[gentle music]
- Norman Gilliland: Films are often referred to
by the name of their director.
A Kurosawa film, a Hitchcock film, a Kubrick film.
But how much control does a director have over a film?
Welcome to University Place Presents.
I'm Norman Gilliland.
Some of the most famous American films
are closely linked to director John Ford.
How much control did he have?
We'll find out from the author
of John Ford at Work, film historian Lea Jacobs.
Welcome to University Place Presents.
- Lea Jacobs: Thanks, good to be here.
- If you just look at the list of the films by John Ford,
let me go all the way back to, what, 1917
and all the way forward, what-- - '65.
- 1965.
And still some heavy-hitting films very late in his career.
- Lea: Yeah.
- From silent films all the way to color
and all kinds of technological innovations.
But let's look at several of his films
that give us an idea of how much control he had
and how he exerted that control.
And most notably, you want to start in 1931 with Arrowsmith.
New to talking films at this point,
right at the edge between silents and talkies, right?
- This was not his first talking film,
but it was one in which he had a much bigger budget
than he had previously.
His early sound films were made just at the Depression.
You know, the crash came
just as the conversion to sound happened,
so Ford was now working for Goldwyn
when he made Arrowsmith,
and the film is an example of him having the budget
and the freedom to really experiment with the direction.
He didn't have to just shoot things on the fly, outside,
you know, just getting, capturing real sound.
He was able to control the flow of the scene
and to stage for sound in a way.
- So, what did he do with Arrowsmith
that he hadn't done before?
- He tries a lot of different things.
That's one of the interesting things about the film
and about Ford that I learned from this film,
is that he was basically a tech geek.
I mean, he loved playing with the technology.
He tried different kinds of things.
And, so for example,
the standard way of shooting a conversation scene
after the transition
was to have all the cameras lined up in a row
like they are in the studio right now,
and to switch from one to the next
and to shoot the scene simultaneously
from many different angles.
And the reason they had to do that was that the camera itself
was taking sound, and cameras make noise.
So, the camera that was capturing the sound
was in a booth.
So, all the cameras were kind of locked in place
and everything had to be taken at the same time.
Whereas most Hollywood films before that
were shot with a single camera and moving around, you know.
That was just something
that was done between 1927 and about 1931.
This was actually Ford's last film
that was shot with multiple cameras.
But Ford actually seemed to like experimenting with that.
It's unbelievable 'cause everybody hated it.
Some directors refused to do it, but he tried and he,
he tried to move the camera on a crane in a shot
that took all night to get.
He did a lot of wild things.
He was just trying things out.
And, but one thing he did
that worked very well in this film and that I admire,
was to shoot the scene with a single camera for picture
and a single camera for sound,
and to have a static camera and the actors move around the set
in a very long take.
So, the actors had to keep their wits about them
because they weren't, like, saying one line
and then cut, and then another line, cut.
They had to conduct the scene kind of like live TV,
you know, with this one camera on them.
And they had to be very careful to stay on camera
'cause it's very easy to get off the frame.
And they had to make their mark.
And Ford was one of a number of directors
who tried this technique during the transition
as an alternative to multiple camera shooting.
Lubitsch, Ernst Lubitsch did so.
A lot of directors.
John Stahl.
They tried this because it was--
It allowed them to have actors move in depth
with much more fluidity. - Just more space.
- Yeah, they had more space, yeah.
- It's interesting because, not to digress too much,
but as we get into some later films, the takes are so short.
You know, three seconds is not unusual length for a shot
and a scene, and to have a very long scene
where the camera is following action.
More unusual now maybe than it was in 1930.
- Very unusual, I mean, there are exceptions.
There are directors, like Christopher Nolan,
that will have a long take and like,
like to experiment with it.
But most...
But most people are used to a very, very fast cutting style,
two to three seconds now, and would be maybe bored.
But there's...
An actor, on the other hand,
can develop a scene much more effectively
if the take is long.
An actor can build to that, can build to a moment
where they move towards the camera all of a sudden,
or where they sit down in despair,
or whatever they're doing.
If they have that continuity of performance,
it makes for much more effective, I think, acting.
- One of the things we hear about from time to time
also is backlighting.
He used that, and how did he use it?
- Well, he was-- He was a lighting freak. [laughs]
In fact, he says in an interview
that one of the things he's proudest of,
and Ford very rarely was honest in interviews.
He was often making up stories that were amusing
rather than actually saying what he did.
