional years as a prairie lawyer. However, this historical footnote is not sufficient for The Iron Horse, which casts Lincoln as the the visionary creator of the Railroad, and rather glibly writes him into its first scene, set in Springfield, Illinois at an unspecified mid-nineteenth century time. (The film’s treatment of history is so muddled that making sense of the timeline is probably a hopeless endeavor.) A young(ish) Mr. Lincoln eavesdrops approvingly as surveyor David Brandon, Sr. (James Gordon) enthuses about his dream of a coast-to-coast railroad. Son Davy (Winston Miller) has absorbed this rather civic-minded ambition, and not even the charms of local girl Miriam (Peggy Cartwright) can dissuade him from heading West with his father. Unfortunately, the older Brandon is eventually captured by Cheyenne warriors on the frontier, and as a concealed Davy watches in terror, his father is hacked apart by a sneering, axe-wielding brave with pale skin and two fingers on his right hand.

The film then jumps forward to 1862—unlike in the Springfield-based prologue, the year is pointedly mentioned—as now-President Lincoln puts his signature to the Pacific Railroad Act. The grown-up Miriam is preparing to follow the westward progress of the Union Pacific with her father and her new fiance Jesson (Cyril Chadwick), a starchy and sniveling engineer. At this point, the film’s canvas broadens considerably, following the progress of the railroad’s westward march and lingering over the struggles and antics of a broad cast of characters. These include: cigar-chomping saloon proprietor Judge Haller (James Marcus), who holds ad hoc trials in his canvas-walled establishment; spitfire dance hall girl Ruby (Gladys Hulette); Irish railroad laborers and Union Army veterans Casey (J. Farrell MacDonald), Slattery (Francis Powers), and Mackay (James Welch); and wealthy, shifty-eyed landowner Deroux (Fred Kholer), who holds the lion’s share of the Smoky River tract along the planned Union Pacific route near North Platte, Nebraska Territory. In case it wasn’t obvious that Deroux was the primary antagonist, Kholer squints and sneers beneath so much oily makeup he practically oozes off the screen.

The villainous Deroux swiftly enlists the newly-arrived engineer Jesson into his schemes, which entail quashing Thomas Marsh’s attempts to find a mountain pass that bypasses Smoky River. (Mountains in Nebraska?) Fortunately for the future of the Transcontinental Railroad, it’s roughly at this point that Davy reenters the picture, having been raised by mountain men on the frontier after his father’s gruesome demise. Now a strapping Pony Express rider, he fortuitously appears to valiantly fend off an attack by marauding Cheyenne, promptly fanning the dormant flames of Miriam’s passion. Davy is smitten as well, but his heart ultimately belongs to the railroad; he views the completion of the Transcontinental route as a debt he owes his murdered father. This longing is matched in intensity only by his smoldering loathing for the mysterious, two-fingered white Indian, who naturally surfaces to provoke the local Cheyenne chief (John Big Tree) into escalating his assaults on the Union Pacific.

Ford handles all of this with admirable deftness. Despite The Iron Horse’s lengthy running time, the feature is a terrifically entertaining work of epic filmmaking, packed with rousing action, tense thrills, affecting melodrama, and droll comedic set pieces. Everything moves at a good clip, and although there are numerous subplots, the film pulls nearly all of them all together into a remarkably clean story over the course of its two and half hours. Even the cattle drive that ambles along almost entirely in the narrative’s background becomes a vital plot point in the final act. (Although Ford checks in on the drive so infrequently and so briefly, the reaction it provokes is mainly, “Oh, right, that’s happening.”) The only components of the film that feel somewhat unnecessary are the bits of comic thumb-twiddling, such as Ruby’s legal tap-dance when she is accused of shooting at a lout in Haller’s saloon, or an almost vaudevillian sequence in which a reluctant Casey visits the dentist for a toothache. However, while these comic scenes often feel extraneous to The Iron Horse’s main ambition to tell a ravishing story of the taming of the Old West, they are still charming and memorable, and serve to alleviate the achingly earnest devotion that the film displays towards the Almighty Railroad.

