“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) began as a short story called “The Greatest Gift.” Pennsylvania-born writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who said that the heartwarming tale had come to him in a dream, was unable to sell it to a publisher, so he sent the story out as a long Christmas card to friends. His agent subsequently sold the fable to RKO pictures, where it went through several transformations.

—–

In one version a losing political candidate contemplated suicide, only to have an angel convince him to stick around and do good works. Finally it fell into the hands of director Frank Capra, who said it was the story he had been looking for all his life. He purchased it to be the first project for his new venture, Liberty Films (started by Capra in 1945 along with Producer Samuel J. Briskin, and directors William Wyler and George Stevens). With movie attendance booming during the Second World War II, a new independent film company for big name directors seemed like a can’t-miss idea.

Capra had long been an admirer of Amadeo Pietro Giannini, the founder of the Bank of Italy in 1904, renamed the Bank of America in 1928. Giannini earned a reputation for lending money to people other financial institutions had considered bad risks, including immigrants whose property had been destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A.P. only required a handshake and was proud to say later that he was always paid back. Giannini also believed strongly in the hopes and dreams of some of the street merchants who gravitated into the fledgling film industry, and put his bank’s money behind their ventures.

Based on Giannini, Capra’s 1932 drama, “American Madness,” told the story of a bank president (Walter Huston) who makes lending decisions based more on character than collateral, which causes his board of directors to try and ruin him. The money man is bailed by his less well-to-do friends,who personally benefited from his past generosity. A movie about a bank run had proved too topical to be a big hit in 1932; now, fourteen years later, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would allow Capra to once again tackle a similar theme.

To play the unassuming savings and loan clerk in “Wonderful Life,” Capra wanted Jimmy Stewart, who had previously worked with him in “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” (1939). Coming back from World War II, the 37-year-old Stewart was no longer the easy going man-about-town he had been in the thirties. The former Academy Award winner for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) had led a thousand men on bombing missions in the European theater in hard-to-maneuver B-24s. The loud plane engines damaged Jim’s hearing; in later years when people would greet him in public he would sometimes fail to respond. Some would mistake his partial deafness for a cold personality.

Stewart had displayed a great sense of humor when he’d first been inducted into the army; his salary had dropped from the hefty $1,500 a week he was being paid by MGM Studios to twenty-one dollars a month, and he earned his keep as a Buck Private whose duties included peeling potatoes. Upon receiving his first payment Jim immediately sent a check for $2.10 to his agent.

The actor was uncertain after five years away from the screen whether he still wanted to be in the movies; his life in the military at times made him feel like his old profession was insignificant. In 1943, when Stewart had tried to stay in one the best hotels in Madrid, he was turned away because he was an actor. Jim returned back to the military base, changed into his Lieutenant Colonel’s uniform, returned to the resort and was allowed to stay.

“Frank called me one day and said, ‘I have an idea for a movie, why don’t you come over and I’ll tell you?’ So I went over and we sat down and he said, ‘This picture starts in heaven’. That shook me.” James Stewart

When he returned to Southern California in 1945, Stewart took things easily. He refused to re-sign with MGM, despite tearful requests to do so from Metro’s hammy head honcho Louis B. Mayer. Like many World War II veterans, Jim had trouble sleeping and would instinctively duck down whenever a plane would fly overhead. He was content to spend time flying kites, building model planes and going bobcat hunting with Henry Fonda. Fonda had also been up for the George Bailey role; the two war veterans remained lifelong friends despite political differences which had once caused a fistfight between them in 1947. The liberal Fonda and conservative Stewart had promised, and kept their word, never to discuss politics again.

When Frank Capra made his pitch Stewart looked bored, out of it, which caused the director to lose confidence. “Well Jim, it’s about a savings and loan clerk who wants to commit suicide. There’s an angel named Clarence who shows him what life would have been like without him… aw forget it, it’s a stupid idea.” Capra was turning to leave when Stewart put his hand on his shoulder. “Frank, if you want me, I’m your man.” At least that’s how the film’s publicists told it.

“I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn’t care what he believed.” –Lionel Barrymore

In Part 2 (which publishes tomorrow), we learn why “It’s a Wonderful Life” star Jimmy Stewart fought a bad case of nerves while shooting the film and how director Frank Capra got along with his dictatorial studio boss.

Since 9-11, Hollywood filmmakers have had, within free-market parameters, the choice to make any type of picture they wish. No one in government prohibited director Steven Spielberg, in the 2005 drama “Munich,” from implying, in the minds of some critics, that Mossad agents and Palestinian terrorists were morally equivalent and that both sides were equally responsible with their shared intransigence for the Twin Towers coming down (Gabriel Schoenfeld, in the February 2006 issue of Commentary Magazine stated that Munich,” deserves an Oscar in one category only: most hypocritical film of the year.”)

Spielberg, who previously produced “An American Tail” (1986), which depicted Jewish immigrants as mice, seemed to be conflicted with the whole notion of Israelis fighting back against those who wished them not to exist. “”I’m always in favor of Israel responding strongly when it’s threatened. At the same time, a response to a response doesn’t really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual-motion machine,” Spielberg told Time Magazine. “There’s been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end? How can it end?”

Another post-9/11 cinema trait was that Muslim villains became mostly taboo on the screen. The 2002 thriller “The Sum of All Fears,” adapted from the Tom Clancy novel of same name, featured Aryan villains trying to bomb Baltimore rather than the Arab destroyers depicted in the book. Director Phil Alden Robinson claimed the ethnic change was because Middle East terrorists would not be able to accomplish the mayhem that took place in the story, not mentioning that he had been lobbied hard by CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) not to show Muslims in a bad light.Writer Clancy later jokingly referred to himself as “the author of the book Phil Robinson ignored.”

The political correctness which was already present in the film industry, and that just seemed to grow after the World Trade Center was struck down, was a stark contrast to events following America’s entry into World War II. Shortly after December 7, 1941, Washington’s Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMI) made their objectives clear: every director, producer and writer needed to ask whether their current picture would help win the war. The implication by the Roosevelt administration was clear; if the major studios failed to cooperate, their industry would be nationalized.

For the most part, such threats were not needed.

With Stalin’s Russia and the United States on the same side against the Nazis, an uneasy alliance formed in Hollywood between the more traditional patriotic right and the Communist-leaning left. Up until 1942, the Hollywood Studios, similar to today, largely depended on foreign markets. When Greer Garson accepted the title role in the drama “Mrs. Miniver” (1942) in late 1941, she felt the German soldier that menaced her in the movie was too sympathetic.

With her country under attack, the thirty-three-year-old Londoner wanted to give up Hollywood stardom, return home, and drive
ambulances. The only reason Greer agreed to do the picture was that the British government felt that it would be great propaganda; however, the nice Nazi would undermine any hawkish message. Garson’s cautious bosses at MGM pointed out that America was neutral; they couldn’t take sides. Their attitude changed when Germany declared war on the US in December; Greer’s on-screen antagonist was allowed to become evil. Years later, Garson lamented that Mrs. Miniver trapped her into being typecast as sacrificing British mothers. But her Oscar winning performance in Miniver helped convince many Americans to support England’s war effort.

An obvious difference between the World War II and contemporary Hollywood is that in the 1940’s there were no twenty-four-hour cable TV news cycles. Despite being well-received by critics, “United 93″ (2006), a mostly factual account of the fatal San Francisco-bound flight that was hijacked by four al–Qaeda terrorists and ended up crashing into a field in Pennsylvania after some of the heroic passengers tried to retake control of the plane, grossed a paltry (by Hollywood standards) $31.4 million in the United States.

