Since he went off to serve, Hollywood had found new leading men, such as Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck, who both were seven years younger than he was. Some of “Life’s” early scenes called for the now graying Stewart to be just a few years out of high school. He felt ridiculous and considered plastic surgery, then thought better of it. But Jim was helped greatly by his co-star Donna Reed (Jean Arthur, Olivia de Havilland, and Ginger Rogers were among several actresses considered for the role of Mary Baily).

—–

Before the romantic scene where George and Mary tearfully and sensuously declare their love for each other, Reed encouraged her leading man to do it in only one unrehearsed take. Capra later joked that Stewart was so nervous during the tender sequence he was forced to wrap a phone chord around the celluloid couple so Jim wouldn’t run away.

“The nice part about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” — German Philosopher Immanuel Kant

Stewart was also helped by the actor who played the film’s villain, the wheelchair-bound Lionel Barrymore, who reminded him that movies had the power to make people happy around the world. The old man’s pep talks helped Jim regain his confidence in his acting chops, and Capra gave the Indiana, Pennsylvania-born Stewart great latitude in playing the role of the small town resident whose big dreams would never be fulfilled. Just before filming the sequence where the Bailey’s Bedford Falls neighbors came to take their money out of the building and loan, Capra advised the future grandma on TV’s “The Waltons,” Ellen Corby, to ask Stewart for $17.50, half the amount that the script called for. The leading man responded by staying in character and impulsively kissing Corby on the cheek.

In one of the films darker moments Stewart, who during the war was no stranger to nearly overpowering fear and had often prayed for the safe return of himself and his men before bombing missions, started sobbing on camera when he turned to God for help. As the show continued, some of Stewart’s cast mates, who at first were questioning the rusty movie star’s professionalism, became convinced that he and George Bailey were one and the same; Jim went on to deliver an Oscar-nominated performance.

“It bears out my feeling of the picture business, that it’s not a production line business—but magic” – James Stewart, on “It’s a Wonderful Life”

A brief aside: The 66-year-old Barrymore, who for years famously played Ebenezer Scrooge on the radio and suffered from crippling arthritis, showed no sign of his legendary ferocious temper on the Wonderful Life set. A few years earlier Lionel, had been directing a movie in which the actors kept blowing their lines, which resulted in several retakes; Barrymore had felt an explosion coming on. Still smiling, the enraged filmmaker excused himself, went upstairs to the sound control room and let loose a barrage of foul language. None of the cast members were spared his wrath. When he finished, he felt better and calmly returned to the set. To Lionel’s delighted surprise, his performers excelled for the rest of the day. Later a jubilant Barrymore told a crew member that patience always wins. The man replied, “That little broadcast from behind the glass booth didn’t hurt any either.”

In the 1930s director Capra had toiled at Columbia Pictures, which was ruled by the autocratic Harry Cohn, considered by some to be the meanest man in Hollywood. The mogul kept the entire studio electronically bugged, displayed a huge portrait of Mussolini in his office, and used an electrified chair to give unsuspecting victims sudden jolts.

Capra had sat in it once, received a shock, and angrily smashed the chair to bits. Yet the Sicilian-born director and the rough-and-tumble former streetcar conductor from New York mostly got on along well. They had made several classic hits together including the 1934 Academy Award winner It Happened One Night (1934) starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, before Columbia’s decision to cancel a biopic about the composer Chopin had led to the frustrated Capra leaving the studio. When filming began on “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Capra was excited to have his independence but nervous with his own money on the line. Known for making movie sets fun places to work, Frank was at first crabby and irritable with his cast and crew.

Filming a snowy Christmas movie in over one hundred degree heat in Encino did not help morale; many of the heavily dressed actors fainted. But there were nice moments. One scene required Donna Reed as Mary to throw a rock through an old mansion window and make a wish. Capra had a marksman ready off camera, but to his delight Reed shattered the glass on her own. She turned to him and said,” Why so surprised? Don’t you think an Iowa farm girl would know how to play baseball?”

“The importance of the individual is the theme – and no man is a failure. If he’s born, he’s born to do something, he’s born not to fail.”
– Frank Capra

As the shoot progressed, Capra regained his confidence. He disdained special effects when Clarence Oddbody the angel (Henry Travers) did his magic, preferring to tell the story through his actor’s faces. The director started to believe he was making the greatest movie ever. Eventually “Life” became a joyous project to work on; like earlier Capra films, the company went on picnics and sang in between camera setups.

“It was the most gentlemanly way of going broke, and the fastest way anybody ever devised.” – Frank Capra, on Liberty Films

Too dark; the country wanted to watch comedians such as Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Too dated; “Life” came off like a Depression film rather than a post-war movie. Cinema attendance dropped drastically in 1946 overall, as re-united couples often preferred spending quiet evenings at home. For whatever reason, unlike Capra’s blockbuster hits in the 1930s, the three million dollar production failed to make a profit.

Capra made one more movie under the Liberty Films banner “State of the Union,” 1948, with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn), and then chose to fold his entrepreneurial tent, opting instead for the security of a Paramount Studios contract. Years after the sale, Capra mourned the loss of his artistic independence and admitted he was never again the same man or talent that he had been.

The newly energized Stewart, with his acting confidence restored, hinted to his agent that Reed was to blame for the movie’s disappointing box office performance (“Wonderful Life”’s trailers had emphasized the love story instead of the Christmas theme) and superstitiously turned down the opportunity have her as his leading lady again. Donna Reed, who later said she’d never worked harder on a movie, felt completely exhausted after “Wonderful Life” and wondered if her career was finished.

“What is remarkable about ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ is how well it holds up over the years; it’s one of those ageless movies, like ‘Casablanca’ or ‘The Third Man,’ that improves with age” – Roger Ebert, 1999

“Wonderful Life” got mixed reviews in its initial release and like any classic movie was continuously reexamined. Some critics found the film terrifying, citing moments where Stewart’s George Bailey, seeming barely to be able to restrain himself from committing physical violence, verbally abused his wife, children and their teacher.

Salon.com critic Rich Cohen expressed the view that the nightmarish Pottersville, which displaces the more idyllic Bedford Falls after the angel grants George Bailey’s wish to have never been born, was actually the real world that we all live in. Others saw the film as a damning statement on capitalism, ignoring that fact Mr. Potter harms George Bailey by resorting to thievery, while George’s friends make a free market, charitable decision to bail him out. (Socialism was arguably on display during the scene in which a dressed-to-the-nines Reed and Stewart fall into a pool after doing the Charleston; the retractable floor which a jealous Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer used to sabotage the two future newlyweds’ dance was a real-life Franklin Roosevelt New Deal project built for Beverly Hills High School.)

“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.” –Frank Capra

Years passed. From that point on Capra, unwilling to either risk his own money or work for somebody else, directed only a handful of movies after “Wonderful Life.” He grew frustrated both by the rising power of movie stars combined with studio-imposed budget restrictions. In his 1971 autobiography, the always sentimental Capra, who forty years before had talked the foul-mouthed, tough-minded Harry Cohn into distributing Mickey Mouse cartoons, publicly despaired about the lack of wholesome movies coming out of Hollywood.

Although he continued to take on a variety of roles, James Stewart deliberately set out to create a stronger screen image. He shared Capra’s disdain for unrealistic war movies, preferring instead hard, gritty Westerns like “The Man From Laramie” (1954), which helped to make him rich and surpass John Wayne as the nation’s number one box office star. Donna Reed restored her career by winning an Academy Award for playing a prostitute in “From Here To Eternity” (1953) and then became one of television’s most wholesome mothers. She became a staunch anti-Vietnam War activist, putting her politically at odds with her more hawkish former leading man. In 1966, Brigadier General James Stewart flew on a non-publicized bombing mission, suffered the loss of his son Ronald killed in action two years later, and later publicly expressed contempt for those opposed the Vietnam conflict.