In some respects, Ford’s film function as an American cousin to Battleship Potemkin: a work of Silent Era propaganda that trumpets its ideological message with unabashed enthusiasm, while also serving as an breathtaking showcase for contemporary filmmaking at its grandest. (Potemkin, of course, also has the distinction of being thoroughly revolutionary experiment in cinematic grammar; Ford’s film is excellent, but comparatively paltry in its artistic ambitions.) To contemporary eyes, The Iron Horse’s triumphalist Manifest Destiny worldview is deeply problematic, but only rarely discomfiting to the point of distraction. Less easily set aside is the film’s almost fetishistic regard for the locomotive, which is so over-the-top that its straddles the line between poignant and silly. No scene embodies this wobbly quality more perfectly than a moment late in the film when Davy privately savors the railroad’s completion at Promontory Point, Utah Territory. It’s a great sequence: touchingly intimate in a film that is otherwise grandiose and sprawling, and strangely willing to acknowledge of the phoniness of the upcoming “official” Golden Spike ceremony. Undeniably, it is one of George O'Brien’s best scenes in the whole feature, but when he sits down on the tracks to stroke the steel rails almost sexually it invites a tear and a titter in equal measure.

As one might expect from a Western made in 1920s, the film also features a thick slathering of racism, and not only with respect to Native Americans. The spokesman for the railroad’s Italian workers is Tony (Colin Chase), a mustachioed caricature whose dialog titles are dense with stereotypical accented English. The film depicts this fellow and his countrymen as eager to drop their picks and shovels at the slightest provocation—for example, after not being paid their promised wages for weeks (the layabouts!). Of course, they eagerly return to work after a stirring oratory from Miriam, because as hot-blooded Latins, they are easily persuaded by the charms of a lovely woman. The Irish get off comparatively lightly, for while Casey and his compatriots serve as comic relief, they are also depicted as courageous Indian-fighters, enthusiastically embraced by Davy as “real Americans”. (Ford was himself a second-generation Irish-American.)

The Chinese workers who pushed the Central Pacific line eastward to meet the Union Pacific are given short shrift, and there are no black characters to speak of at all in the film. (Despite the grimness with which the film regards the Civil War, there is no mention of slavery, and much is made of the unifying power of the Transcontinental dream for Union and Confederate veterans.) The Cheyenne who attack the railroad are generally shown to be cunning, murderous devils, apparently resistant to technological progress out of savage spite. Of course, the film makes a point of directing the viewer’s attention to the Pawnee who defend the Union Pacific against the Cheyenne. Meanwhile, the main Indian villain, “Two-Fingers,” is not actually an Native American at all, but a white man who playacts as one in order to pursue his malevolent ambitions. However, these concessions to a 1920s version of racial nuance are in some ways just as pernicious as the broadest scalp-hunting, war-whooping stereotype. The film’s view seems to be that Native Americans will naturally acknowledge the virtues of the railroad and eagerly genuflect to its might, unless they are led astray by a villainous white, in which case an entire tribe can be prodded into a frenzy with little effort.

None of these race-based criticisms is presented to suggest that The Iron Horse is an Evil FIlm, or that its sins as a history-distorting Manifest Destiny mash note overwhelm its virtues as engaging cinema. (If one is prepared to disregard every John Ford feature that offers an ugly depiction of Native Americans, one would have to skip over several essential touchstones in the director’s filmography.) Indeed, the film serves to illustrate just how little has changed in pop cinema in nearly a century. The Iron Horse underlines that the viewer has permission to feel conflicted when a film is superbly entertaining, yet deeply entangled with troubling political or cultural attitudes.

A Fine, Good Place to Be: Just Pals (1920)

1920 // USA// John Ford (as "Jack Ford") // June 6, 2012 // DVD - Fox (2007)

[Note: This post contains spoilers. Part of a series on the silent films of John Ford.]

From what this author been able to discern, the 1920 comedy-drama Just Pals is the earliest film by acclaimed American director John Ford that is currently available for home viewing by the workaday cinephile. This is hardly surprising, as Just Pals was also the first film Ford made at the studio that was then known as the Fox Film Corporation. Fox’s contemporary corporate home video label has done a commendable job of not only preserving the director’s work, but also of maintaining a quite comprehensive DVD catalog that includes even the director’s more obscure features. (Many of the releases are unsurprisingly bare-bones, but one has to count one’s blessings where silent era home video is concerned.) Given that most of the thirty-odd films that Ford directed at Universal prior to his 1920 Fox debut are lost or incomplete, and that none appear to be available to consumers, Just Pals is the necessary starting point for a chronological trek through Ford’s prolific career.

