How The West Was Won (Hathaway/Marshall/Ford, 1962):
Prince Charles Cinema, 8.05pm
This epic film (£1 for Prince Charles members) is also screened on December 28th. Details here. This movie has sequences filmed by three directors but it's the section helmed by John Ford that demands to be seen at this very rare screening.
New York Times review:
It
is John Ford who rises to the challenge most poetically, chiefly by
ignoring it. “The Civil War” is an exquisite miniature (unfortunately
padded out by some battle sequences lifted from “Raintree County,” an
earlier MGM Civil War film) that consists of only three scenes: a mother
(Ms. Baker) sends a son (Peppard) off to war; the son has a horrible
experience as night falls on the battlefield of Shiloh; the son returns
and finds that his mother has died. The structure has a musical
alternation: day, night, day; exterior, interior, exterior; stillness,
movement, stillness. In the first and
last scenes the famous Fordian horizon line extends the entire length
of the extra-wide Cinerama frame. In the aftermath of the battle the
horizon line disappears in darkened studio sets. The sense of the
sequence is profoundly antiwar — Generals Sherman and Grant, played by
John Wayne and Henry Morgan, briefly appear as a couple of disheveled,
self-pitying drunks — and it gradually becomes apparent that the elderly
Ford is revisiting one of his early important works, the 1928 drama
“Four Sons.”
The expressionistic
middle sequence, with its studio-built swamp, refers to F. W. Murnau,
whose “Sunrise” was one of the great influences on the young Ford, while
the open-air sequences that bracket it, with their unmoving camera,
long-shot compositions and rootedness in the rural landscape, recall the
work of the American pioneer D. W. Griffith. When,
in the final panel of Ford’s triptych, a gust of wind tousles Peppard’s
hair in the foreground and then continues across to the forest in the
middle distance and on to the stand of trees in the most distant
background, it seems like a true miracle of the movies: a breath of
life, moving over the face of the earth. No less formidable a filmmaker
than Jean-Marie Straub has called “The Civil War” John Ford’s
masterpiece.
Dave Kehr (you can find the full review via the link here)
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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