Whether modern movie goers distrusted liberal Hollywood to do the subject justice, were too burned out by the news to be sufficiently entertained, or were mostly just too young to appreciate a heavy realistic drama without comic book superheroes in it was hard to say; whatever the reason, “United” did not appeal as escapist fare.

In contrast, audiences during World War II, with far less access to information, often enjoyed movies with real life elements. One factor that helped cinema attendance was that female factory workers, often lonely on the home front, and having disposable income for the first time in years, became rabid filmgoers; unlike other products at that time, movies were not rationed. Also, servicemen stationed in many American cities with no hotel vacancies were welcomed to stay the night and sleep in movie theaters.

And sometimes a little light-hearted fantasy mixed with realism didn’t hurt; in “Tarzan Triumphs” (1943), Tarzan and Cheetah teamed up to help win World War II on the screen. After the Ape Man dispatched some very dangerous Nazis in the jungle, his furry pal got on the radio and broadcasted a message to Berlin. The soldiers on the receiving end mistook the chimp’s chattering for Hitler and saluted their imagined Fuhrer while goose-stepping.

Many modern Hollywood stars, including Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Jack Black, Mark Wahlberg, Scarlett Johansson, and most notably Gary Sinise, have done their country proud by entertaining US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in USO shows, but it would be hard to match the overall patriotism displayed by the movie industry during World War II. Amongst the public spirited leading ladies, there was Bette Davis dancing with servicemen at the famed Hollywood Canteen, Ingrid Bergman joyously grabbing a random soldier and kissing him hard on the mouth in France right after Germany surrendered, Carole Lombard feverishly selling war bonds on the last day of her life just before she embarked on a military transport plane that would fatally crash near Las Vegas, and Ginger Rogers, who told of a letter she received from an American soldier who had been incarcerated in a Japanese POW camp. His guards had screened Rogers’ romantic comedy “Tom, Dick and Harry” (1941) and were so enthralled by it that he was able to escape.

With today’s volunteer army, no one really expects stars like Justin Timberlake or Matt Damon to give up the fame and fortune of
Hollywood for military service, yet that is exactly what happened during the Second World War with a number of prominent leading
men. The icons of the past could have easily used their connections to be exempt from service; many people, including General Dwight Eisenhower, felt that the best thing the Hollywood leading men could do for soldiers often bored and in need of entertainment between battles, was to make more movies.

Victor Mature, Tyrone Power, James Stewart, Clark Gable and Henry Fonda were some of the better-known celebrities who were willing to go fight the enemy in an arena where there is no one around to yell, ”cut!” Conversely, actors with ailments such as Gregory Peck, saddled with a bad back, or Van Johnson, who after a near fatal car accident ended up with a metal plate in his head, were able to stay behind and fill the onscreen void.

One possibly apocryphal story while the war was still raging involved an agent who had a meeting with a mogul about a potential new
discovery. “You’ll love him! He’s handsome, he’s talented, and best of all, he has a double hernia!”

Correction: Shortly after this article went to press I was contacted by Phil Robinson who informed me that the ethnicity of the terrorists in his film “The Sum of All Fears” was changed a year before he came on the project; it was not his decision. Robinson’s only contact with CAIR came through a fax he received a month before the shoot asking that “Sum’s” villains not be Arab, the director assured CAIR’s representative that was already the case. I apologize for the error and thank Mr. Robinson for being an absolute gentleman when he informed me of my mistake.

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.

“I personally like to see films that are the work of as singular a consciousness as possible,” Stevens explained about his decision to do two exhausting and difficult jobs at once. But as with everything, there was a price to be paid. “It’s like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of moviemaking. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.”

The making of Shane, then — indeed, the making of most great films — is largely a tale of an artist using all of his powers and guile and energy to bend the technology and the paraphernalia to the arduous task of making those delicate emotional values come to life on an empty screen.

*****

The opening of Shane. A little boy, played by young Brandon De Wilde, stalks a large-horned buck with an unloaded rifle. The buck is startled by something in the distance, looks up — and there, poised right between its antlers, is a distant horseman lazily riding toward us.

You are George Stevens, there on the ground in Jackson Hole one morning, with dozens of cast and crew waiting around for you to decide how to capture such an image. What do you do?

“I sent out and got a little elk and a couple of bucks with big spreads,” says Stevens.

We lined it up and then worked with this buck to have him in the foreground; we had some dry stuff or weed up there that he went after a few times. We rehearsed with Alan Ladd and got Ladd back — he’s going to move along at a signal — then we moved the camera over to where the buck was grazing. There’s a fella out there, hidden back in Ladd’s direction just out of frame, with a bucket and some rocks in it. During the take the fella shook the rocks; it sounded a little bit like rain. Once we did it and the buck looked toward the rocks. We took it again, the buck stayed right there with his good downtown hay (it’s unusual for him), and on cue, a silent cue, we watched this rider come along.

And it was a coincidence, the horn was right in the middle — it was awful good. So I decided to shoot the works, since I was going to get lucky. I kept it quiet, let the animal graze, got Alan all the way back there, silent signal for him to start on, silent signal for the camera, he’s coming on and pretty soon we call up the cue for the buck. Not quite. A little more cue. He looks up, and Alan is right between the antlers.

And that, more often than not, is how movie magic happens. “Three takes,” says Stevens. “You’re either going to get it or you’re not going to get it. There’s no use persisting; it just had to work that way.”

*****

Fifty-five minutes into Shane. A boy, learning how to shoot a weapon for the first time, asks the man he idolizes to show him how it’s done. “What do you want me to shoot at?” asks the man. The boy glances around. “The little white rock over there, see?”

You’re George Stevens, thinking about World War II as you make this Western. Above all, you’re keen to convey to a somewhat innocent audience the notion that “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.” What do you do?

“The effect on the audience was much greater than normal,” says Stevens, justifiably proud of his solution. To start, he increased the power of this scene by deliberately muting the power of all the scenes previous. “I very carefully kept gunshots out of it up until that point,” he says of the film’s opening hour, “to make the first one more emphatic.”

Then he leveraged the full power of editing, taking what had been a fairly leisurely paced movie and suddenly assaulting the audience with a half-dozen shots in rapid, machine-gun succession:

Shane draws!
The boy grimaces as the blast rocks his ears!
The boy’s mother, watching from the fence, gasps in horror!
The rock bounces toward us low on the ground, with Shane standing tall in the background, shrouded by gunsmoke!
The boy gapes, eyes wide!
And as the smoke clears, and the gunshot echo fades away among the mountains of the Teton Range, and the farm’s chickens clatter in fear, Shane’s strangely meditative face comes into view, in deep contemplation of and respect for the power of his weapon.

Six shots in as many seconds, a pace that leaves the audience as breathless and impressed as the boy.

But even that wasn’t enough. “In most Westerns,” Stevens complained, “you know, people are shooting off guns all the time, until you don’t even notice it anymore. I wanted people to be really jolted out of their seats the first time Shane uses his gun.” And so decades before surround sound became the norm, Stevens decided to do what he could to bring off the same type of sonic grandeur using comparatively primitive 1950s monaural speakers. “We took the pistol sound out,” he says, “and put in the sound of an eight-inch howitzer canon, alongside a rifle shot. So it had the highs of the rifle shot and the expanding boom of the howitzer.”

If you talk to old-timers who saw Shane in the theater in 1953, you’ll often hear them remembering the sheer power and impressiveness of those gunshots. The effect was wonderful. As Big Hollywood commenter “blueunicorn6” said a few weeks back, “The gunshots really rock you. I think Stevens wanted those shots to be loud.”

Yep.