Meanwhile, “It’s a Wonderful Life” fell into the public domain in 1974 because no one renewed its copyright. The almost forgotten film, considered by many to be old-fashioned in it’s time, was shown repeatedly on cable television stations during the holiday season, achieved an enormous following, and became a perennial Christmas classic.

“It’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen,” Capra told the Wall Street Journal in 1984. “The film has a life of its own now and I can look at it like I had nothing to do with it. I’m like a parent whose kid grows up to be president. I’m proud… but it’s the kid who did the work. I didn’t even think of it as a Christmas story when I first ran across it. I just liked the idea.”

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, Hollywood is celebrating its Academy Awards, a look back at great actors and actresses and films.

Kengor: For me, it’s a moment to look back at Hollywood’s worst communists, communist sympathizers, Stalinists, and duped liberals and progressives—as well as the good guys (and gals) that fit none of those categories.

Big Peace: Fair enough. This should be fun. Let’s start with communists.

Charlie Chaplin comment, “Thank God for
communism!” will make you see (him) red.

Kengor: How about the Hollywood screenwriters who liberals still insist were innocent lambs? Dalton Trumbo, Communist Party code “Dalt T;” Albert Maltz, party no. 47196; Alvah Bessie, no. 46836; John Howard Lawson, no. 47275. Or, if you turn to page 191 of my book—if you don’t have a copy yet, shame on you—you can view Arthur Miller’s party application. Miller wrote The Crucible, about how Joe McCarthy pursued “liberals” unfairly suspected of being communists—“liberals” like Miller, Trumbo, Maltz, Bessie, Lawson.

Big Peace: As you say in Dupes, Hollywood produced “quite a cast.” Let’s narrow the focus to the Academy Awards.

Kengor: Among films that have canonized communists, Julia (1977) celebrated the scowling Lillian Hellman and her mystery lover/writer, Dashiell Hammett, who we now know was a CPUSA member. Hellman wrote a bitter play called Scoundrel Time, about Joe McCarthy. In Hellman’s universe, it was Joe McCarthy, not Joe Stalin, who was evil. Winning Oscars for Julia were Jason Robards and Vanessa Redgrave. Fittingly, Lillian Hellman was played by Jane Fonda, recently retired from her real-life role as Vietcong go-go girl. “If you would understand what communism was,” Fonda pleaded with a student audience, “you would pray on your knees that we would someday be communist.”

Big Peace: Another film from that period that celebrated American communists was Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981).

Kengor: That film lionized American Bolshevik John Reed. Reed today is buried in the wall of the Kremlin, a structure responsible for upwards of 60-70 million deaths. Maureen Stapleton won an Oscar for her role in that film as “Red” Emma Goldman, a woman so radical that Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department deported her to Russia.

Big Peace: Which Academy Award winner made the worst statement about communism?

Kengor: I would roll out the red carpet for Charlie Chaplin. “Thank God for communism!” said the silent film star. “They say communism may spread all over the world. I say, so what?” The Daily Worker thrust that comment onto its front page. Communism, of course, did spread around the world, killing 100-140 million. How’s that for a “so what?”

Big Peace: You have several Oscar winners in Dupes whose names were raised as potential communists by a party organizer in Los Angeles who testified under oath to a grand jury and to Congress.

Kengor: The party organizer was John Leech. Most of those he named turned out to be proven party members. Among those who denied Leech’s charges were Jimmy Cagney, who won an Oscar for Yankee Doodle Dandy, Fredric March, who won it twice, and Humphrey Bogart, who won for The African Queen. I think Cagney was at least momentarily interested in the Communist Party.

Big Peace: We talked previously about your fascinating material on Humphrey Bogart, profiled in a feature by Big Hollywood (click here).

Kengor: In the Soviet Comintern Archives on CPUSA, I found a “Bogart” at the Workers School in New York in 1934. With great care, and with all the declassified documents, I consider whether this was Humphrey Bogart. I found no smoking gun, but it’s extremely intriguing.

Big Peace: We do know that Bogart was a dupe.

Kengor: He was a self-admitted dupe, ashamed at how the communist screenwriters lied to him and other celebrities that formed a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. They flew all the way to Washington to defend their “progressive” friends, only to learn that the screenwriters were closet Stalinists. Bogart was enraged, snapping, “You [expletives] sold me out!” Yes, they did. The Reds had no concern for the reputations of these actors.

Other duped liberals who threw their support behind these communists, and won Academy Awards, were Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, and Judy Garland.

Big Peace: Perhaps the biggest Oscar winner is also one of your biggest dupes: Katharine Hepburn.

Kengor: Yes. One of the sorriest episodes in Hepburn’s illustrious career came when she delivered, in flame red dress, a speech at a May 1947 Progressive Party Rally. The speech was unerringly close to the Soviet line. Why wouldn’t it be? It was written by one of those “liberal” screenwriters: Dalton Trumbo. People’s Daily World reprinted the entire text. Hepburn hit a home-run for the comrades.

Big Peace: Burl Ives won an Oscar for The Big Country (1958). Tell us about Ives.

Kengor: Burl Ives also sang some wonderful Christmas tunes. He was in a folk group called “The Almanacs,” which alternately included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and (among others) Will Geer—“Grandpa Walton” on The Waltons, a wild left-winger, and Columbia University grad, naturally. Some of these guys joined the party. “The Almanacs” were exploited by the seditious communist front-group, American Peace Mobilization, which appeased Hitler because Hitler signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. They were the musical entertainment for the mobilization’s signature event in New York in April 1941. Go to pages 142-157 of Dupes, which presents materials from that rally—including Soviet orders to sucker “social justice” pastors, which occurred with tremendous success.

Big Peace: On the plus side, you highlight duped liberals who learned and changed, including in Hollywood. Sticking to Oscar winners, give some examples.

Kengor: If I were giving awards for best converted dupes, male and female—who also won Oscars—they would go to Melvyn Douglas and Olivia de Havilland. Douglas warned his fellow liberals about being duped. Ditto for de Havilland, who we discussed previously (click here). Unlike Katharine Hepburn, de Havilland, who played “Melanie” in Gone With the Wind, refused a pro-Soviet speech written by Trumbo.

Big Peace: Also on the plus side, list some Oscar winners who remained committed anti-communists throughout their career.

Kengor: Top billing goes to John Wayne, of course, who won for True Grit, and declared that Hollywood needed a good communist “de-lousing.” Others: Charlton Heston, Red Buttons, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Loretta Young, Bing Crosby, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple. William Holden, who, with Ronald Reagan (click here), crashed a meeting of Hollywood communists in 1946. Gary Cooper, who won two Oscars, testified before Congress as a friendly witness on communist infiltration in Hollywood. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert both won awards for It Happened One Night (1934).

Finally, I tip my hat to Haing Ngor, real-life survivor of Pol Pot’s Cambodian holocaust. Ngor won an Oscar for playing “Dith Pran” in The Killing Fields (1984). After all that, he was murdered in California in 1996.

Big Peace: Most of those we’ve noted are deceased. Give us some names of dupes or potential dupes among recent Oscar winners.

Kengor: George Clooney won for Syriana (2005). Mercifully, he didn’t win for Good Night, and Good Luck, another film where anti-communists are the demons. Barbra Streisand won for Funny Girl (1968). Of course, Sean Penn won in 2003 and 2008. Penn fits the theme of my book well, as he’s somewhat of a bridge from Cold War dupes to War on Terror dupes.

