Wednesday
March 10
Friday
March 12
Directed by John Ford.
With Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature
US 1946, 35mm, b/w, 97 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
My Darling Clementine by John Ford (1946, 97 min.). Based loosely on the shootout at the OK Corral between the Earp brothers and the Clanton gang, the film stars Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp who, with his three brothers, attempt to drive their cattle to California. After the three eldest brothers travel to the lawless town of Tombstoneleaving the youngest brother to watch the cattlethey return to find the cattle stolen and their brother dead. Seeking vengeance for his death, Wyatt takes the position of Tombstones Town Marshall to find out who was responsible. Meanwhile a young woman from Boston arrives in town by the name of Clementine Carter.
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The Prisoner of Shark Island
Harvard Film Archive
friday, march 12
9:00
the prisoner of shark island
Directed by John Ford.
With Warner Baxter, Gloria Stuart, Claude Gillingwater
US 1936, 35mm, b/w, 95 min.
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
Ford’s prints the legend, rather than the fact, in his rousing film about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was jailed for his purported role in the assassination of President Lincoln after tending John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg. Although Mudd and Booth knew each other prior to the murder, it is unclear to this day whether Mudd knew or was part of Booth’s plan. Ford offers his interpretation of the events by presenting Mudd as an innocent figure whose unjust imprisonment is met with saintly forbearance. Despite several moments of racial caricature, The Prisoner of Shark Island is both nightmarish and ultimately quite moving, redeemed by the film’s chronicling of the relationship between Mudd and one of his former slaves, whose devotion to each to the other is tested by hardship.
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Saturday
March 13
Directed by John Ford.
With Henry Fonda, Dolores Del Rio, Pedro Armendariz
US 1947, 35mm, b/w, 104 min.
Among Ford’s least known yet deeply memorable major works is his beautifully stylized adaptation of Graham Greene’s celebrated 1940 novel The Power and the Glory - a gripping allegory about religious faith and the State which follows the final desperate days of the last priest in an unnamed Latin American country where religion has been declared illegal. Shot entirely in Mexico by the preeminent Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, The Fugitive accents and adds nuance to its stark tale of guilt and difficult retribution by returning to the Expressionist lighting and shadows favored by Ford earlier in his career. Henry Fonda brings an unusual pathos and humanity to his portrayal of the whiskey priest struggling to understand the moral and spiritual turpitude of his country and religion.
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Directed by John Ford.
With Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., Joanne Dru
US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 86 min.
One of Ford’s unsung masterpieces, Wagon Master at first seems a
variation of Stagecoach, with another motley assortment of character types embarking on a perilous journey through the Wild West. Wagon Master takes on a Fellinian picaresque quality in the almost musical combination, separation and recombination of the various groups formed when two young cowboys cross paths with a Mormon wagon train, a traveling theater troupe and a gang of outlaws. Wagon Master exhibits that lyrical sense of the everyday so often encountered in postwar filmmaking and usually labeled “neorealist” not only in its episodic narrative but also in the relaxed framing of its images. One of Ford’s favorites, Wagon Master can be seen as the beginnings of the revisionist Western in its espousal of the idea that the West was always multicultural and a haven for outcasts, individualists and the oppressed.
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Sunday
March 14
Directed by John Ford.
With Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine
US 1940, 35mm, b/w, 129 min.
Print courtesy of the ConstellationCenter and the Academy Film Archive
Ford’s riveting adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic novel of “Okie” farmers made destitute by the Depression and the Dust Bowl is considered one of the very few politically radical works of studio-era Hollywood. Although Ford envisioned the film as a character study - a portrait of a struggling family - rather than an open attack on capitalism, his adaptation faithfully retains the book’s hard-eyed look at the exploitation of the rural poor. Like so much of his thirties work, The Grapes of Wrath reveals Ford’s then-ardent Leftist populism. The suffering of the Joad family as it marches slowly toward California is given iconic status by Ford’s monumental compositions, by the remarkable performances from a talented cast and by pioneering cinematographer Gregg Toland’s successful fusion of Ford’s expressionist aesthetic and photojournalist realism.
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Monday
March 15
Friday
March 19
Directed by John Ford.
With John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harry Carey, Jr.
US 1949, 35mm, color, 106 min.
Ford’s offbeat Biblical allegory reimagines the three Magi as a trio of slightly befuddled bank robbers, “badmen” notably out of place in an increasingly civilized West. John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and newcomer Harry Carey, Jr. share a wonderfully naturalistic repartee as the not-so-wise men who unexpectedly become fathers to an infant son at the seemingly worst possible time. Despite its comic touches, 3 Godfathers is tinged with a mournful tone that anticipates a major theme of 1960s and 1970s revisionist Westerns - the inexorable death of the frontier. Filmed largely in Death Valley, 3 Godfathers renders the torturous heat-warped landscape of the unforgiving desert into scorching Technicolor.