*****

“If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil,” says filmmaker Woody Allen, “it is Jack Palance.” It’s not too much to say that his portrayal of Jack Wilson in Shane ranks right up alongside such quietly venomous portrayals as Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955), Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List (1993). That he manages to make such an unforgettable mark in a relative handful of scenes makes his achievement all the more impressive (perhaps only Neville Brand in the 1950 noir classic D.O.A. has managed to create a similar gleeful maleficence using even less screen time).

You’re George Stevens, looking over at Jack Palance, who is over in the corner practicing his quick draw technique and quietly hissing his lines to himself, getting into his character Method-style. You know that this largely unknown actor somehow has to measure up to Alan Ladd, one of the world’s most popular movie personalities. With much less screen time in which to operate, Palance has to be as much a villain as Shane is a hero, absolutely terrifying in his deadly skills and sinister potentialities. The crew is getting impatient as the sun rises, waiting for you to tell them how to setup the day’s first shot.

What do you do?

Stevens, as it happened, decided to break all the rules. Most movies show a major villain cantering into town on a towering black charger, with quivering mothers shuttering windows as the little ones hide in their petticoats and their men look down at their shoes in shame. In contrast, the director of Shane makes his town look deserted as Palance rides down a muddy street on a horse specially picked to be too small for the actor. The animal almost creeps as it walks, as if it is trying to be quiet with each step, and the effect is subtly grotesque, a kind of dark mirror image of when Shane majestically came down from the mountains in the beginning of the film. “He’s just bad news,” says Woody Allen about that shot. “Serpentine.”

Then Stevens has Palance enter the local tavern, and in the middle of his walking toward the camera, for no apparent reason, he does an odd dissolve, showing Palance fade away from the background and reappear in the foreground.

“It’s one of the most puzzling dissolves I’ve ever seen,” Allen admits. “I can’t imagine what it was for. It must have been to cover up a mistake. I can’t think of any other reason for it.”

I can — the effect turns Palance into more than a mere man. He becomes a baleful specter possessing the power to almost disappear and reappear at will.

Stevens takes this idea further in a later scene when Shane and his nemesis are sizing each other up while the other protagonists argue a few feet away. One of our FCML commenters, “nolotrippen,” pointed this out after our first installment of this series, when he marveled at how “Shane (Alan Ladd) just watching the evil Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) getting on his horse in the background while the main conversation between other characters goes on is one of the most masterful scenes ever. Very little happens, yet it shows volumes about the hero and the villain.” Another regular in our comments section, “LBOscarMayer,” added, “That hesitation thing that Jack Palance does — where he stops for a moment in mid air — while getting on his horse is mesmerizing! Whoever came up with that — genius!”

As it turns out, the man who came up with how to get Palance to mount his horse like a creepy ballerina was George Stevens. Remember, Stevens spent years filming slapstick comedies with geniuses like Laurel and Hardy, and many of the old tricks they used decades earlier were still in his mental toolbox. Specifically, he remembered how they were able to achieve all sorts of interesting physical effects in the old days by first performing certain actions in reverse order and then playing the film backwards through the projector.

So for this scene in Shane, he asked Palance to first get off his horse, swinging his leg out wide and taking his sweet time lowering himself down, using the vastly improved control gravity gives you when you lower yourself down instead of push yourself up. Then he had the film printed backwards in post-production. The result in the final film is Palance seeming to get on his horse in an eerie, almost impossibly muscular fashion, pushing his body up with his leg without a hint of the quivering or weakness that would usually accompany such a feat. As our commenter said, it’s “mesmerizing,” and becomes yet another sign of the villain’s preternatural powers of malevolence.

*****

But above all, audiences remember Palance in the famous scene with actor Elisha Cook Jr., taunting and bullying him from the plank walkway, his every movement sleek and graceful as a shark drifting in for the kill, while Cook’s character slides and stumbles in the mud, hopelessly outmatched. Grim peals of thunder echo across the plain as the sun glows wanly through grey clouds, as if nature itself knows that death is in the air.

All of those details weren’t in the book, nor were they serendipitous uses of things Mother Nature gave him to work with. Every bit was dreamed up by Stevens.

If you’re the director, how do you pull it all off?

Cook remembers Stevens stalking around the town set on the night before the scene was to be shot, thinking through the logistics. In the morning, he ordered the entire street sprayed down with water until the dirt became a sea of treacherous mud. The dreary atmosphere was made by having the lab print the film a bit dark, and the thunder was added in post-production by the sound editors.

Stevens also worked over Cook himself to get him in the proper mindset. “He called me aside,” the actor remembered. “He said, ‘You know, I’ve got you eight weeks on the picture, and I’m stuck with you. You’re the worst ac­tor I ever saw in my life bar none’.” One can imagine the feelings of fear and anger that coursed through Cook’s mind upon getting this awful news. “What are you gonna say?” Cook said, thinking back on how he was snookered. “You don’t say anything. What are you gonna do?” Only after everything was shot did Cook learn the truth: “He wanted me terrified and not terrified.”

When it was time for Cook to bite the dust, Stevens’ technical adviser told him that men who are killed with a single shot fall forward. But just like with Shane’s first use of a gun, Stevens wanted Palance’s first draw to be just as memorable. So once again, he relied on an old Laurel and Hardy gag. “Let’s put him on a wire!” Cook remembers Stevens exclaiming. “So, under that curious outfit I had on, they had me wired [with a harness], and when [Wilson's] gun went off it pulled me six feet through the air and into the mud.”

After the scene was shot, the ornery director who had treated Cook so badly let down his mask, and Cook realized that it had all been to make the scene work. “You dumb son of a bitch!” Stevens said to him with a broad smile. “That’s what happens to you when you stand up for a principle!”

*****

“Pa’s got things for you to do! And mother wants you! I know she does! Shane! Shaaaaane! Come baaaack!”

The most famous scene in the film, and one of the most memorable endings in film history. No one who sees it ever forgets it.

How does one craft such a wonderful conclusion? It’s not taken verbatim from the book, and Stevens pointedly leaves much of its subtext to the viewer’s imagination. The strange expressions of the little boy as he watches his hero ride away are left unexplained. We aren’t sure if the last shot of Shane, his left arm sort of dangling at his side as his horse canters through the graveyard and into the mountains, means that he is dying, or is just overcome with a weariness of the soul.

There comes a point in talking about this stuff when the usual anecdotes and stories are wholly inadequate to the task of answering such a question. The creative choices become so numerous, instinctive, and intertwined with the threads of the rest of the film — the poetic brushstrokes so fine and variegated — that all you can do is sit back in awe and shake your head in appreciation.

In her critical biography Giant: George Stevens, A Life on Film, Marilyn Ann Moss tells how, late in life, Stevens sat in on a screening of Shane with some students at a university, and gave a sort of running commentary to what was up on the screen. The transcript of his remarks is a rambling stream of consciousness that comes as close as anything to understanding how much focused, brilliant creativity goes into making an ending like that. I quote at length:

I notice in taking it apart [that] there’s very little unity to the film as shot; because there are so many different pieces. They’re inside the saloon with a variety of shots around the room, and the reverse angle shot, and the boy’s face coming under the door — all shot in the studio; then, outside there is the shot where Shane is sitting on a horse and the boy is talking to him — shot on location, so he can leave the front of the saloon. There, again, is the camera around from Shane’s point of view into the boy’s face, taken in the studio at another time — sometime after the work that was done in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Then there’s the shot, shooting up at Shane on the horse, seated in the saddle in front of the saloon. And then a strange “Ring-around-the-rosy” business in which Shane leaves the front of the saloon and heads toward the back of the saloon from another angle, then back to the front of the saloon when the boy comes around the end of the saloon, heading toward the Teton Peaks, the Grand Teton in the background there, at the right time, when the cloud happened to be with us, with a long focal-length lens to give the mountains some structure and some height — because it’s a grand thing, with the horse moving into the distance.

