The John Wayne-John Ford Collection.

The John Wayne-John Ford Collection Includes Stagecoach: Special Edition, The Long Voyage Home, They Were Expendable, Fort Apache, 3 Godfathers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers: Ultimate Collector's Edition and The Wings of Eagles.

The John Ford Film Collection

Includes The Lost Patrol, The Informer, Mary of Scotland, Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn. Both DVD box sets released by Warner Home Video, http://whv.warnerbros.com.

I approach writing this review with some hesitation. It's the nature of the assignment. On the one hand, merely listing and briefly describing the contents of these two DVD box sets would be enough to fill a feature article. On the other hand, it's tempting to take the release of these fifteen DVDs (thirteen films, plus supplementary material) as a pretext for outlining a broader view of John Ford, while using the limitations of the boxes as an excuse to limit the scope of the project.

A critic might be grateful for any pretext, however external and circumstantial, to limit the scope of a consideration of a work as vast and complex as Ford's. The corpus defined by these two box sets is, however, particularly factitious. The John Wayne-John Ford Collection includes eight films starring John Wayne--excluding (in addition to the seven late Twenties/early Thirties Ford films in which Wayne appeared in small roles) a number

of major films. The John Ford Film Collection is a bizarre set of five films that happen to have fallen under the legal control of Warner Home Video: three RKO films from the mid-Thirties (The Lost Patrol, The Informer, and Mary of Scotland) and two Westerns from Ford's last decade of filmmaking, Sergeant Rutledge and Cheyenne Autumn.

These two box sets combined give us, then, a Ford oeuvre from which are omitted the entirety of Ford's silent work, all his films for Fox Film/20th Century-Fox (including the Will Rogers trilogy, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and My Darling Clementine), three films that might justly be called Ford's masterpieces (Wagon Master, The Sun Shines Bright, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), and several other key films. But let's pretend, for the rest of this review, that John Ford made just the thirteen films that are on these two box sets. Who is the John Ford who becomes visible in these films?

First, he's an extremely subtle artist. How unobvious Ford is, how deliberately he defeats the audience's temptation to find his films obvious! When, in Sergeant Rutledge, the military court orders Rutledge (Woody Strode), the defendant, to be brought in for the first time, the viewer might expect the standard shock of the black man entering among all the white people--might expect, in other words, that Ford will handle the scene from the point of view of the racist whites in the court. Instead, before giving us the shot of Rutledge coming in (and the court's reaction on seeing him), Ford first cuts to a shot outside the court, of Rutledge being marched along the porch toward the doorway. This shot neutralizes Rutledge's appearance and compels us to see him--and the color of his skin--as objective facts, not as emotional provocations.

At the same time, a certain artifice is visible--indeed, advertised--in Ford's films. In Sergeant Rutledge, the light changes in the trial scenes, darkening the image while each witness launches into a recollection of the past, are an explicitly conventional device (one that Ford also uses in Mary of Scotland), and the color and the photography make the convention appear irrational and abnormal. Often in Ford films, the contrast of darkness and light comes with a surplus of acknowledged artifice. In the opening and closing shots of The Searchers, the extreme darkness of the interiors of homes is blatantly a photographic effect created by lighting, exposure, and probably also the design and decoration of the sets. The least that can be said is that Ford is unafraid of the 'pulling-the-audience-outside-the-film' effect that such photographic devices cause. This is true also of the use of silhouettes in the shot in They Were Expendable of the men walking away down the corridor of the hospital where they have just said goodbye to their dying comrade.

The hospital scene (in which the men all avoid acknowledging that their wounded friend is dying and that this will be their last meeting) is a good site for identifying another major impulse in Ford's work: the depiction of acting--the performance or presentation of being--as a social ritual. This is very clear near the end of The Wings of Eagles, in the visit Spig (John Wayne) pays to his recuperating friend, Carson (Dan Dailey). Here, acting both creates a meaning and takes away the possibility of another meaning--the acknowledgment of the two men's love for each other (which becomes purely private). The Wings of Eagles is altogether a remarkable use of Wayne's acting not just to 'express without expressing,' but to criticize, and show the tragedy of, the failure to express what goes unexpressed.

This critique is part of Ford's view of society not as something monolithic and completed, but as a dynamic complex of relations. The Informer, Mary of Scotland, Stagecoach, and The Long Voyage Home are all examples of an intricate mode of analysis in which various individuals and groups are placed in relation with one another--a relation that, in each film, becomes increasingly difficult to map as, again and again, fundamental allegiances are put in play and exposed: those of the gambler Hatfield (John Carradine) and Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) in Stagecoach; the allegiances of Gypo (Victor McLaglen) to Katie (Margot Grahame), Frankie (Wallace Ford), Frankie's mother (Una O'Connor), and the IRA in The Informer. In Fort Apache, the characters live in different worlds, divided by class, rank, race, age, and gender. Ford is the director par excellence of such divisions (The Wings of Eagles is entirely a film of separations). That Ford sees the cinema as a kind of map of social conflict is clear from the way he marshals the movements both of actors--often along corridors that are firmly defined in the composition, as in the aforementioned shot from Expendable and the shots of the Ringo Kid (Wayne) and Dallas (Claire Trevor) at the hacienda in Stagecoach--and of strongly directional lighting in order to define the screen as a network of movements.