Among the non-dupes who won recent Oscars, there’s Jon Voight (Coming Home, 1978). His role in a major film on Pope John Paul II was wonderful, and would never garner modern Hollywood’s approval.

Big Peace: Professor Kengor, thanks for a unique take on the Academy Awards.

Kengor: My pleasure.

Fifteen-years ago it was all the rage to worship It’s A Wonderful Life, and then the inevitable backlash began by the contrary-is-cool crowd and those offended by spiritualism and sentiment. Whatever. All I know is that after dozens of viewings each new one is like the first and without fail the story stays with me for days. 

And who are we to argue with time? Like Beethoven and Sinatra, the story of a good man blinded by disappointment, driven to suicide, and saved by God’s grace will live for as long as there’s a civilization. Because the message is about the simplest and yet most important of things — it’s about why when things are at their worst that’s the most important time to step outside the hurly burly of life’s setbacks and inventory our blessings. 

It’s A Wonderful Life is about perspective. 

George Bailey wants to shake the dust of Bedford Falls off his shoes and stake a place in the world in order to validate his existence through the building of bridges and monuments. Constantly thwarted by his own decency and love for a beauty who looks just like Donna Reed, he never goes anywhere, and instead grudgingly spends his life engaged in a bitter war of attrition with Old Man Potter to keep a crummy old savings and loan afloat. So blinded is George Bailey by life’s misfortunes, he never notices the monuments he’s erected inside those around him through the trust and dignity and friendship he offers in the small homes he builds. And that blindness nearly costs him his life. 

Imagine a man like George Bailey; a man with a town full of faithful friends eager to show their gratitude for his lifetime of decency and generosity of spirit… Imagine how blind he must be to think he has nowhere to turn other than to the bottom of that cold black river. 

You can watch the film and marvel in its perfect script, unrivaled series of iconic scenes, and the towering performance given by Mr. Stewart… And you can watch the final scene set in a modest living room filled with family and loved ones and realize, just like George finally does, that it’s all up to us, that a chance at a wonderful life is almost always within our own grasp. 

George Bailey’s dark and desperate path to that realization is a reminder that our own blessings are not found in the world or given to us by others, but rather in who we are and what we’re capable of as God’s creatures. Everything that matters and that is beautiful in life costs nothing more than what we’re born with: our ability to be decent and gracious and kind to one another.

There’s nothing wrong with building monuments and bridges and having goals and ambition, but what does any of that matter if you can’t fill a living room with family and loved ones?

God sent Clarence to give George a long slow look around, and in that respect It’s A Wonderful Life is our own guardian angel… Making it the greatest Christmas movie of all time by a pretty wide margin.

Merry Christmas.

Read the full countdown here.

And, of course, old movies.

By 1944 John Ford already sensed the onset of these creeping forces of forgetfulness, and so when the time came to make Expendable, he hatched a strange plan. First, he confronted Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, and demanded that he be paid $300,000 for helming the picture, more than any director had ever made for a single film. Appealing to Mayer’s patriotism, he said he wasn’t going to keep a single cent of it — it would be used in toto to establish a special place of military honor and memory, a shrine “for Pennick and the boys.” Mayer agreed, and after Expendable was finished Ford used the money to buy eight acres of land in the foothills north of Los Angeles, and to build upon it what became known as The Field Photo Farm.

By the time Ford’s funds were exhausted, the property sported stables with horses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a baseball diamond, and a large parade ground — all of it reserved for the veterans of his OSS Field Photographic unit. A big clubhouse contained glass cases filled with the war medals of Field Photo’s heroic dead. A beautiful chapel was constructed on-site, with the names of the men lost under Ford’s command engraved therein. The list included Jack MacKenzie Jr., the young assistant who had narrowly avoided death alongside Ford at Midway and who had survived the rest of the war, only to be tragically killed in an August 1945 Jeep accident in Los Angeles. In 1947, They Were Expendable’s brilliant cinematographer Joe August collapsed on the set of his 277th picture, dead of a heart attack. Ford dutifully had his name added to the chapel’s grim roster.

A mission statement drawn up for the Farm reads:

The aim of the organization shall be to ever respect and hold before all men the shining example of our comrades who made the supreme sacrifice in order that we, as a nation, may continue to enjoy those freedoms that are the foundation of our country’s greatness and are the birthright of all peoples.

For the next twenty-five years, the Field Photo Farm served as a lovely place for Ford and his old war buddies to meet, drink, be merry, and celebrate holidays with their families. Elaborate Memorial Day services and Christmas parties were staged, which were equal parts festive get-togethers and morose eulogistic remembrances. “Wild Bill” Donovan, Ford’s old OSS superior, had a room permanently reserved for his exclusive use. Field Photo vets down on their luck were allowed to live at the Farm free of charge for as long as they wanted. As members of Ford’s inner circle began to die off, the chapel became the site for many funerals, most notably Ward Bond’s in 1960.

Only in 1969 — when the clubhouse was destroyed by fire, and most of his war buddies were dead and gone — would John Ford reluctantly disband the Farm. Even then, Ford didn’t keep the money: the proceeds from the sale of the property and all of its amenities were donated to the Motion Picture Television and Relief Fund, netting that organization nearly $300,000. As for the chapel, it was moved to the grounds of the Motion Picture Country House and Hospital, where it still stands today as “The John Ford Chapel.” Aside from his films, it is the last physical reminder of Ford’s quarter-century crusade to keep memory alive.

Well, as they say, no good deed goes unpunished. Joseph McBride notes glumly at the beginning of Searching for John Ford how ignorant Hollywood and its admirers have become concerning the career of America’s greatest director:

I was shocked a couple of years ago when I asked a film teacher at a leading California university what she thought of Ford, and found that she had never seen any of his movies. This was not an isolated instance. I often encountered blank looks when I mentioned Ford’s name to people outside the film business, and a story editor for a Hollywood film company asked me, “What are his films?”

Clearly, something is drastically wrong here. A director of Ford’s artistic stature, a filmmaker whose canvas of American life is so rich and ambitious, should be central to our culture, a household word. . . Has Ford become marginalized because of his concentration on a pioneer past that seems less and less meaningful to a nation entering a new millennium? And if that is so, what does that say about us?

What does it say, indeed. If we no longer make the kinds of films John Ford made — if we lose the capability even to imagine how such movies would look and feel today — what does that say about us and our society? What have we lost?

When in the last months of Ford’s life President Richard Nixon came to Los Angeles to give the dying director the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Jane Fonda decided to protest the event outside the auditorium with thousands of anti-war hippies and vermin. Whether she was raging against Nixon, Ford, or the war is irrelevant — her father owed much of his career and fame to Ford, which means she did, too, whether or not she had the sense to realize it. That supreme lack of class, and of respect for one’s elders, is as good a place as any to draw a line between Ford’s world and our own. To put the dichotomy into further relief: Donna Reed, who starred in Expendable, was also a Vietnam War opponent during those years, but she at least possessed a modicum of politesse. For instance, Reed never once saw fit to pose on an enemy gun battery — on the contrary, she was one of the actresses who had danced and mingled with servicemen at the Hollywood Canteen.

The citation for Ford’s Medal of Freedom reads in part: “As an interpreter of the Nation’s heritage, he left his personal stamp indelibly imprinted on the consciousness of whole generations both here and abroad. In his life and in his work, John Ford represents the best in American films and the best in America.” During his brief acceptance speech that night, a frail and cancer-ravaged Ford admitted to Nixon and the world that he had recently “blubbered and cried like a baby” while watching American POWs coming home from Vietnam on TV. Miss Fonda, for her part, famously called those same POWs “hypocrites and liars,” and laughed off their claims of being tortured.