Then the boy coming around the building — a wide angle shot; then a reverse angle with the boy in the foreground and the horse in the middle distance going away toward the Tetons; and then around for what became the major aspect of the scene — the boy’s face. . . as he sees he’s not convincing Shane. Further shots with the camera now moved away from the saloon, following the horse and rider — it’s the horse and rider and the mountain. The same shot on the boy, back into his face, and, eventually Joey weakens — having the first experience in his life when something really doesn’t work his way — when he realizes Shane is not coming back. And his spirit dims a little bit and he grows up a lot. . . and then in the far distance, Shane going away. . . then back into Joey’s life with him looking rather bewildered and somewhat wiser. And then we’re way up in the mountain looking back as Shane comes toward us, going into his never-never-world, whatever that might be. And there’s a distant landscape below, where the farmers were, where we spent the hours of our adventure with them, and so to fadeout.

As we can see, it breaks up into quite a bit of work as far as shooting is concerned. It has to do with a variety of the aspects of the view that [gives it] an immediacy and a kind of continuity. And also, hopefully, in editing, a graceful relationship of scenes, so that the relationship of one shot isn’t repetitious with the following shot, but a great difference of relationship of size of figure. The size of the figure in one shot being small and diminu­tive with the horse going away, then the face of the boy being immediate and close, which gives a kind of charge to the editing of the film.

All of that highly thoughtful creativity, made up of equal amounts of technique, craft, and artistry, and combining Stevens’ varied decisions about focal lengths, music, pacing, composition, light, shot selection — the works. And all for what?

For what was expressed recently by Big Hollywood commenter “IMCONSERVATIVE,” who says “I saw it for the first time over 40 years ago on TV and cried at the end. Now, 40+ years later, and having seen it several times over the years, I still cry at the end.”

Stevens would have loved to hear that, even as he sighed in exhaustion. “You have a Grand Central Station atmosphere around you,” he said wearily of being a director, “and in all that wilderness of people and machinery perhaps the only thing you are trying to record is a small boy, crying goodbye. With all that organization you feel you ought to be filming a battlefield. You have to squeeze so much grapefruit — to get so little juice.”

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

[Ed. Note: Here are Part I and Part II of this series.]

I’ve seen John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln at least a dozen times, but screening it here at Hillsdale College made me see the film in an entirely new light.

In one of the most lyrical passages of the movie, Young Abe, played by the young Henry Fonda, studies a book of law and comes to a revelation:

“By jing, that’s all there is to it. Right and wrong.”

But his revelation is only complete when Ann Rutledge, Pauline Moore, appears on the scene.

John Ford was deeply rooted in Catholicism and Ann’s appearance has an almost divine quality.

We see only the briefest glimpse of their courtship. There’s an ellipses and abruptly Ann is dead.

Young Abe visits Ann’s grave where he carries on a conversation with her spirit. And then the grief-stricken Abe allows Ann to decide the direction of his life—and by implication the fate of the country.

The laws of man, Ford seems to be saying, can only be known when we recognize G-d.

Take a look at the clip:

Dan Ford, John Ford’s grandson, an assistant director, production manager and producer who was active in live television for over 25 years, delivered a fine, unsentimental lecture.

The year 1939 was not only a great year for Hollywood, but that was the year in which John Ford established himself as the premier director in America with: Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Grapes of Wrath.

Dan observes:

Without taking away from the magnitude of John’s accomplishment, it should be said that three of these films—Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, and The Grapes of Wrath—were studio projects, films made on that marvelously efficient and immensely profitable assembly line called Twentieth Century Fox. The real story behind these three works is not so much John’s genius as an auteur director as his ability to work within the confines of the studio system and his volatile and sometimes quarrelsome relationship with Darryl Zanuck.

Dan Ford recognizes that Hollywood movies are a series of endless collaborations. But some collaborations yield more than others.

Dan Ford elaborates:

Judged by any standard, Zanuck was one of the most important figures in John Ford’s life. Zanuck steered him toward his greatest work, created an atmosphere that was supportive and creative, and brought the fine edge of discipline to his films. Perhaps more than any other man (and certainly more than John himself) he understood the kind of films that John was really good at. Yet, there was a considerable amount of tension in their relationship.

Zanuck insisted on a crisp pace and frequently recut Ford’s films, eliminating the slapstick humor and the broad sight gags of which Ford was so fond. Ford liked to dwell on little bits of business that slowed the pace of his films, while Zanuck, with bulldog tenacity, insisted on sticking to the storyline and maintaining a forward velocity.

Both men were stubborn and egocentric and their creative tensions yielded some of John Ford’s best work.

Dan Ford’s book, Pappy, The Life of John Ford, is a clear-eyed view of the life and work of his talented, cantankerous grandfather.  Highly recommended.

When not screening great movies and listening to erudite lectures, I had the opportunity to explore Hillsdale College and its lovely, historic campus.

I spent at least fifteen minutes gazing at this Civil War memorial.

From the Hillsdale website:

A higher percentage of Hillsdale students enlisted during the Civil War than from any other western college. Of the more than 400 who fought for the Union, four won the Congressional Medal of Honor, three became generals and many more served as regimental commanders. Sixty gave their lives.

Joe Cella, one of the many generous and courteous staff members responsible for inviting Big Hollywood to Hillsdale, took me aside and asked if I’d like to shoot trap.

Turns out that Hillsdale, which already has an excellent athletics program, is also building a world-class outdoor firearms education facility.

At Hillsdale, students put the Second Amendment into practice.

From a prospectus prepared by Hillsdale College:

In the Constitution of the United States of America, the Founding Fathers set forth the rights and responsibilities of self-government. They knew, however, that future Americans would enjoy those freedoms only as long as they understood and defended their underlying principles. Many Americans today have forgotten—or worse, have never even learned—the high ideals behind the country’s founding. Fortunately, there remain educated citizens who are aware of the subtle threats to the self-determination that is the right of every American.

The beautifully crafted shotguns were donated by Beretta to Hillsdale College.

Hillsdale College is one of only four colleges or universities in this country that require each student to take a course on the Constitution. Hillsdale students examine the Federalist Papers, read the Declaration of Independence, and study the Constitution in the context of important historical events in U.S. history. They learn that the Amendments are mutually supporting, thereby making the Constitution a “whole document” rather than a “living document.” They discover the reasoning and perspectives of the men who ratified the Constitution, giving them a deep understanding of the founding.

Here is your faithful screenwriter observing the Hillsdale College range, getting ready to shoot trap for the very first time.

Hillsdale College received an estate gift for the establishment of a world-class outdoor firearms education facility. This project creates exciting new opportunities not only to host shooting events, but also to present seminars on the Constitution to participants. This is a singular opportunity to help young people discover, and concerned adults rediscover, their rights and responsibilities as free people. Hillsdale College faculty and guest lecturers, who are among the finest constitutional scholars in the country, will teach these seminars. This initiative will help shooters and concerned citizens to develop a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the philosophical and historical foundations of their country.

I’m using a Beretta 12 gauge shotgun. The clay flies at about 40 mph, and the range is approximately 50 yards. You can see the shell ejecting from the gun. Of about 20 shots, I only hit the clay three times. It is very difficult.

Movies and firearms. It’s a wonderful life.

Stay tuned for my next installment of, Hillsdale College: The Films of 1939.

–

Is there anything left to say other than….

Matt, you’re doing it wrong.

“I am really a coward. I know I am, so that’s why I did foolish things. I was decorated eight or nine times, trying to prove that I was not a coward, but after it was all over I still knew, know, that I was a coward.”