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Directed by John Ford.
With John Wayne, Claire Trevor, John Carradine
US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 97 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
Stagecoach by John Ford (1939, 120 min.). With rumors of a possible Apache attack, a group of travelers in a small New Mexico town board the Overland Stage to Lordsburg. Among them, pregnant Lucy Mallory; timid liquor salesman Peacock; Hatfield, an aloof gambler; Gatewood, a pompous, embezzling banker; and two exiles: alcoholic Doc Boone and Dallas, a prostitute. Along the trail, they pick up the Ringo Kidplayed by John Wayne in the role that made him a staran outlaw out for revenge for destroying his family and framing him for murder. As the journey progresses, the hypocrisy of the respectable passengers becomes clear: its the tainted outsiders who display courage and humanity.
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Saturday
March 20
Directed by John Ford.
With Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, Edna May Oliver
US 1939, 35mm, color, 104 min.
A kind of pre-Western, Drums Along the Mohawk shifts the location of the frontier between civilization and wilderness from the Southwest to the Northeast—upstate New York during the Revolutionary War, to be precise. In gorgeous Technicolor, Ford presents the story of a young couple trying to make a home in New York’s Mohawk Valley in 1776. Lindsay Anderson notes that the years of 1939 and 1940 constitute Ford’s rediscovery of America, with Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk and The Grapes of Wrath coming in the wake of a number of films set abroad, and especially a rediscovery of the American past. Others have pointed out that Drums should be understood in the context of the American present of 1939. Drums Along the Mohawk reveals a snapshot of American anxiety about the possibility of war on the eve of conflict in Europe. The British are not the primary villains; the Mohawk are. Despite Claudette Colbert being perhaps too glamorou
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Directed by John Ford.
With Charles Winninger, Arleen Whelan, Stepin Fetchit
US 1953, 35mm, b/w, 90 min.
One of Ford’s personal favorites, this rarely screened late work offers a fascinating vision of Americana that captures the quaint - and often outright bizarre - charms and disturbing contradictions of small town Kentucky at the end of the 19th century. Returning once more to the figure of Judge Priest, famously played by Will Rogers in two Ford films of the 1930s, The Sun Shine Bright centers its complex cross-section of the town’s many splintered factions - white and African-American, male and female - around the figure of the level-headed and temperate lawman. Punctuated by the lyrical passage of the steamboat, the film interweaves multiple storylines into a polyphonic and choral portrait of a provincial community reluctantly harboring the seeds of inevitable change.
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Sunday
March 21
Directed by John Ford.
With Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp
US 1941, 35mm, b/w, 118 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
It would be no exaggeration to call Ford’s multiple-Oscar winning saga of a struggling Welsh mining family one of the most emotionally resonant and genuinely moving films of the studio era. Like The Grapes of Wrath the year before, How Green Was My Valley is a triumph of expressive realism that gives emotional depth and dignity to those suffering social injustice, rendering vivid and authentic the difficult lives and plain pleasures of the coal miners and their families. In his first starring role, child actor Roddy MacDowell poignantly captures the awkward, fragile innocence of youth in his portrayal of a wide-eyed, precocious romantic pulled abruptly into adulthood. Originally assigned to William Wyler, Ford was – incredibly - only appointed at the very last minute to what would become one of his best-known works.
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Monday
March 22
Tuesday
March 23
Wednesday
March 24
Friday
March 26
Directed by Abdellatif Kechiche, Appearing in Person
With Osman Ekharraz, Sara Forestier, Sabrina Ouazani
France 2004, 35mm, color, 117 min. French with English subtitles
Built around a high school production of Pierre de Marivaux´s eponymous 1730 play, Games of Love and Chance is set in the housing projects on the Parisian outskirts that are home to many Franco-Arab families today. While the youth in these same areas have rioted occasionally in recent years in response to police violence, Kechiche pointedly avoids any sensationalizing of their struggles. The film instead focuses on a teenager pulled into the play’s cast by his unspoken attraction to a classmate. Using the blossoming relationship between the young couple as its spine, Games of Love and Chance expands outward to a wide cast of characters, reveling in their singular use of slang and other everyday behaviors, and expressing Marivaux’s humanist vision of class differences transcended.
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Saturday
March 27
Sunday
March 28
Monday
March 29
Tuesday
March 30
Wednesday
March 31