It’s probably a fool’s errand to try to discern early whispers of Ford’s later auteurist signatures in a feature as pleasantly anonymous as Just Pals. Consistent with that of many American silent features, its story is a double-dose of treacly earnestness, wherein layabout nogoodnik Bim (Buck Jones) discovers virtue and respectability through his friendship with eleven-year-old tramp Bill (Georgie Stone). There is a plot of sorts, chiefly involving the pair’s misadventures as they negotiate the perils of joblessness and homelessness in a small Western town. Not incidentally, Bim has eyes for the local schoolteacher Mary (Helen Ferguson), whose naive entanglement in a shifty suitor’s embezzlement scheme drives most of the film’s action in its latter half. The plot also features a deceitful doctor and his wife, who rather creepily conspire to keep Bill and Bim apart for their own gain. And, just for good measure, camped in the sagebrush outside of town is a flea-bitten gang of bank robbers, the co-conspirators of Mary’s suitor. All of these myriad threads come together neatly in the end, with the evildoers securely behind bars, Mary’s good name restored, and Bim and Bill reunited and polished up.

As with many workmanlike American silents that have faded from popular memory, Just Pals has a kind of matter-of-fact, plodding quality to its storytelling when laid alongside features made just twenty years later (let alone contemporary films). The tidiness of the plot’s resolution notwithstanding, the film is concerned chiefly with presenting a cluster of amusing and thrilling scenes, connected by little more than Jones’ star presence (which is not insubstantial). Accordingly, the film’s events have a this-then-that-then-this banality: Often engaging or exciting in the moment, but lacking in cohesion. Given the film’s vintage, one is inclined to be generous on this score, if only because the aforementioned amusements and thrills have a snappy, theatrical substance that is one of the primary appeals of action-studded films of the era. When Bim hoists Bill up by a pulley in order to give the squirmy tyke a long-overdue wash behind the ears, one can’t help but marvel at its physicality.

And so it is with many of the film’s set pieces: Bim’s spur-of-the-moment rescue of Bill from the hands of a railroad bull; the lad’s foolish nocturnal thievery from what turns into a moving train; and a climactic shootout with the outlaws at the town’s telegraph office. These are all familiar moments of Western action that would not be out of place in Ford’s later filmography, but here they likely represent little more than Hollywood’s perennial fascination with the frontier, rather than this particular filmmaker’s embryonic expression of genre preoccupation. Indeed, at times the Western setting of Just Pals feels almost tossed-off, expressed primarily through the odd plot detail and the film’s modest production design. With a few adjustments, the story could work just as well in a small town anywhere in America.

Visually speaking, Just Pals doesn’t do much to distinguish itself, but this is hardly unusual for the countless American silents turned out by the studios of the time. In such films, the dominant style is best described as “straightforward.” Accordingly, Just Pals is foremost an actor’s feature, and therefore Buck Jones’ film. He possesses the sort of superb leading-man face that only the silent era seemed capable of incubating: square jaw, chiseled cheekbones, and gleaming eyes, yet capable of projecting a kind of dewy sentiment that sets him apart from the stock Tough Guy. Many of the film’s most affecting moments involve little more than Jones gazing off at some distant point, often while embracing Stone with paternal affection. One can practically hear Ford off-camera shouting, “Now, Buck, you’re worried here!” And yet Jones sells it well.

Beyond this, the chief pleasure of Just Pals is the parcel of odd gestures that lend it striking dabs of wit or darkness. There are some unexpected jabs at the petty hypocrisies of the good church-going folk and self-appointed town elders. (It never gets too prickly. This is a Hollywood film, after all.) This satirical current culminates in one of the film’s best visual gags: the grizzled, comically pompous town constable wordlessly rebuffs a proffered church collection plate by flashing his badge. Other idiosyncratic moments crop up here and there. In one of the film’s only special effects shots, Bill blissfully dreams of a proud, employed Bim dressed in a succession of uniforms (including a baseball slugger’s pinstripes). In perhaps the bleakest and strangest scene, a distraught Mary stumbles upon a mother and child about to drown a sack of kittens in the creek. The mother is unable to stomach this deed, but when she turns her back, her son surreptitiously empties the sack into the underbrush. Actress Ferguson watches this scene unfold with a mixture of morbid curiosity and despair that lingers in the mind’s eye. The film subsequently fades to black, and the viewer is left to discern from later dialog that she thereafter attempted to drown herself. The “all’s-right-with-the-world” uplift that closes out the film out can’t quite erase an unsettling moment like that.