– John Ford –

June 4, 1942. The Battle of Midway. John Ford was on his back, covered in debris, unconscious. All around him bombs were dropping, buildings were erupting into monstrous fireballs, and young marines were dodging deadly lines of machine-gun strafing sent down by Japanese fighter planes. Ford and his assistant, young Jack MacKenzie Jr. (whose father was an RKO cinematographer) had been perched on the roof of a power station on Eastern Island, brazenly filming the morning attack by the Japanese and reporting enemy plane positions to headquarters, when a bomb landed a scant twenty feet from their position. The shockwave was so great that MacKenzie later recalled he was “bounced flat on my face by the terrific explosion,” adding, “we almost lost Commander Ford.”

The blast had sent a large chunk of concrete slamming into the director, knocking him out cold. When he came to, he also found that metal shrapnel had ripped through his left forearm, leaving behind an ugly three-inch gash. Bleeding and badly shaken, Ford grabbed his camera and with MacKenzie hurried down from the power-station roof. Moments later, they watched the enemy bomb the building into oblivion.

“Film faces!” Ford told MacKenzie before dashing off. For the rest of the morning they staggered about the island, each capturing spectacular images of raging infernos, flying debris, swooping planes, and young soldiers — kids, really — shooting enemy Zeros out of the sky with anti-aircraft guns. Talking of that hard-won film footage later, Ford said, “The image jumps a lot because the grenades were exploding right next to me. Since then, they do that on purpose, shaking the camera when filming war scenes. For me it was authentic because the shells were exploding at my feet.”

At one point, with the Japanese dive-bombing so close to the ground that Ford could clearly see their smiling faces, he watched in astonishment as a group of bold Americans trotted out into the open and proceeded to fulfill their daily morning duty of running up the red, white and blue. Wounded and exhausted, Ford had the presence of mind to race into position, raise his camera on his good arm, and forever capture the stirring moment of our country’s colors rising in a blue sky billowing with black smoke — the events of “The Star-Spangled Banner” brought to majestic life. Upon viewing the footage later, Henry Fonda would reverently call that meager strip of celluloid, “one of the all-time great shots.” In its own way, it rivals the famous raising of the flag on Iwo Jima several years later — less iconic perhaps, but just as moving. By God, it was “time for the colors to go up,” Ford later marveled, “and despite the bombs and everything, these kids ran up and raised the flag.”

When it was over, twenty men were dead on the islands, but out in the ocean America had won an incredible victory, using guile, strategy, lots of guts, and a bit of luck to overcome a ruthless, numerically superior opponent. John Ford was left standing amidst the carnage, his pockets filled with exposed film cartridges, his body quivering with adrenaline and fear. “Oh, we’d go ahead and do a thing,” he recalled toward the end of his life, “but after it was over, your knees would start shaking.”

When Ford viewed the rushes that he had taken at Midway — the massive explosions, the debris slamming into the camera, the spectacular raising of the flag amongst black clouds of ruin — he knew he had something special. But in a way, the material was too good — sure to be heavily redacted by the Navy as too frightful and disturbing for public consumption. So in Washington soon after the battle, the wily director secretly passed the reels to one of his young Field Photo editors, the former child actor Robert Parrish, and asked him to cut it down to a decent twenty-minute documentary.

“Is it for the public or the OSS?” Parrish asked.

“It’s for the mothers of America,” Ford shot back. “It’s to let them know that we’re in a war, and that we’ve been getting the shit kicked out of us for five months, and now we’re starting to hit back.”

Ford devised an elaborate series of ruses that kept the film one step ahead of the higher-ups. “I don’t want you to work here,” he told Parrish. “As soon as it’s discovered in Honolulu that I’ve smuggled the film past the Navy censors they’ll come snooping around with enough brass to take it away from us. They’ll assign seven or eight high-ranking associate producers and public relations officers to the project. The four services will start bickering over it and the whole thing will get so bogged down in red tape that we’ll never see it again, let alone the mothers of America.” He thus ordered Parrish: “You get on a plane and take the film to Hollywood. Don’t report to anyone. Go to your mother’s house and hide it until you hear from me. . .I’ll tell them that it’s not my fault if an enlisted man steals eight cans of top-secret film and runs home to his mother!”

In Hollywood a few weeks later, safe from the many prying eyes in Washington DC, they edited in secret, preparing an “official” war documentary like no other. Ford eschewed bland reportage, instead going unabashedly for the gut and the heart. To fulfill his vision, he began calling in favors all over town. The great Alfred Newman, musical head of Twentieth-Century Fox (and composer of the now-famous fanfare that, to this day, proceeds every Fox movie), was called in to orchestrate stirring versions of well-loved tunes like “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “Anchors Aweigh,” and the Marine and Air Force Hymns. A wistful piece of accordion music from Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath was spliced in at a key moment. Accessible, down-home, folksy movie stars like Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell (who played Tom and Ma Joad, respectively, in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath), along with more erudite and stentorian men like actor Donald Crisp and the director Irving Pichel (who was later blacklisted), were asked to emote heartfelt lines of dialogue written by Ford and his longtime (and very liberal) screenwriting partner, Dudley Nichols:

Men and Women of America — here come your neighbor’s sons!

. . .men who fought to the last round of ammunition, and flew to the last drop of gas, and then crashed into the sea.

Get these boys to the hospital, please do! Quickly! Get them to clean cots and cool sheets, give them doctors and medicine, a nurse’s soft hands. . .

Editor Parrish thought such lines sounded hopelessly corny, and told Ford as much. Ford stressed that this wasn’t going to be just another throwaway rah-rah newsreel to be dumped between features at the theater.

“You have a mother, don’t you?” he asked Parrish.

“Of course.”

“Well,” said Ford, “how do you think she’d feel if she saw you in that ambulance.”

Throughout the editing, Ford’s choices were unconventional, oftentimes startling. He dwelt on wistful shots of sailors relaxing in the setting sun during the evening before the battle, and built a humorous Wild Kingdom-like interlude featuring the birds on the island. He spent what some thought was an inordinate amount of time showing the haggard faces of downed pilots rescued after over a week at sea. He lingered on images of the impromptu funerals for men killed in the battle, their flag-draped bodies lined up on the ground. Heck, he even included a quick shot of himself:

This film was turning out to be much more than the usual show-only-the-positive-stuff propaganda piece. It was, in the words of biographer Joseph McBride, “an extraordinarily vivid and eloquent meditation on war, one of the rare pieces of propaganda that is also a timeless work of art.”

Remembering the political battles he suffered through during the early days of Field Photo, Ford made sure that all branches of the armed services were well-represented in The Battle of Midway, going so far as to measure the amount of coverage each received down to the foot. He also staged a screening for President and Mrs. Roosevelt, the Joint Chiefs, and an assemblage of White House aides, hoping their approval might fend off any censors looking to re-edit his film. As the story goes, the President talked distractedly throughout the movie, until suddenly stunned into silence by a heroic close-up. It was his own son — James Roosevelt, who had requested combat duty at the start of the war, and who was assigned with the Marine Raiders on Midway when the battle occurred. Ford had caught a quick shot of the young Major saluting, and before the screening had secretly spliced it into the film to surprise the President. The entire audience fell into a hush for the remaining minutes of the film, and when the lights came up Eleanor Roosevelt had tears in her eyes. “I want every mother in America to see this picture,” President Roosevelt intoned, and soon hundreds of prints were being distributed to theaters across the nation.