Years later, an elderly Nixon penned a heartfelt letter to Ford biographer Joseph McBride, wherein he tried to express what John Ford meant to America and how modern Hollywood had broken faith with those ideals. I found it a profound, perceptive statement, but judge for yourself from this excerpt (italics mine):

[Ford] was appalled that the Mayor of New York had said, “Our best young men went to Canada.” What appalled him was not the fact that they fled to Canada in order to evade the draft. He understood why any young person would not want to go to Vietnam and get his butt shot off. What he objected to was their pretensions of higher morality — their looking down on those who did serve, the “dummies” who went to Vietnam and got their butts shot off. He believed as I did that our best young men went to Vietnam — even though they were not the best educated or the wealthiest or members of what would generally be described as the elite class, the brightest and the best in our society.

I don’t see many Hollywood motion pictures these days and I am sure that there are some good ones. But what concerns me as I believe it would have concerned John Ford, is the tendency for many Hollywood pictures to reflect life in Hollywood rather than life in the United States. Many movies are sick because those who write, produce, direct, and act in them are sick. It just isn’t considered fashionable to portray the old virtues that John Ford stood for. Even more important, it isn’t considered to be commercial. This new negativism pervades the elite classes not just in Hollywood but in New York, Washington, and the other great financial and corporate centers of the United States.

A goody-two-shoes portrayal would not be a true picture of America. But I would suggest that Hollywood moviemakers would be well advised to travel through America and see what it really is — the good, the bad, and the ugly, with the good prevailing over the bad and the ugly by a factor of ten to one.

John Ford in his life and in his motion pictures celebrated courage, loyalty, honor, strength, sacrifice, patriotism. He did it so well that people by the millions flocked to see his movies. What America and the world needs today are more John Fords who share his values and reflect them in their work.

John Ford died on August 31, 1973, and was buried on a gentle hillside at Holy Cross, the largest Catholic cemetery in the Los Angeles area. His wife, who died six years later, lies at his side. His older brother Francis rests a few plots away — Francis, who played a genial drunk in so many Ford movies, and who signed up with the Army in April, 1943 before being rejected during Basic once they discovered he was sixty-five years old. Ford’s younger brother Edward and his sister Josephine also are interred in the same section, a bit up the hill.

Having the luck of living only a few minutes away, I visit Ford’s grave often. Always I brush the cut grass and dirt off the small marker. Sometimes I fill the inset vase with flowers. If the illegals mowing the lawn aren’t looking my way, I might even fire off a clandestine salute, Jack Pennick-style. Small gestures to be sure, and pretty worthless in the greater scheme of things.

But what the hell. John Ford never forgot his men. Now that he needs a bit of looking after, I don’t intend on forgetting him.

This concludes our seven-part look at the war years of John Ford and the films The Battle of Midway (1942) and They Were Expendable (1945).

Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable”:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

You remember our pact, don’t you? The deal was: first we go through the history of a movie, we study the lives and dreams of its makers, we immerse ourselves in its time and place, and we examine its themes and subtext from a conservative perspective.

Then: we watch the film.

Watching the film is important, it’s the culmination of everything we’ve worked up to. At the end of the day, films aren’t meant to be dissected like so many cadavers at an autopsy — they are meant to be experienced as living, breathing entities. It’s the difference between a butterfly fluttering among sunbeams and flowers in the fullness of life, and one pinned into a scrapbook stinking of formaldehyde. It’s the difference between studying the sheet music of a symphony versus hearing it played by a full orchestra. Don’t think you’ve learned very much about John Ford if you’ve only followed along with these articles. You’ve only prepared yourself to learn, the way a traveler studies a map before heading off on a grand adventure. It’s in the film itself where the real magic happens.

Always remember: the more you bring to a film, the more it will give back to you. If you’ve stuck with me these past seven weeks, you now know a great deal about They Were Expendable. It’s time to put all that knowledge to use. You can Buy the DVD of Expendable for as low as $7.12 with free shipping. Alternately, you can add it to your Netflix queue. However you do it, get it in-house.

Then: make some popcorn, crack open a cold beer, put out the lights, pop in the DVD, and enjoy one of the great triumphs of classic American cinema. 

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we’ll turn to an all-new year and an all-new film. Hope to see you there.

Back in the states he enlisted in the U.S. Navy Reserve, and over the next three years served in many capacities before finding his way to the Pacific theater, where he met John Bulkeley and became his executive officer. Montgomery commanded a PT boat in many battles, and eventually headed up to Normandy as an operations officer for a destroyer squadron. While preparing for D-Day, he remembered later, “I saw Bulkeley on his PT Boat and waved to him. There was another man on the bridge with him. I had no idea then it was Jack Ford.”

Soon after D-Day, Montgomery was felled by a serious bout of tropical fever and was sent back stateside. In four years of war he had earned, among other decorations, the Bronze Star and a Chevalier ranking in the French Legion of Honor. All in all, Ford’s kind of guy. When it came time to cast the Bulkeley part in Expendable, the choice was obvious.

Montgomery arrived in Florida not having acted in four years, and the prospect of stepping in front of the camera again terrified him and triggered debilitating panic attacks. But Ford — capable of immense kindness when least expected — treated his problems with understanding, and over a period of several days gently coaxed him back into the acting groove. Ultimately, They Were Expendable would become one of the actor’s best performances, quietly understated but richly nuanced. Montgomery later said that

Ford had a great crew; they all knew him and they were all fiercely loyal. They’d have defended him to the death. They gave me as good . . .

So little of what I did in Hollywood gives me any pride of achievement. Three or four pictures out of sixty-odd. It’s not very much. Ford was the best I’d ever worked with: the only one I’d call creative. After Expendable I’d cheerfully have signed a contract to work with him exclusively. I don’t know that the idea would have appealed to him, of course. But I’d have been happy. He was a genius.

The respect was mutual. Near the end of filming, Ford took a nasty fall off of a studio scaffold and fractured his leg (“Jesus Christ, you clumsy bastard!” Wayne yelled when he and Montgomery found Ford writhing on the ground). When M-G-M called him frantically in the hospital, wondering who could possibly step in on short notice to finish the picture, Ford christened Bob Montgomery as the man who would direct the few remaining scenes.

After Expendable, Montgomery went on to a fruitful later career, first as a director of several well-regarded noir films, then as a popular television personality. His then-twelve-year-old daughter Elizabeth would later grow up to be a star, too — most famous for playing the madcap enchantress Samantha in the 1964 television series Bewitched.

Donna Reed (1921–1986), was just coming into her own as a young actress in 1944, and like so many others before her she was putty in Ford’s hand. In the beginning Ford deliberately didn’t speak to her for weeks, and his rudeness served to build up the hardened exterior she would need for playing her opening scenes in the hospital, stoically assisting meatball surgeons. Later on in the production, however, the wily director changed tactics.

Right before the scene where she is treated by Wayne and his unit to a charmingly improvised candlelight dinner, Ford suddenly softened her up with a string of lovely pearls, ostentatiously presenting them to her in front of the whole crew as a sort of tribute to the nurses of Bataan. This gift from the fearsome, crotchety director was so unexpected that her face lit up with a radiant glow which carried over into the scene, lending genuine conviction to her reactions throughout the dinner, the serenade, and all the way up to her tearful final line, “They’re just such nice guys!”

Film critic Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his era and no fan of stridently patriotic movies, would write in the New York Times that, “Donna Reed is extraordinarily touching in the role of an Army nurse who figures into the story in a brief romance which is most tastefully and credibly handled.” This was the start of Reed’s career as a true star, and the very next year she would appear in her most immortal film role, that of Jimmy Stewart’s devoted wife in It’s a Wonderful Life.

