John Ford | 125 Years

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Frank S. Nugent, based on the novel by Alan Le May

Cast: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles

Presented with the Farnsworth Art Museum

Michael Komanecky, chief curator of Farnsworth Art Museum, will discuss contemporary Maine artists John Ford and painter W. Herbert “Buck” Dunton who each went west about the same time (California and New Mexico), both making their names with vivid depictions of the American West.

Ethan Edwards’ niece is captured by Comanches and he sets off with his nephew, half-Indian himself, on a long and bitter search. Slowly he begins to reveal more and more about his motives and ultimate objectives to his wary young companion. “In truly great films–the ones that people need to make, the ones that start speaking through them, the ones that keep moving into territory that is more and more unfathomable and uncomfortable–nothing’s ever simple or neatly resolved. You’re left with a mystery. In its final moment, The Searchers suddenly becomes a ghost story. Ethan’s sense of purpose has been fulfilled and…he’s destined to wander forever between the winds” –Martin Scorsese.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, based on the story by Ernest Haycox

Cast: John Wayne, Claire Trevor, Andy Devine, John Carradine, Thomas Mitchell, Louise Platt, George Bancroft

Presented with Abbe Museum

Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko, CEO of Abbe Museum, will host a post-screening discussion about media reinforcement of ethnic stereotypes and why enduring public fascination with the Wild West continues impacting Native Peoples.

“A film in which two great careers were renewed. Although he had appeared before in many films, as an extra, a stuntman and then an actor in B films, this was John Wayne’s first starring role in a film by John Ford. For Ford, it was a return after some years to a genre about which his ideas had grown–the genre in which he would make many of his greatest films. Confined for a good deal of the film inside the stagecoach, [the] actors create a fascinating community as they gradually reveal their hidden reasons for traveling in great discomfort though hazardous Indian territory. The Ringo Kid, Wayne’s character, is a wanted murderer being taken to prison by a U. S. Marshall (George Bancroft). The film’s attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land. But [Wayne] never suggests evil, and seems prepared to be taken to prison even though he has many opportunities to escape. [Perhaps] he stays with the stagecoach because he is needed to protect its passengers. We see here Wayne’s extraordinary physical grace and capacity for tenderness, and understand why Ford later cast him as The Quiet Man” –Roger Ebert.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller, from a story by Sam Hellman, based on a book by Stuart N. Lake

Cast: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature

Presented by Bowdoin Cinema Studies

Hosted by Tricia Welsch, director, Cinema Studies Program, Bowdoin College.

“Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) and his two brothers indefinitely extend their stay in Tombstone after discovering their cattle stolen and other brother murdered, most likely by another all-male familial clan, the Clantons. Revenge against the Clantons soon quickly takes a back seat, however, as newly minted town sheriff Earp soon finds himself embroiled in a ever-fluctuating friendship-cum-rivalry with Doc Holliday (Victor Mature), a black-clad local powerbroker. Prone to heavy boozing and intimidation of local riffraff, Holliday also appreciates the finer things in life, like sipping champagne and reciting Shakespearean soliloquies from memory, signs of a more-cultured past back East that he mysteriously abandoned for the anonymity of the West. This history catches up with Holliday soon enough in the form of Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), a nurse and former lover who has scoured the frontier in search of him. Their reunion is complicated by Holliday’s self-destructive rejection of his former life and his present romance with local saloon singer Chihuahua (Linda Darnell)—not to mention Earp’s tentative interest in Carter” – Matthew Connolly, Slant. ”Astonishingly, this masterpiece starring Henry Fonda as the upright town-taming marshal Wyatt Earp, and culminating in the 1881 gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, was only Ford’s second western of the sound era (the first was Stagecoach in 1939). Marking the director’s homecoming to Hollywood after distinguished war service, Henry Fonda also returned from active service as a naval officer to play the part in the film, his fourth collaboration with Ford” –Roger Ebert.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by John Steinbeck

Cast: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine

Presented by Bates Rhetoric & Screen Studies.
Free and open to the public!

Jonathan Cavallero, associate professor, Rhetoric, Film & Screen Studies, Bates College, will moderate a post-screening discussion with Rachel Desgrosseilliers, director, Museum L-A; Fowsia Musse, executive director, Maine Community Integration (formerly African Immigrant Association); and Marcelle M. Medford, Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow and lecturer in Sociology, Bates College.

After serving four years for murder for killing a man in a saloon, Tom Joad is paroled and returns to his family farm in Oklahoma, only to learn the Joads have been “tractored off the land” and are joining the desperate migration to California. “A left-wing parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper’s son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer. The message is boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity than anger or resolve. It’s a message movie, but not a recruiting poster. Based on John Steinbeck’s novel, arguably the most effective social document of the 1930s, and it was directed by a filmmaker who had done more than any other to document the Westward movement of American settlement.” –Roger Ebert.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Frank S. Nugent, from the story by Maurice Walsh

Cast: John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald

Andy O’Brien, editor of The Free Press, will moderate a pre-screening conversation with historians of Ford and the Irish in Maine: Michael C. Connolly (co-editor of John Ford in Focus) and Matthew Jude Barker (author of The Irish of Portland, Maine).