Robert Parrish, the editor who had been so worried that Ford’s cornpone dialogue would be laughed out of the theater, later attended the premiere of the documentary at Radio City Music Hall. He watched the audience fall under the film’s spell, quietly absorbing the rousing military anthems, the sensitive pre-battle montage, the electrifying shots of exploding buildings and billowing black clouds, the heroic raising of the flag. Then, as all of this gave way to the shots of the emaciated downed pilots, Jane Darwell’s loving, matronly voice cooed over the sound system:

Get these boys to the hospital. Please do! Quickly! Get them to clean cots and cool sheets, give them doctors and medicine, a nurse’s soft hands. Get them to the hospital. Hurry! Please!

Somewhere in the darkness of the theater, a woman choked back an anguished scream. Others began to groan softly as if in physical pain. A cacophony of weeping rose up like a wave and filled the theater. And like a dam bursting, Parrish watched that jaded, seen-it-all New York audience fall apart. It was a primal reaction he would never forget.

“On reflection,” Parrish mused decades later,

there have been so many changes in combat film. It’s so much more realistic now, and it’s not particularly unusual to see people get shot, particularly after Vietnam. But The Battle of Midway was the first film of its kind. It was a stunning, amazing thing to see. At Radio City people screamed, women cried, and the ushers had to take them out. And it was all over the material that we had fought about, the stuff I thought was too maudlin, like when Jane Darwell says, “Get those boys to the hospital, please do! Quickly!” The people, they just went crazy.

It’s indescribably sad to realize that, in our time, many people now laugh at the exact same footage that made those women weep. They watch old movies like The Battle of Midway and they cackle at the narration, groan at the music, and dismiss it all as a hokey and corny reminder of an absurdly innocent and gullible age. They sit in self-satisfied judgment of the rubes of the past, safe and smug in their twenty-first century superiority, drunk on their impregnable sense of entitlement and sophistication.

We forget. Always, we forget. We forget how much mental strain Americans of that time were under. We forget that the first six months of World War II saw America lose battle after battle in the Pacific. Thousands of husbands and sons were killed. A steady stream of 9/11-sized disasters shook the country’s psyche, one after the other, boom, boom, boom. Everyone knew people who died, or were trapped in murderous concentration camps, or were at that very moment risking their lives every day in faraway lands, possibly never to return.

And in the midst of all of that pain and worry and anguish, one man — a self-described coward — had used all of his artistry and courage and guile to create against all odds a twenty-minute paean to those lost husbands and fathers and sons, a message brimming with hope and awash in love and pure patriotism. It was more than a film, it was a gift.

John Ford had been right: those old-fashioned words and sentiments, presented without shame, were just what the mothers of America needed.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: a study of the bestselling 1942 book They Were Expendable, and of the hero whose exploits formed the basis for John Ford’s incomparable film.

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

Part 1

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

John Ford’s The Battle of Midway: I believe it is the solemn duty of every conservative to see this at least once in their life, and by “see” I mean really see, not just blithely skitter through with one eye while the other drifts through their incoming email.

There are a number of versions available on the web, but all are exceedingly poor quality — with one exception. Recently, The Documentary Channel posted a gorgeous restored version of the film on YouTube, allowing us to see and hear The Battle of Midway for the first time in all of its original glory:

It’s less than twenty minutes long, so do yourself a favor: close the shades, throw out the cat, take the phone off the hook, and watch this with your full attention. Think about how someone in 1942 must have felt while viewing it with a packed audience in a darkened theater, all of them having suffered through six months of defeat and loss, and none knowing what the perilous future would bring. Allow those days to come back to life for you here in 2009, sixty-seven years later. Open your heart to John Ford’s film and his worldview — if you are a conservative who cares at all about our military, past and present, it’s something you will never forget.

As a chaser, interested parties can read an oral history transcript of John Ford describing his wartime service and the filming of The Battle of Midway at the Naval Historical Center website.

Growing Up in Hollywood and Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. These two volumes of reminiscences by former child actor and Oscar-winning film editor Robert Parrish contain lots of great stories about the movie business, with plenty of first-hand tales of John Ford in all of his perplexing, frustrating, tyrannical, monumental genius. In particular, he provides a more detailed look into the making of The Battle of Midway than what could be summarized here. The sheer daring and cleverness of Ford as he crustily keeps The Battle of Midway one step ahead of the Navy’s censors and bureaucratic roadblocks is thrilling to read.

“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.”

The masterpiece of which he speaks is a 1945 war film called They Were Expendable, and if you are a conservative who has never seen it, then you have denied yourself one of the most moving and achingly poetic expressions of your worldview ever put to celluloid.

They Were Expendable was made in the Fall of 1944, while most of the people portrayed in the story were still rotting in Japanese POW camps, if indeed they weren’t already dead. Just like our modern foes, the Japanese mocked the Geneva Conventions throughout World War II, and by the end some 40% of the POWs in their care had been executed, starved, or died of disease in their camps. This is compared to Europe, where only 1% of American POWs in German camps died. The events the film depicts took place in early 1942 when, in the wake of Pearl Harbor, tens of thousands of Americans found themselves trapped in the Philippines and facing a fearsome Japanese invasion. The enemy bombed them with impunity, destroying their bases and leaving them with only four planes and an assortment of tiny boats. Supplies and morale dwindled into oblivion as, rather than be evacuated, they were ordered to hold their positions as long as possible against — and eventually be killed or captured by — an overwhelming enemy who was infamous for torturing and murdering prisoners.

How these Americans (and Filipinos) comported themselves as they were gobbled up by the Japanese war machine, buying time with their lives so that General MacArthur could escape the clutches of the enemy and prepare a counter-assault, is the focus of the film. And yet it is like no other war film ever made. Its long running time (two hours, sixteen minutes) allows us to linger on scene after scene of doomed men and women slowly losing their grip on their homes, their jobs, their culture, and each other. Under Ford’s direction, the movie rises above mere plot — battles, strategies — to become something much greater: the cinematic ennobling of an entire people, their way of life, their code of honor, and their selfless sacrifice. Lindsay Anderson would later declare it his single favorite film from his single favorite director, noting the presence of “image after image of conscious dignity” depicting a “love of brotherhood, loyalty,” and “the spirit of endurance that can wring victory from defeat.”

What prompts someone to make a movie like this? To throw away all of the Hollywood clichés, to indeed ignore the enemy entirely (the Japanese are only seen from afar via their planes and ships) and instead reach for something more vital: the very bedrock of our connection with country and culture? It’s so personal a picture that any essay has to be as much about the life and times of its maker as about the film itself — the two are intertwined too deeply to ignore. We thus turn away from They Were Expendable for a spell, and drift backward in time to the life of the director many call the greatest in motion picture history.

For John Ford (1894–1973), serving with the Navy during World War II was much more than boilerplate Hollywood patriotism. He was no green recruit, hastily enlisting in the wake of Pearl Harbor to toss on a uniform for the very first time. Growing up on the coast of Maine where he met many sailors, from an early age he was entranced by the discipline, hard ways, and exaltation of duty inherent in military life. During High School he applied to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, and was devastated when he failed the entrance exam. In 1918, as a twenty-three-year-old fledgling director in Hollywood, he again tried to serve, this time volunteering as an aerial combat photographer. Bad eyesight ensured he flunked the physical, and numerous attempts to circumvent that ruling came to naught.

Despite these failures, he never gave up, making many military films throughout the ’20s and ’30s and taking every opportunity to schmooze with the Navy brass brought on as technical advisers. Finally, as a forty-year-old in 1934, and despite bad eyes once again causing him to fail the physical, enough strings were pulled by his Navy buddies to get him into the U.S. Naval Reserve. Given the rank of Lieutenant Commander, he was charged with creating “a course in naval photography; its uses, tactical, historical, and propaganda,” studying “infra-red and other super-sensitive films and complimentary filters as to their efficacy on sea and in the air, particularly in tropical waters” and “working intensely in an effort to collect photographic and camouflage information likely to be of value to the Navy.”

