Director:
Peter Bogdanovich Year:
1971 Rating: 8.0
I feel guilty that it took Peter Bogdanovich's death to finally get me to
catch up on some of his films that I have been meaning to for years. I just
kept putting them off. I think we all do that until we feel it is the right
time. I mainly want to watch the films that crashed and burned at the box
office that I never bothered with. Those that brought his career to a halt
at times in his life. But I wanted to start with his wonderful documentary
that he made about perhaps America's greatest director. I expect some might
argue with that but Ford made about 140 films over seven decades beginning
in the silent era - many obscure or lost now but who else has made as many
classics as he did. Primarily the Westerns but some powerful dramas as well
like Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green is My Valley, The Quiet Man and The Grapes
of Wrath.
But I also wanted to start with this because in his heart Bogdanovich was
a huge film fan - he loved movies in particular those from the Golden Age
of Hollywood. You can see this influence in many of his own films. He wanted
to recreate that magic and some times he did and sometimes they flopped.
Beginning when he was ten he began making notes on every film he saw on an
index card and filed them away. Over 5,000 of them before videos and streaming.
He had a very distant relationship with his father who was uncommunicative
- but they watched movies together and that connection may be why films were
so important to him.
This was produced right before the film that made him famous overnight -
The Last Picture Show. Bogdanovich had already written extensively about
film, seeking out and interviewing many of the great directors and stars
from yesteryear. His adoration for the movies and those who made them drips
from every frame of this film. He spends no time on Ford the man, on his
background, his family, his devils unless it is related to the films. He
begins and ends it with the two famous doorway scenes in The Searchers. In
between he interviews Ford, Wayne, Stewart, Fonda as well as a few current
day directors. Two of them are Spielberg and Scorsese which just seemed weird.
By 1971 neither of them had done anything - did they time travel backwards
to be interviewed? Well, yes in a way - Bogdanovich interviewed them in 2006
and inserted them into the film.
Bogdanovich asks his good friend Orson Welles who were the best three directors
ever. He replied Ford, Ford and Ford. You watch the clips from these films
and listen to the enormous respect from everyone and it is hard to disagree.
His films were very poetic and he mixed masculinity and sentimentality wonderfully
well. He was able to use music and songs to pull the heartstrings. His heroes
were quiet men - no boasting or hubris - they just did what had to be done.
These were the types of men he respected. He was not fond of dialogue and
on the day a scene was shot he often would just decide to cut out much of
it. His films always look so good, so authentic, so well framed and his use
of scenery and pageantry soars.
That moment in Stagecoach when the camera zooms in on Wayne with Monument
Valley in the background is to me one of the great shots in film. That one
shot made Wayne a star and took Westerns from B movies to art. He mainly
tells the story of men as he tells the story of America. Male bonding infuses
all his films - men working together, drinking, singing, fighting. Even in
one of his few romances, The Quiet Man, it is the eventual friendship between
Wayne and Victor McLaglen that is the heart of the film. His films were mythmaking
about the West, the flow of history and the men who made it and died for
it. Women generally are left in the background to worry about their men.
They are no doubt told from a patriotic perspective and a white man's perspective
- Manifest Destiny as white men and women moved across the country building
communities, clearing the land and pushing out the Native Americans. That
is the story of the West as it has been handed down to most of us. Few people
back in those days or even when Ford made his films ever doubted that this
was a noble history.
Ford was by all accounts a bastard on the set - haranguing his actors, throwing
things at them, embarrassing them in front of the crew - but they loved
him because he got great performances out of them - Wayne's best work, Fonda
with Young Mr. Lincoln, Grapes of Wrath, Mr. Roberts, My Darling Clementine
and Fort Apache. And also from some of the character actors he used time
after time like Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen and Harry Carey Jr. It is a great
documentary - about 2 hours long - and the reminisces from Wayne, Stewart
and Fonda are wonderful to hear.