“Irish-American boxer Sean Thornton (John Wayne), recovering from the trauma of having accidentally killed a man in the ring, arrives in the Irish village where he was born. Hoping to bury his past and settle down to a life of tranquility, Thornton has purchased the home of his birth from wealthy local widow Mildred Natwick, a transaction that has incurred the wrath of pugnacious squire Victor McLaglen, who coveted the property for himself. By and by, Thornton falls in love with McLaglen’s beautiful, high-spirited sister Maureen O’Hara. Though it tends to perpetuate the myth that all true Irishmen live only to fight, drink and make love, The Quiet Man is grand and glorious fun, enacted with gusto by a largely Hibernian cast and directed with loving care by a master of his craft. Graced with a lilting musical score by Victor Young, the film won Oscars for Archie Stout’s Technicolor photography and for John Ford’s direction” – Hal Erickson, Rovi.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Frank Wead, based on the book by William L. White

Cast: Robert Montgomery, John Wayne, Donna Reed

Introduced by Joe Mosier, US Navy Master Chief (ret.) and maritime historian.

“Most war films are, ultimately, about winning. In 1945, however, as World War II was ending, John Ford made probably the finest U.S. war picture, about one of America’s greatest defeats—-in the Philippines—-the title of which alone is devastating in its implications: They Were Expendable. The picture focuses on the use of PT-Boats in the Philippines, specifically through the deeds of its central pioneer John D. Bulkeley, a good friend of Ford’s and one of the most decorated men of the war: he is played with simple dignity by Robert Montgomery, also a Naval veteran. His fictional cohort—-who gets the brief but memorable love interest with a Navy nurse perfectly incarnated by Donna Reed—-is done in a most effectively understated performance by John Wayne. Essentially, like a good many of Ford’s pictures, They Were Expendable deals with the peculiar glory in defeat. When I pointed this out to him, Ford said it wasn’t something he had “done consciously,” though he allowed, “it may have been subconscious… Of course, they were glorious in defeat in the Philippines—-they kept on fighting” –Peter Bogdanovich, IndieWire.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Philip Dunne, based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn

Cast: Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp, Anna Lee, Roddy McDowall

Presented with Waterfall Arts

Introduced and discussed by Michael C. Connolly, author, professor, and historian whose academic focus includes John Ford, labor movements, and maritime issues. 

“One of John Ford’s masterpieces of sentimental human drama. It is the melodramatic and nostalgic story of a close-knit, hard-working Welsh coal-mining family (the Morgans) at the turn of the century as a socio-economic way of life passes and the home-family unit disintegrates. Episodic incidents in everyday life convey the changes, trials, setbacks, and joys of the hard-bitten community as it faces growing unemployment, distressing work conditions, unrest, unionization and labor-capital disputes, and personal tragedy. Domestic life, romance, harsh treatment at school, the departure of two Morgan boys to find their fortune in America, unrequited love between the local preacher (Walter Pidgeon) and the only Morgan daughter (Irish actress Maureen O’Hara), and other events are portrayed within the warm, human story. The film was nominated for a total of ten awards and walked away with five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, and Best Art Direction” –FilmSite.

Director: John Ford

Screenplay: Dudley Nichols, from the story by Liam O’Flaherty

Cast: Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster, Margot Grahame, Wallace Ford, Una O’Connor

“The Informer is forcefully and intelligently written, directed and acted. The story by Liam O’Flaherty deals with the Irish rebellion against British authority prior to 1922, when the Irish Free State’s creation finally removed the hated symbols of British domination” – Variety. “The Informer won Oscars for best direction, script (Dudley Nichols), music (Max Steiner) and acting (Victor McLaglen); [it’s among] Ford’s finest works for its status as a Hollywood art film…through expressionistic visuals, symbolic touches, and a downbeat story centred on the figure of a man who informs on a fellow-Republican and then goes inexorably to pieces. It was a box-office draw at the time, though not in Ireland: the censors found its image of the nation unacceptable, despite the fact that Ford and Nichols had shifted the period back from the Civil War of O’Flaherty’s novel to the less controversial territory of the War of Independence” –Irish Film Institute.

Director: Jules Dassin

Screenplay: Jules Dassin, Ruby Dee, Julian Mayfield, based on the novel by Liam O’Flaherty

Cast: Raymond St. Jacques, Ruby Dee, Frank Silvera, Roscoe Lee Browne

By all cultural accounts, 1968 was a hellish year for America. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy helped spark the “burn baby burn” sensibility ignited in the streets. It was also during this turbulent period that Paramount Pictures reluctantly agreed to finance Jules Dassin’s remake of the classic film The Informer into the militant action film Uptight. Moving the action from the streets of Ireland to the ghettos of Ohio, Dassin’s bleak exploration into the world of sharp-dressed Black revolutionaries introduced the Blaxploitation aesthetics that later influenced a crop of Black action films including Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), Shaft (197), Super Fly (1972) and others. Working with cinematographer Boris Kaufman, Dassin created a claustrophobic cinematic landscape that New York magazine critic Judith Crist described as, “teeming and pulsing one minute, stark in its solitudes and isolations the next.” “But, it was about the music too,” says Darius James, author of That’s Blaxploitation!: Roots of the Baadasssss ‘Tude. “‘Time is Tight’ by Booker T. & the MG’s is heard in fragments throughout, and the complete song serves as the film’s coda. While Uptight remains one of the best gritty political crime features from that period, it was soon, according to Ruby Dee, withdrawn by the studio” –Michael A. Gonzales, Ebony.