Incredibly, after They Were Expendable was released, the real-life counterparts of the Wayne and Reed characters both sued for damages, claiming that — even though the names in the movie are all fictitious — the film insinuates that they had a romantic relationship in real life. How anyone could complain about being portrayed by the likes of John Wayne and Donna Reed is beyond me, but in the end they both won damages in court (a few thousand for the man, several hundred thousand for the woman). And so it was this film that prompted the widespread use of the disclaimer we have seen on countless movies ever since, about all characters being fictitious and any resemblance to real people “living or dead” being coincidental.

Throughout the decades in which he worked, John Ford collected about himself a motley assortment of character actors, stuntmen, ex-soldiers, and personal friends, people he particularly enjoyed working with. Together they became informally known as the John Ford Stock Company, and over the course of thirty years they matured into an experienced acting troupe much greater than the sum of their parts, to the point where you can usually judge the merit of a Ford film based on how many members of his Stock Company are listed in the credits. Astoundingly versatile, they were by turns raucously hilarious or deeply affecting, depending on Ford’s whims. For fans of the director’s films, the sight of one of their weathered, well-loved faces on screen is always a cause for rejoicing.

Along with John Wayne, the Company’s most prominent member was Ward Bond (1903–1960). Both Wayne and Bond came to Ford in the late 1920s as a pair of frat-boy college football players from USC looking for summer studio work as grips, stuntmen, whatever they could get. A hardworking character actor, Bond had a different kind of appeal than the Duke, but one no less important to Ford’s films.

Bond was a human bulldog — pug-nosed, round-bellied, big-assed. He looked like someone’s father or brother, eminently blue-collar and dependable, with no guile in his face whatsoever. This allowed him to stand in front of a camera and bring lines to life that in other mouths would have sounded shamelessly corny:

“It means service — tough and good.”

No fancy wordplay, no flowery prose. Just honest sentiments, presented with all the simplicity you would expect from a rugged sailor searching for a manly way to express himself to his buddies. In Ford’s oeuvre, Bond continually grounds scenes in reality that might otherwise become too saccharine, as when in They Were Expendable he serenades Donna Reed (a scene that both Bond and Reed would repeat the very next year in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, with Bond playing Bert the Cop).

Like Wayne, Bond also didn’t serve during the war — rejected due to his epilepsy — and so instead became an air-raid warden in Los Angeles. In July 1944, he suffered a horrible accident while riding his motorcycle on Hollywood Boulevard. According to fellow John Ford Stock Company member Harry Carey Jr.:

He was hit by a car, and his left leg was torn to shreds. The story is that one doctor wanted to amputate it because it was evidently hanging by a thread of flesh, but Duke Wayne threatened to annihilate the doc if he did that. Somehow, after months and months of treatment and skin grafts, the leg was saved. Ward wore a huge brace on it much of the time, but covered it so well you could hardly tell. One part of his leg never did heal. He always had to wear some kind of dressing on it.

With Expendable filming at the end of that year, Bond was in no condition to play such a physically demanding role. Yet like with Robert Montgomery’s panic attacks, Ford reacted to the news with kindness. He kept his friend in the cast and worked around the injury, blocking his scenes so he wouldn’t have to walk more than a step or two in any one shot, and later having his character injured in the script so he could hobble around on a crutch.

It was a good choice — Bond is one of the highlights of They Were Expendable, providing generous helpings of pathos and comic relief in equal measure. One indication of the respect Ford had for his abilities is that Bond was paid more than any other actor on the picture aside from Montgomery and Wayne — $37,000 all told, compared to Montgomery’s $170,000 and Wayne’s $80,000. (For the record, Jack Holt made $30,000, many of the other second-tier actors brought in $15,000 or so, and Donna Reed got $5000 for her few days of studio work.)

In addition to Wayne and Bond, the two giants of the Stock Company, They Were Expendable relies on the talents of other longtime members. Russell Simpson (1880–1959) is “Dad” Knowland, the aged mechanic who refuses to abandon his forty-year home in the Philippines, and is last seen sitting laconically on his doorstep, totally alone in the jungle, cradling his shotgun and a jug of whiskey, waiting for death at the hands of the soon-to-arrive Japanese vanguard. And Harry Tenbrook (1887–1960) portrays the lovable lug “Squarehead” Larsen, the unit’s cook, who ever pines for “the Arizona to come steaming up the bay with her fourteen-inch guns blazing, and the best cook stoves in the Navy.” Neither of these actors were household names, but Ford gave them small, key moments to hold up in the picture, and as always they shine.

(Stuntman Frank McGrath (1903–1967) — a Ford favorite who over a decade later would become a star in the hit television show Wagon Train with Ward Bond — can also be spied as an unnamed sailor in a late scene. He’s the one who tells John Wayne “Glad to see ya back, Mr. Ryan” after Wayne’s character finds Brickley and his men once again.)

Special mention must be made, however, of Stock Company regular Ronald J. “Jack” Pennick (1895–1964). In They Were Expendable he plays Doc, the old weeping sailor being put out to pasture in the clip we saw earlier, but who ultimately stays behind to fight alongside the doomed Army on Bataan. His is a name few people remember today, but anyone who professes admiration for the movies of John Ford needs to know it. Jack Pennick meant a great deal to the director, so much in fact that he holds the honor of appearing in more Ford pictures than any other actor.

Pennick was a two-bit Hollywood trouper when he first met Ford in the late silent era, and he appeared in several of the then-youthful director’s pictures in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A particularly kind and gentle man under his rough, hangdog exterior, it impressed Ford greatly to later discover that Pennick was also a lifelong soldier — a tough-as-nails former Marine drillmaster who had fought in both World War I and the “Banana Wars” of the 1920s. As if that wasn’t enough, over the years he also educated himself into becoming one of the foremost experts on soldiery and military history that Ford or anyone else had ever met.

The two men got on famously, and soon Ford adopted Pennick as his all-around, ever-present aide-de-camp. He did virtually everything for the director, from waking him up each morning on location and hand-delivering his first cup of coffee, to tucking him into bed unconscious after a long night of drinking and poker. The man Ford affectionately called “the big six-foot-four-and-a-half mick” also served with him during World War II, devotedly following him around the world and supposedly (according to professional bullshitter Ford, so take it with a huge grain of salt) even winning the Silver Star. “Wild Bill” Donovan, the founder of the OSS, once reverently said of Pennick, “There is the most perfect soldier I have ever met.” To the end of his days, whenever John Ford would exit a car or enter a room, Jack Pennick would jump up and snap off a perfect salute to his benefactor.

All of this appealed greatly to Ford’s boundless sense of drama and history and duty, and he reciprocated Pennick’s loyalty many times over in the post-war years. In all the director’s greatest movies you can see the winningly ugly ex-soldier appear in some minor role, usually as a sergeant or barman. He was much more useful behind the scenes, mercilessly drilling pampered actors and teaching them how to comport themselves as real servicemen. Anyone wondering how it must have felt for John Wayne and the rest of the John Ford Stock Company to be worked over by ol’ Jack Pennick need only check out this little clip from Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), which has a funny scene of him whipping some green cavalry troops into shape:

My guess is that, given his druthers and some recalcitrant recruits, he could have given R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket a run for his money.

Pennick was also kept on hand to ensure that all the military costumes and lingo were as accurate as possible. It was he who famously walked into West Point during Ford’s filming of The Long Grey Line (1955), took one glance at an old coat-of-arms on the wall, and nonchalantly proclaimed it inaccurate — the swords hanging in the display, he assured the docents, were upside down. When they checked their manuals they discovered to their astonishment that he was right — the display had been hanging wrong for decades until Pennick tipped them off.