He also began spying for the Navy on a semi-formal basis during frequent trips of drunken carousing down the western coast of Mexico on his yacht, the Araner. With friends like John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Ward Bond in tow, Ford made observations of the coastline and filed detailed reports on Japanese ships and suspicious “sailors” in the area. These made their way to Navy intelligence, netting him several citations.

In 1940, with friends in the military telling him that America’s eventual entry into the war was all but assured, Ford attempted to establish an official Naval photographic unit that could not only use their skills to directly aid the front-line troops in the fight ahead (in the form of reconnaissance, mapping terrain, et cetera) but also help fight the nasty propaganda war that was already brewing between patriotic Americans and growing cells of anti-American Leftists who were becoming increasingly vocal in the media and Hollywood. The proposal he sent to his superiors reads today as if it was clipped from Big Hollywood’s own mission statement:

Radio, newspapers, motion pictures blast contrary ideas back and forth. . . A series of films which show factually the power of the American Navy is bound to give a psychological lift to the whole nation. Let them see the rigors of training; the skill of execution in maneuvers. . . our morale purpose is to show that a Democracy can and must create a greater fighting machine, in spirit and being, than a dictator power.

Unfortunately, Ford was pressing up against a lumbering, asleep-at-the-wheel Navy, the same one that would allow the Japanese to surprise its fleet at Pearl the very next year. With numerous agencies like the Signal Corps protecting their film-making/photographic turf against the interloper, Ford watched his proposals vanish into the gaping maws of military bureaucracy. The sense that namby-pamby Hollywood civilians would have little to contribute to an honest war effort might have played a part as well. As much as Ford liked being a Navy man, the endless red tape and politics were sources of constant aggravation, and he often lashed out at his superiors to a degree that would have landed anyone else in the brig. An oft-told story has it that, when asked by an officer what Hollywood landlubbers liked to do for amusement after making a movie, Ford cheerfully replied, “We all get on a bus and go down to San Diego and f*** Navy wives.”

Undeterred by being ignored, Ford decided to proceed unofficially, confident that someday soon the talent of Hollywood would be called upon, and that he would be ready. He began enlisting men from the rank-and-file of Hollywood film crews — cinematographers, grips, editors. He borrowed prop guns and uniforms from the Fox costume department, and set up impromptu military film classes on unused soundstages. There his Hollywood recruits learned from experts like the Oscar-winning cinematographer Gregg Toland (The Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, et al.) about cameras they would use during a war, how to shoot in all lighting conditions, and how to develop film in the field if need be. They also were drilled in the basics of military life by Jack Pennick, a member of Ford’s regular acting troupe who happened to be an expert on military history and rules.

The rest of Tinseltown, and the skeptical Navy brass, began jokingly referring to this motley crew as “John Ford’s Navy.” And yet, by the time he was through, over a hundred of his Hollywood trainees had joined the active service or reserves, ready for a war they knew was coming.

After Pearl Harbor, with the Navy in shock and disarray, Ford finally found his long-sought benefactor. William “Wild Bill” Donovan was in the process of setting up the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to today’s CIA — and Ford’s moxie, skills, and penchant for skirting the bureaucracy was just what he was looking for. Soon the director had brought his Hollywood gang under the official auspices of the OSS as “The Field Photographic Branch,” and it wasn’t long before they were filming reconnaissance, troop movements, and full-on battles all over the world.

At forty-seven years of age, after three decades of trying, John Ford was finally a soldier.

Ford served without pay, traveling across the globe and dodging enemy bombers and U-Boats to fulfill his duties as head of Field Photo. Iceland… Panama… North Africa… West Africa… Cuba… Australia… Ceylon… China… India…. Burma…. Saudi Arabia… Brazil… France. Ford filmed potential base locations, assessed the security of existing sites, captured now-historic battles on film, often in color, and coordinated the movements and missions of his men, thirteen of whom were killed in action. For these efforts, he was promoted to Captain on April 3, 1944. In later years he would state that — although he was the recipient of many of the highest awards in the film industry, including several Oscars — he was most proud of having earned his Small Arms Expert’s medal in the Navy.

John Ford had a knack for showing up in interesting places. He was on the deck of the USS Hornet, deep in enemy waters, when the famous Doolittle raid lifted off for Japan, his camera recording the historic moment for posterity. He was at Normandy on June 6, 1944, capturing rare footage of D-Day as it unfolded. He first (and last!) parachute jump occurred behind enemy lines in Burma on a secret OSS mission, with Ford terrified and murmuring Hail Marys all the way down because, a mere few days before, he had filmed a cargo drop and watched as chute after chute failed to open and the boxes smashed into the unforgiving earth.

Someone else who was scared was Ford’s wife, Mary, who only saw her husband on several brief occasions during the years he was off to war. She was from a Navy family herself and understood the sacrifices involved, but that didn’t make it any easier. One extant letter has Ford gently chiding her, “Ma, you can’t call up long distance just when you’re blue and lonesome. It’s just too damned expensive. We’ve really got to adjust — not financially necessarily, but mentally.” Lonely and bored, she wrote back to her husband that she felt guilty for not doing anything herself for the war effort while he was away fighting. One stateside friend wrote to Ford that his wife was, “pretty miserable just sitting on a hilltop worrying about you and waiting for you to come home.”

Eventually, Mary found some solace in volunteering her time at the now-legendary Hollywood Canteen, the star-studded entertainment hangout for servicemen passing through Los Angeles, where GIs could be served dinner by movie stars and dance the night away with popular starlets to the tunes of world-famous big bands. Mary threw herself into kitchen work there, and quickly became Vice President of the Canteen’s board. Her letters during this time reveal that she helped stars like Bob Hope and Bette Davis fight off a coven of Hollywood Commies, who were trying to get the military MPs (charged with keeping order in the Canteen) booted out, so they could then begin using the venue for staging and promoting leftist propaganda unimpeded.

Ford’s relationship with his wife wasn’t perfect — he was a notorious alcoholic, and one who had flirted with his share of Hollywood actresses during the early years, most notably Katharine Hepburn. But his wife had closed her ears to the gossip and never wavered from his side, vowing to remain “Mrs. John Ford until I die.” They had been married almost twenty-five years, raised two kids, and had overcome problems that would have doomed a lesser marriage. “I pray to God it will soon be over,” he wrote to her in another letter, “so we can live our life together with our children and grandchildren. . . God bless and love you Mary darling — I’m tough to live with — heaven knows & Hollywood didn’t help — Irish & genius don’t mix well but you know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved.”

By the end of John Ford’s life, he had been married for fifty-three years.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we continue our look at John Ford’s war years, and address his Oscar-winning WWII documentary The Battle of Midway (1942).

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Searching for John Ford: A Life by Joseph McBride: Without question the bible for John Ford fans. Ford is lucky in that most of the biographies written about him have been pretty good. But McBride’s masterwork — the culmination of three decades of intense research — towers above them all. Heavily drawn upon whenever I write or think about Ford, it is a must-read for all conservative film fans.

John Ford’s Sex Hygiene (1940): A footnote to Ford’s war career, mentioned here solely for the benefit of the morbidly curious. Only for the strong of stomach (and not safe for work). Actor Charles Trowbridge (later to play Admiral Blackwell in They Were Expendable) narrates and stars in this still-ghastly training film, which fully accomplished its goal of scaring the hell out of millions of randy enlisted men. In graphic, venereal diseased detail, young recruits are shown the perils of fooling around with ’dem dirty wemmins in their off-hours. At one point during the production of this little documentary Daryl Zanuck, the head of Twentieth-Century Fox, burst in on Ford interviewing a guy glistening with disgusting sores and declared, “He don’t scare me — send him to makeup!” When asked to comment on the film years later, Ford quipped, “I looked at it and threw up.”