In Fort Apache, the young couple--Michael (John Agar) and Philadelphia (Shirley Temple)--are always seen from the point of view of their elders, as in the shot through the door from the inside of the O'Rourkes' house, showing the pair together on the porch. This is also the point of view of the past. Already, in Stagecoach, Ringo and Dallas are viewed from the point of view of Boone and the Marshal (George Bancroft); and in The Long Voyage Home, Ole (Wayne) is viewed from the point of view of the older sailors. These inscriptions of point of view as a movement that runs counter to the forward thrust of time hint at Ford's rejection of any ideology of progress or improvement. Gypo in The Informer and Dallas and Ringo in Stagecoach are, in a sense, damned: they have already ceased to believe in 'the blessings of civilization,' and civilization wants nothing from them but that they die or disappear. At the end of The Searchers, the old is not restored, and the film is not a parable of unity. Instead, the cutout oblong of landscape framed in the doorway looms as a sign of constant movement and the moral necessity of homelessness.

The idea of being left (or left out) is strong in Ford. In They Were Expendable, most of the action is a staying behind (by those who are left in a place while the others go away), or a waiting to be used in combat, or killed. The chief radicality of Ford may lie in his incorporation of waiting in his cinema--not merely as a moment of respite in a rhythmic structure of high and low points, but as something that is embedded within the highpoint, inextricable from the event itself. All of The Informer is a waiting for two inevitable occurrences: first, Gypo's act of betrayal; second, his punishment. In Stagecoach, Ford lingers over the lengthy wait before Ringo's shoot out with the Plummers and the wait before the birth of Mrs. Mallory's baby.

The emphasis on waiting--especially in conjunction with the themes of exile and homelessness--indicates that Ford's cinema is involved in a profound and fundamental way with time. Everything in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is report and repetition; everything has already happened, from the predetermined outcome of the love triangle to the retirement of aging Captain Brittles (Wayne). After the raid in which his men disperse the enemy's horses, Brittles asks for the time and is told that it's 12:02. "Then I've been a civilian for two minutes." The moment the film has endlessly prepared us for has been elided in time's passage: in a sense it has never actually occurred; in another sense it has occurred continually.

The constantly deferred presence of women in Ford's films can also be seen in relation to this elision. Sandy (Donna Reed) in They Were Expendable and Min (Maureen O'Hara) in The Wings of Eagles are both bid final (?) farewell over the phone by their men (played in both films by Wayne), who have been ordered away. This state of permanent leavetaking and abandonment is the most extreme version, perhaps, of the condition of the male characters in Expendable: always left behind. This doesn't mean that we should speak here of the 'feminization' of the men. Instead, women represent a height of isolation, solitude, misplacement, and alienation--and thus incarnate in an extreme way a state of being that is shared by many Ford's heroes.

Among the men, Thursday (Henry Fonda) in Fort Apache stands out by his refusal to be expelled and alienated, his resentment of exile, his attempt to regain official standing and claim for himself a place in history ("The man who brought Cochise back," he murmurs to himself--to the astonishment of the subordinate officer present). The other characters in the film all understand that exile is an honor, a mark of distinction (the Irish, the Confederates). Thursday alone craves official honors.

On the other hand, the movement of Cheyenne Autumn is toward the past (toward the past home of the Cheyenne). The film--one of Ford's greatest--is all about decision: the decisions of groups and individuals, confronting one another at a historical crisis, as to what image of themselves will be retained by the future. The Dodge City sequence shows a Doc Holliday (Arthur Kennedy) and a Wyatt Earp (James Stewart) who have voluntarily withdrawn from history: this is the other side of the escape from the blessings of civilization that Ringo and Dallas make at the end of Stagecoach. The other characters in Cheyenne Autumn are all involved with questions of national destiny, ideology, racial identity. Ford's epic detachment makes more sense than ever before. The historical drama of decision is played out somewhere far away from us: Ford insists on this removal, this absence, as a way of forestalling false alibis. The object of the film is not (as in a 'liberal' treatment) to reassure the viewer, but to show the processes of history-making and legend-making.

Similarly, in Rutledge, Ford keeps us somewhat removed from the title character--as he does indeed from all the others--but with Rutledge, the distancing gesture has the greatest force, since Rutledge, more than the other characters, already knows his place in history: he already lives in history, he is part of the 'past' as seen from the future, he's living in the future anterior. The crucial calculation in the film is Rutledge's decision to rejoin history, to merge again with his historical image, by crossing back over the river to help save his platoon. The calculation is removed from us, emotionally: but that's Ford. He's not interested in dramatizing the emotion; he's interested in showing the movement. It's the same with the decision by Ethan (Wayne) to spare Debbie (Natalie Wood) at the end of The Searchers.

One could construct a very full and rich model of Fordian cinema out of these thirteen films, and I see I haven't even discussed 3 Godfathers, a masterpiece, or the interesting The Lost Patrol, and have barely mentioned the more problematic Mary of Scotland. As we move farther and farther away in time from Ford's films, they become more paradoxical, more uncomfortable, more stirring and moving. Eight more Ford boxes, please.--Chris Fujiwara