When today’s filmmakers, flush with the power of CGI and modern camera techniques, declare their gloomy anti-war films more realistic and thus superior to the hokey military movies of yore, I can only think of guys like Jack Pennick, men who infused old movies with their patriotism, optimism, loyalty, and expertise. One of John Ford’s greatest gifts to posterity is his immortalization of such people on screen, reminding future generations of their caliber.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our coverage of They Were Expendable with a look at John Ford’s postwar legacy, and his place in film history as a champion of the American spirit.

Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable”:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

Company of Heroes: My Life as An Actor in the John Ford Stock Company by Harry Carey, Jr. For those wishing to learn more about the group of Fordian actors mentioned above, there is no better source than this volume of delightful stories by Mr. Carey (who as of this writing is 88 years old and still hale and hearty). There are many laugh-out-loud (and some cringe-worthy) moments featuring John Ford, John Wayne, Ward Bond, Jack Pennick, and all the rest. A must read if you watch the films of John Ford — it will add layers of meaning to each picture, and make them that much more satisfying.

The Earl of Hollywood: a nice website dedicated to the life and career of Robert Montgomery. Lots of rare pictures, including ones of Montgomery as an ambulance driver in France, and in uniform on the cover of various magazines. Well worth perusing.

MOVIE TRIVIA ANSWER: Looks like no one came close to getting the answer to our trivia question last week. Future film director Blake Edwards, in his early acting days, played an unnamed sailor in They Were Expendable, appearing in two main scenes. First, he shows up as a wet-behind-the-ears seaman in the bar during Doc’s farewell party (he’s the one who gets a “very small beer” from actor and former wrestler Sammy Stein).

Much later his character is seen again, this time as a bearded, now-veteran member of John Wayne’s dejected crew, attending an impromptu funeral for two comrades and then listening gravely as the radio in the bar heralds the fall of Bataan.

If you think about it, Ford here creates a shattered mirror image of the first bar scene. Some of the same kids who cheerfully toasted Doc’s health with beer, sarsaparilla, and ginger ale are now at a much different tavern, this time drinking hard liquor, having in the interim become seasoned, war-hardened sailors fully aware of the meaning of “service — tough and good.”

All of these scenes were shot on Hollywood sound stages as opposed to on location in Key Biscayne, Florida, which explains why Edwards doesn’t appear in any outdoor shots.

Other movies the young Blake Edwards can be seen in include The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), where he plays a corporal at the ATC (Air Transport Command) counter in the beginning of the film (“Guess I’m goin’ to Cleveland,” he tells Andrews). He also played the lead in several schlocky B films, including the immortal Strangler of the Swamp (also 1946).

“I was just the paint for the palettes of Ford and Hawks.”

– John Wayne –

John Wayne was still young in 1944, only thirty-eight years old. And yet the major elements of his inimitable style were hardening into place. Perhaps no other actor in history has been so cognizant of using his body to express grand themes and timeless mythological underpinnings. Under Ford’s direction Wayne never just stands there, he poses, in ways and with effects that conjure up famous paintings and sculpture. When he fills the frame as Lieutenant Junior Grade Rusty Ryan in They Were Expendable, he becomes every man who ever fought a losing action in a war, who faced defeat with stoicism, who sacrificed for a greater good. In the history of film, John Wayne remains nonpareil in his use of presence to project subtext.

Little of that came naturally to the Duke — in his early films he’s tall and rangy and handsome, but with little of the gravity, focus, and dramatic weight that would come to typify his prime acting years. Those skills, and they were skills, were consciously learned over fifteen years of working with Ford and his old troupe of veteran actors. He watched the way they walked and carried themselves, studied the way they were directed, and began to divine the level of nuance Ford demanded. There’s a funny story from the making of Stagecoach (1939, John Wayne’s big coming-out party as an actor), where Wayne’s character was supposed to be washing his face after a hard day, and Ford started smacking him around screaming, “Christ Duke, wash you face like a man! You’re daubing it! You’re daubing it!” He was trying to teach Wayne that, when you are an actor in front of a camera, your every movement can and should mean something deeper than what is on the surface. The act of washing one’s face can be pedestrian, or it can be a sweeping gesture that evokes strength of character, or a relaxed demeanor, or a gentleness of heart. And those deft movements will unconsciously fire off all sorts of neurons in the brain of an audience.

When you watch They Were Expendable, pay close attention to John Wayne. Look how he stands in each shot compared to others in the frame, how he inevitably comes across as more interesting than everyone else, more classically posed. Notice the way his hands are often planted on his hips, his elbows flared wide. The way his chest is thrust out like a peacock. The way he keeps his face turned down and glares out at people from under dark eyebrows. The way he wrinkles his forehead with weariness and, without blinking, gazes out into space with a thousand-yard stare that looks as if he has all the pain of the war bottled within. Other, supposedly more accomplished actors would go toe-to-toe with Duke in a scene, and he would often just mop the floor with them, blowing them off the screen with a look or a gesture.

To this day, leftists regularly embarrass themselves with the argument that the Duke’s lack of a war record disqualifies him from being an on-screen exemplar of cherished American values. The notion that an actor must actually be in real life whatever he’s portraying on screen is idiotic. Wayne was never a real-life war hero, granted. But neither was he the draft-dodging hypocrite of liberal fever-swamp fantasies. A May 1942 letter exists of Wayne almost begging John Ford to pull strings to get him into his Field Photo unit:

Have you any suggestions on how I should get in? Can I get assigned to your outfit, and if I could, would you want me? How about the Marines? You have Army and Navy men under you. Have you any Marines or how about a Seabee or what would you suggest or would you? No, I’m not drunk. I just hate to ask favors, but for Christ sake you can suggest, can’t you?. . .No kidding, coach, who’ll I see?

Meanwhile Herbert Yates, the head of Republic Pictures, continually requested deferments for Wayne in a desperate effort to keep his main action star on the lot. Studios like M-G-M could let a dozen headliners go off to fight and still have a vast stable of bankable names to draw on. A tiny second-rate outfit like Republic, on the other hand, had none to spare. Yates’ biggest moneymaker, Gene Autry, had already abandoned his contract to enlist, meaning that in 1942 and 1943 the only Republic films to become Top Twenty box-office hits starred John Wayne.

One review from the period noted, “John Wayne is a rudimentary actor, but he has the look and bearing, unusual for his trade, of a capable human male. . . he is able to make his habitual inarticulateness suggest the uncommunicative competence that men expect in their leaders.” At a time when President Roosevelt was making patriotic films a top priority (wartime theater attendance had skyrocketed from fifty million people a week to more than ninety million), Wayne was one of the only guys left in Hollywood able to pull them off and make them hits (Humphrey Bogart being another).

“You should have thought about all that before you signed a new contract!” Yates said when Wayne asked to be allowed to enlist. “If you don’t live up to it, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got! I’ll sue you for every penny you hope to make in the future!” For the Duke — who grew up poor and ever worried about returning to those circumstances — it was a terrifying threat. He was not yet a star on the level of a Gable or Stewart or Fonda (or even a Robert Montgomery, who in 1945 got paid $170,000 for They Were Expendable compared to Wayne’s $80.000). John Ford’s grandson Dan, a veteran in his own right, later mused that

It must have weighed heavily on him which way to go. But here was his chance and he knew it. He was an action leading man, and there were a lot of roles for him to play. There was a lot of work in A movies, and this was a guy who had made eighty B movies. He had finally moved up to the first rank. He was in the right spot at the right time with the right qualities and willing to work hard. Would I have done any different? The answer is hell no.