Sex Hygiene Part I at YouTube | Sex Hygiene Part II at YouTube (again, it’s thoroughly gross, and there’s lots of medical full-frontal male nudity — you have been warned.)

The Hollywood Canteen is an idea that could and should be resurrected today, but do you dare take a peek at the modern incarnation of The Hollywood Canteen? One featuring not patriotic movie stars serving our troops, but pampered, puerile celebrities like Paris Hilton and Marilyn Manson being feted by armies of vapid Hollywood wannabes? Steel yourself against massive disappointment and check it out.

It’s in the walk.

Think of Mae West, hands caressing her Rubenesque hips, head tilted, not just sauntering, but oozing forward, the exaggerated female.

Elbows cocked and angled at his hips, moving with concentrated energy, Jimmy Cagney looks like a coiled spring about to explode.

Joan Crawford, leading with her linebacker shoulders, like a tank on the battlefield, determined, dangerous, unstoppable.

Spine rigid, arms glued to his side, plum straight steps—no motion in the hips or shoulders—eyes nailed to the distant horizon, Henry Fonda’s walk is a combination of cool reserve and righteous indignation.

Bette Davis, nervously wringing her hands—William Wyler once threatened to chain them down—as she paces back and forth in her pathologically unstable world.

Rapid fire mincing steps, hips and shoulders swaying, Marilyn Monroe is the archetype of the sexually charged woman, and yet simultaneously a little girl who is innocent of her immense power.

And then there is John Wayne.

His walk is odd.

Distinctive, but odd.

It’s a complex, disorienting, and ultimately elegant forward propulsion: long manly strides, elbows bent and poised—like a boxer locked into position—a distinctly feminine swooshing of the hips, and a pronounced case of pigeon toe.

Was Duke’s walk natural?

Or was it part of the John Wayne image, a carefully constructed bit of acting business?

Harry Carey, Jr., in his fascinating memoir, Company of Heroes: My Life as an Actor in the John Ford Stock Company, provides invaluable and deeply private insights into the famous John Wayne walk.

First, Harry Carey, Jr. sketches in some background on John Wayne’s intimate relationship with the great character actor Paul Fix (1901–1983) Carey’s father-in-law:

…Paul Fix had almost as much to do with Duke’s success as a screen actor as did John Ford. Paul Fix literally taught John Wayne what John Wayne knew about acting. He was the man who gave Duke his first insight into forming the mold which was to be his persona. Most people give Uncle Jack [John Ford] the credit for this, but the first man to put the John Wayne image into John Wayne’s head was Paul Fix.

Carey, Jr. discusses the early days, the B westerns, and journeyman actor John Wayne’s stage appearance that turned disastrous:

Paul first worked as an actor with Duke in those early westerns. In those days, Paul had a sort of slinky, haunted look about him, like a man who might steal or lie, so of course he was usually cast as a heavy; not the head honcho, though, the sly henchman. He played a lot of gangsters, along with Sheldon Leonard or Barton MacLane. Paul was very serious about acting, and he wrote many plays. He was always putting them on in the little theaters around Hollywood. He cast Duke in one of them, but Duke was so frightened of live theater that he overdosed on booze and made a total ass out of himself. His wife, Josephine [Alicia Saenz], was so furious she screamed from the audience, “You’re a bum—a drunken bum!” What a night in the theater! Little did they know that they were looking at the man who was to become the biggest movie star of all time.

Harry Carey, Jr. reveals how Paul Fix worked behind the scenes as an acting coach to John Wayne during the most important film of Duke’s career.

Duke used to tell Paul that he felt awkward in front of the camera. He said he didn’t know what to do with his hands; that he didn’t feel natural. Not too many years later, Duke got his big break when John Ford cast him as “The Ringo Kid” in Stagecoach. Duke was overwhelmed by this good news but paralyzed with fear that he wouldn’t be able to carry it off. He went to Paul for help. Without John Ford’s knowledge. Duke went to Paul’s house every night to go over the next day’s work while they were shooting in town.

Private and not so private acting coaches are not unusual in Hollywood. Montgomery Clift was so dependent on his acting coach Mira Rostova, that he put her on salary while shooting some of his most famous films. And much to the chagrin of his directors and co-stars, Clift, after every take, would anxiously look to Rostova—not the director—for approval or disapproval of his line readings.

“Not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s walk.”

And now Carey fills us in on the birth of the legendary John Wayne walk:

Because Duke was kind of heavy-footed and used to trudge more than walk, Paul told Duke to point his toes when he walked, and the “John Wayne walk” was born. Try it yourself. Take a step and point your toe, like you’re stabbing it into the ground—left foot, right foot. Your shoulders automatically move back and forth, and the hips follow, not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s walk. When Duke first did it, it was ballsey as hell. As the Wayne legend began to form, the walk became more pronounced. Rio Bravo or any of the “Rios” are good examples.

Hollywood stardom is a mysterious thing. In the days when the studio system dominated, the moguls consciously searched for the key to a players potential image. And then, once identified, the studio system—at its best, an incredible make-over machine—created, polished and ruthlessly exploited that star’s specific persona.

No wonder L.B. Mayer alternately broke down in rage and tears when he discovered that Andy Hardy/Mickey Rooney ran off in the middle of the night and married the young and sexy Ava Gardner. Mayer was terrified that the public would reject the incredibly profitable Andy Rooney series—innocence and apple pie—when they realized that small town, all American Andy/Mickey was actually something of a dog, hooking up with a hot 17-year old actress—not to mention a host of chorus girls, hookers and vulnerable starlets.

With Clark Gable it gradually became clear to the executives at MGM that he was a man’s man, possessed of a humorous glint in his eye that turned women to jelly. For Jean Arthur it was her sandpaper voice and hesitant delivery that conveyed a woman desperate for control, but on the edge of a melt down. Jean Harlow was perfect as the sexy, vulnerable, wise-cracking tootsie who didn’t take herself too seriously.

But since the demise of the studio system, Hollywood stardom has morphed into an eerie kind of tabloid celebrity. Movie stars no longer have an identifiable movie persona, in fact most work hard at subverting a fixed image. They take pride in grabbing movie roles that go against type. Contemporary actors want to prove that they have range, that they are versatile. Hence, absent a fixed address, the post-modern actor is, with rare exceptions, fated to be excluded from the pantheon of Hollywood immortals.

For John Wayne, after a long Hollywood apprenticeship, his stardom was defined and exquisitely refined as a particular kind of rugged American individual; a man, no matter how conflicted, who recognized the difference between good and evil—and strode across the silver screen like a colossus.

Copyright © Robert J. Avrech

11:30am PST – Fugitive, The (1947) – A revolutionary priest flees a Central American dictatorship. Cast: Henry Fonda, Pedro Armendariz, J. Carrol Naish, Leo Carrillo Dir: John Ford BW-100 mins, TV-PG

The star of John Ford’s most personal film is Gabriel Figueroa’s inexpressibly beautiful photography. The Mexican cinematographer painstakingly paints each and every shot with black and white and contrast and hushed stillness. Like his masterpiece, “Young Mr. Lincoln” (which also stars Henry Fonda), Ford isn’t interested in story as much as myth-making and emotional atmosphere.

By some reports, Ford considered this rumination on liberty and Christianity his only “perfect” film, but he paid a price for it. “The Fugitive” failed at the box office, forcing Ford to go back to the profitably reliable Westerns which postponed for five years Ford’s other labor of love, “The Quiet Man” (1952).

Good thing, too. Those “reliable” Westerns ended up being Ford’s epic cavalry trilogy.