Soon, Yates was making money with Wayne not only by starring him in Republic films, but by loaning him out to other studios, all of whom were suffering from their own leading man shortages. Wayne worked relentlessly, averaging four movies a year. At the behest of Mary Ford, he would come to the Hollywood Canteen after hours and wash dishes, bus tables, and carve turkeys. Between films in late 1943, he embarked on a three-month, two-shows-a-day USO tour across the South Pacific. The experience made a deep impression on him. “They’ll build stages out of old crates,” he reverently noted after one trip, “then sit in mud and rain for three hours waiting for someone like me to say ‘Hello, Joe’.”

The war ending without his having enlisted would haunt Wayne’s conscience for the rest of his life. In hindsight, a large part of his later career can be seen as a sincere effort to make amends by doing our troops proud via the art of filmmaking.

John Ford’s disgust with Wayne’s lack of military experience has been grossly over-exaggerated, but he did add it to his tool chest of things used to get a rise out of his protégé or, in extreme cases, bring him to tears. During the filming of They Were Expendable, after several takes of Robert Montgomery and Wayne saluting a departing general, Ford broke out with, “Duke — can’t you manage a salute that at least looks as though you’ve been in the service?” Crestfallen and shattered, Wayne walked off of a set for the only time in his life. Montgomery, who served with distinction throughout the war, walked up to Ford, put his hands on the arms of the director’s chair, and with steel in his voice said, “Don’t you ever speak to anyone like that again.” When he further insisted that Ford find Wayne and apologize, Montgomery remembers that, “[Ford] blustered at first — ‘I’m not going to apologize to that son of a bitch. . .’; then he came out with a lot of phony excuses — ‘What did I say? I didn’t mean to hurt his feelings.’ He ended up crying.”

But if the grizzled director sometimes drove the Duke to fits of despair, he far more often elevated him to the heights of cinema legend. Few anecdotes illustrate this more profoundly than the tale behind the nostalgic tune featured so memorably in They Were Expendable, “Marchéta.” Pronounced Mar-KEE-ta, it’s a 1913 “love song of Old Mexico” written by the American composer Victor Schertzinger when he was but 25 years old. Some thirty years after the song became a well-loved standard, Ford made “Marchéta” one of the emotional linchpins of his 1945 film.

All the versions of “Marchéta” to be found on modern CDs are either overwrought ballads by male vocalists like Al Jolson and Mario Lanza, or else corny “cha-cha” dance instrumentals. However, when played in sleepy waltz-time it becomes an achingly beautiful theme. It is first played (and the lyrics quietly sung by the assembled crowd) when Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) attends a hospital dance on Corregidor, in the Philippines, and falls in love with a nurse there. Much later in the movie Bataan falls, and Corregidor (where his lover is stationed) is being bombed and starved into submission by the Japanese. As Wayne gets drunk in an island bar, a poignant reprise of the melody appears on the radio. Without a single word of dialogue or explanation, Wayne gazes off into space, and as the music plays we recognize it from before, and realize he is remembering that wonderful evening spent dancing in the darkness with a doomed woman he’ll never see again:

–

The song is utilized expertly in Expendable, and would stick with John Wayne for the rest of his life. Ford, you see, had an accordionist friend named Danny Borzage, who would often play mood music to help the actors find the right emotional timbre for a scene. (In fact, Borzage can be seen on-screen in many of Ford’s films — in They Were Expendable, look for him under the floorboards of a hut providing musical accompaniment to Ward Bond’s serenade of Donna Reed.) Whenever John Ford or a member of his stock company appeared on-set for the day’s work, Borzage would also play favored themes — different for each person — to announce their arrival. Over time, his presence and these songs became a grand and well-loved tradition on Ford’s sets, creating a palpable sense of family amongst the cast and crew.

After They Were Expendable, “Marchéta” became John Wayne’s aural signature, lovingly warbled on Danny Borzage’s accordion each morning to herald the arrival of the Duke. It’s a beautiful melody, laden with nostalgia, and deserves to be remembered far better than it has been.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we focus on some of the other members of the John Ford Stock Company who appeared in They Were Expendable, along with a pair of prominent non-Fordian actors who helped greatly to make the movie special.

PAST POSTS IN THIS SERIES

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

Here’s a great review/essay on They Were Expendable by an anonymous writer at eOpinions, one that adds more arguments and behind-the-scenes stories to my defense of John Wayne’s actions during the war.

The National Archives has some scans online of pages from John Wayne’s 1943 application for a commission with the OSS (scroll to bottom of page).

A kindly pianist saw fit to post a nice, full version of “Marchéta” on the Internet for all to enjoy, one that hews pretty closely to the way it sounds in They Were Expendable. I find most of the other versions lacking (Al Jolson does the best lyrical interpretation, in my opinion), but there’s a lot more examples out there on YouTube if you want to explore them.

MOVIE TRIVIA TIME: It’s a little-known fact that film director Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther series, et al.) started out in Hollywood as a young actor, with one of his earliest roles being an uncredited sailor in They Were Expendable. If you look carefully, he can be seen in both the “Marchéta” video above and in the Introductory video to Part 1 of this series. Care to guess which sailor is Edwards?  Put your choices in the Comments section below, and I’ll reveal the answer in next week’s installment.

“Close-ups, affectionate or noble, are held at leisure; long shots are sustained long after their narrative role has been performed. A marginal figure is suddenly dwelt on, lovingly enlarged to fill the center of the screen. Informed with heightened emotion, a single shot, unexpectedly interposed — a ragged line of men marching into nowhere, one of them playing a bugle-call on his harmonica — assumes a deeper significance than is given by its function in the story. This is one of the properties of poetry. They Were Expendable is a heroic poem.” – Lindsay Anderson

The wondrous shots about which Mr. Anderson writes were masterminded by John Ford, but they were brought to life on film by Joseph H. August (1890-1947), one of the great cinematographers of the age. It was August who memorably crafted the hauntingly beautiful images of night-fog and shadows for Ford’s The Informer (1935), which won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. He also lensed now-classic movies like Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both 1939), and during the war served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves.

Joe August was a twenty-one-year-old wayward cowpuncher from Colorado when he migrated west to work as a ranch hand at Inceville, the vast silent-era movie studio created by film pioneer Thomas Ince on what is now modern-day Santa Monica. But it wasn’t long before he drifted away from horses and lariats and lost himself in the shiny, futuristic world of cameras, lenses, and light. August’s cinematographic mentor was the director Ray Smallwood (1887-1964), who not only taught him the intricacies of camerawork but impressed upon him the need to become an instinctive artist, one capable of using light and chemicals and film emulsion to emotionally transform a film composition the same way a symphonic conductor can transform a well-known piece of music with different orchestrations and the wave of a baton.

Even something as innocuous and seemingly necessary as a light meter (a handheld instrument that allows you to measure the intensity of light at various points in a composition, so that you can be sure you are not over- or under-exposing — and hence potentially ruining — a shot) was verboten on a Smallwood set. Decades later, and now a veteran cinematographer in his own right, Joe August had not forgotten the hard lessons of his apprenticeship. “I am not against meters by any means,” he said in a 1939 interview. “They just don’t fit into my plan of taking pictures. The meters I lean on are my eyes. When I first started in this business twenty-eight years ago, I had a preceptor I then thought sort of tough because he was insistent on my learning what could be accomplished by a pair of eyes, and a man with scant patience for any devices that aimed to make those organs secondary to any human intervention.”

This sort of approach to cinematography often results in images that are, by strict measurable standards, too dark, too light, too grainy, too blurry — in a word, not perfect in the way we’ve come to expect from Hollywood fare. But in August’s determination, rigid standards of slick perfection were beside the point. He felt that the emotional spectrum of a cinematographer’s image counted as much as the physical, just as a painter hardly feels the need to portray everything with strict photographic realism. “Frequently,” he said, “I choose to make an exposure that — well, we will call it an unorthodox exposure, one aimed to produce a certain effect that may be desirable. For instance, the negative might be overexposed and underdeveloped — or the procedure might be reversed.”

The video I posted above is filled with examples of these “unorthodox exposures”: haggard faces swathed in shadow and smoke, men and planes reduced to silhouettes against dim panoramas of swaying palms and setting suns, two figures dancing together in an almost total darkness which serves to enhance the intimacy of the moment. There were no video screens back then to give guys like August instant feedback on their lighting setups. With every shot they guessed, they experimented, they checked the camera’s film gate for stray hairs. And if they were very skilled and a bit lucky, a few days later the film would come back from the lab with something magical burned into it.

There are two recurring visual motifs in They Were Expendable: the long-shot goodbye and the luminous close-up. Throughout the film we see faces swathed in shadow, almost lovingly, with only their eyes aglow in the gloom, like feral ghosts. The quality of light mirrors the content of their souls, flickering and guttering like fragile candles amidst the harsh winds of war. Water, too, is used to great effect. Fearsome waves and bomb-created geysers batter men as they struggle to keep afloat, their tattered battle flag fluttering madly. At one point, the destruction of John Wayne’s beloved boat casts up a mournful veil of artificial rain that falls down upon him like heavenly tears.

August was in his mid-fifties when he shot Expendable, but he frequently pushed himself to the limits of endurance in his efforts to capture the shots Ford wanted:

When Ford and I did They Were Expendable for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the United States Navy, the keynote of the picture was realism. We used regular PT Boats manned by Navy crews off the Florida Coast. Equipped with a handheld 35mm Mitchell camera that weighed fourteen pounds, I reverted to old-time photographic technique, shooting the scenes myself. I was cushioned against a slack service belt attached to a boat by two lines as the craft hit speeds of 42 knots, sometimes taking drops of five feet while speeding across the water. For other action shots, I lay on the bow of a PT Boat shooting backward into the vessel. As in Ford’s The Battle of Midway, the camera often shook while photographing real explosions.

It’s interesting that he stresses realism. M-G-M tried forcing Ford to film a silly ending that would have shown MacArthur’s 1945 invasion force triumphantly returning to the Philippines, topped by Wayne’s character finding Donna Reed in a guerrilla hospital and giving her a glorious Hollywood kiss! To Ford’s everlasting credit, he doggedly fought for his original bittersweet denouement until the studio capitulated. The filmmakers were also hampered by the harsh dictates of the Breen Office, which strictly regulated what could and could not be displayed on screen. “In all of the scenes of wounded men and of men taking machine gun slugs,” one December 1944 letter from Breen warned, “restraint should be exercised to avoid any excessive gruesomeness, which might not be acceptable in the finished picture.” Numerous instances of words like “damn,” “hell,” and even “nuts” were ruthlessly excised from the script again and again, despite Ford’s multiple attempts to sneak them past the censors. We must allow for this artistic meddling before thoughtlessly damning our forefathers for the crime of papering over the true horrors of war.

Today we regularly are treated to heads exploding, blood splattering across the lens, and glistening intestines strewn in full color across the widescreen frame, all accompanied by explosions and screams delivered in ear-splitting surround sound. And yet realism is not the be-all, end-all of art, and oftentimes loses more than it gains. Contrary to popular belief, modern audiences needn’t be subjected to raw butchery and carnage for a war movie to have an impact, any more than they demand pornographic portrayals of sex scenes in romantic films. The relatively sanitary images created by Golden Age Hollywood are no different than a Shakespearean stage actor gamely taking a sword-thrust under the armpit and stiffening up in over-dramatic death-throes capable of being seen by the schlubs in the cheap seats. It’s a simplistic, unimaginative mind that routinely sanctifies realism at the expense of poetic impressionism. The next time you are watching an old movie and find yourself snickering at men reacting painfully to non-existent bullets, consider the possibility that it’s a blessing that your nervous system isn’t being overwhelmed with gore, that you are left with enough emotional distance to think and feel, not just recoil.

Like all of Ford’s best films, Expendable is filled to the brim not with visual horror but with what he called his “grace notes” — shots of spare simplicity and honest emotion that, while not absolutely necessary to the plot, served to powerfully convey his deepest feelings and themes. The cutaway we saw in the opening clip of this series — of a boy toasting his elder with a glass of milk — is a Fordian grace note. In the video above, the shot of the two young seamen praying at their friends’ graves is one, too. I would suggest to you that such images, then and now, are far more important to a movie than seeing yet another man’s guts spilling out.

If I had to pick a favorite grace note among the embarrassment of riches to be found in Expendable, I would chose the one that appears toward the very end. It ranks as perhaps the most subtle in Ford’s entire canon, one that comes and goes so fast you sense it more than see it. Throughout the film, Wayne’s impulsive character has been openly seething at having to retreat rather than take the fight to the enemy. Only now, at the end, does he realize that this brashness and anger has been a luxury denied to his commander, who is ever forced to stoically suppress his own agony so that others can draw strength from his leadership. In most modern films (and, to be sure, many older ones as well), Wayne would have had a good cry and made a pretentious speech about how he’s “changed” and “grown” as a human being. Ford, by contrast, has the Duke convey an entire universe of feeling with a single gesture, one so quiet and understated that most viewers miss it entirely:

One look, one touch. Says It All. Pure visual poetry. That was the genius of men like John Ford and Joseph August. Modern-day Hollywood could learn a lot from their legacy.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we delve into the controversial war years of John Wayne, examine the foundations of his irreplaceable acting talent, and learn of the history and significance of a special song featured in They Were Expendable.

Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable”:

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

“The Founding Fathers” by Robert S. Birchard: A fine article on the fifteen cameramen who started the American Society of Cinematographers, including They Were Expendable’s Joe August. Includes a picture of August taken during the very early years of Hollywood silents.

Big Hollywood’s own Schizoid Man wrote a great post a few months back about another movie lensed by cinematographer Joe August, Gunga Din (1939). If you missed it the first time, click here to check it out.

About John Ford by Lindsay Anderson: In an earlier post I mentioned that Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford is the bible among Ford fans. Well, About John Ford is the bible for Ford critics — simply the best book about Ford’s artistry ever written, or likely to be written. Anderson was a British magazine critic in the 1950s when he first met Ford, and later became a revered director in his own right (it was he who jump-started the career of actor Malcolm McDowell, who credits Anderson with much of his growth as an actor). But I feel Anderson deserves to be primarily remembered for this wonderful volume, wherein he absolutely nails the essentials of John Ford’s genius, his patriotism, and his love of family and country. In the key chapter, “Ford and His Critics: Auteur or Poet?”, he thoroughly dismantles the gaggle of clueless academics and pretentious critics that ever hover around Fordian cinema missing the forest for the trees. In the process, the ostensibly liberal Anderson also mounts the most convincing defense of classical (read: conservative) cinematic styles against post-modernism that I’ve ever read. Anderson’s sole blind spot was The Searchers (he found it a stylistically forced and emotionally bitter film, one at odds with Ford at his best), but even there his arguments are fascinating to ponder.

Illustrated with dozens of rare photographs and screenshots, and including interviews and correspondence with key people who worked with Ford (including They Were Expendable’s Robert Montgomery), About John Ford is all tied together with a relaxed erudition that is sheer poetry to read, an emotionally evocative mirroring of Ford’s films themselves. The praise he heaps on the great director — “such smiles, such tears, such restorative energy” — could just as easily apply to his own marvelous book. I can’t recommend it highly enough to conservatives — a masterwork.