- Well, it's all a showbiz. - [laughs] Yeah.
But he said one of the things he was proudest of
was that he could build his scenes around a point
of light and shadow,
and he could plot the points where the light,
the highlights hit and the points where the shadows hit.
And he was very, very close to his cameramen.
He tried to always work
with a very small number of cameramen.
So, he didn't have his usual cameramen on Arrowsmith,
but he did have--
Most of the other films that he made in the '30s
were shot by either Joe August, or in the early '30s,
Joe August or George Schneiderman.
And then in the late '30s, after Schneiderman retired,
he was working with Gregg Toland of Citizen Kane fame,
and Bert Glennon,
who's my personal favorite of his cameramen.
But he was very, very--
He worked very, very closely with them,
and I don't think he would tell them what to do,
like, "Put your lights there."
But he would say, "I want a highlight here,
I want a shadow here."
And I think that's how he worked.
Now, this is just from watching a lot of movies
'cause we don't really know, but it's one of the things
I feel like I understand how he thinks.
- In this backlighting process, he actually has the camera...
Opposite of where you would usually have it.
- Well, yeah, the light is behind the actor and there's,
it's usual to have a little bit of backlighting
to make the figure stand out from the,
stand out from the background.
But Ford would often have the backlight
be the principal light.
So, in this slide from Arrowsmith, you can see
that there's a very strong point of light
at the back of the set and a dark foreground.
He very much liked that contrast.
It gives you a stronger sense of depth and it's very dramatic.
So, yeah, it was one of his specialties
was putting the light at the back of the set, and...
But sometimes it would be to the side,
but setting up a dark, dark, dark foreground.
He liked that.
That was his style.
- Well, let's skip forward,
and we're not gonna leave that topic entirely,
I'm guessing, with John Ford, [Lea laughs]
but we'll skip forward from 1931 to about 1939
and Stagecoach. - Yeah.
- Norman: Now here, and I know he's done some of this before,
but probably not to the extent
where he's shooting outdoors with a panoramic view
that you get in Stagecoach.
He's gonna obviously have a mix of close-ups and long shots,
and then some shots that are yeah, they're outdoors,
but they're still close-ups.
How did he finesse all of that
to make it look like a smooth transition from one to the next?
- Lea: So, Stagecoach was shot on location
in a number of places,
but most famously in Monument Valley.
It's the first film that Ford made in Monument Valley,
and it's a film that introduced him to that spot in the planet,
and he went back there many, many times subsequently
to shoot Westerns at the later part of his career.
But at the time that he was making Stagecoach in 1939,
he was, at that point,
the studios were not very interested
in sending a whole company on location.
Like he--
The studio would not have sent all the stars of Stagecoach,
their hairdressers, their wardrobe people--
- Norman: The caterers. - The caterers, right,
to send all those people to Monument Valley especially,
which was basically wilderness then,
or it was a reservation, but it was, you know,
there wasn't accommodation for 150 people,
which you would need for a major Hollywood film.
So, the way Ford had to work
and other directors had to work this way too, at the time,
was to, usually there was what was called a second unit
that went on location and shot the, you know,
the waterfalls, the terrain, the volcanoes,
whatever they were shooting.
And then they would, in the studio,
they would shoot what was called principal photography.
That is with the stars.
So, you get this situation
where you have famous actors talking in close-up
with back projection,
which showed the landscape behind them.
So, so the way that was done is you,
it's called rear projection.
You have a screen,
the projector is behind the screen
projecting a view of the landscape.
And then the actors are filmed in front of that screen
and they're shown basically from the waist up or the knees up,
because they're not actually in the landscape.
You might say the landscape is a background.
Like on the stage, it would be a painted backdrop.
Now we have a photographic backdrop,
and there'd be a conversation.
So, you don't have to have your actors in a dangerous situation,
like on a whitewater raft.
You don't have to have your actors
staying out there for months, which is very expensive.
- Sometimes dangerous too. - Yeah, yeah.
And uncomfortable.
So, the thing that was interesting about Stagecoach
was that Ford didn't have a second unit.
That is, he went out to Monument Valley
with his principal cameraman,
who was Bert Glennon, my favorite,
and with some extras who he needed to do, like,
the cavalry riding through the valley, you know,
those kinds of shots.
And so, you get these beautiful shots composed by Ford
and shot by Bert Glennon of the landscape.
But then, when they have to add in the principal actors,
they're using back projection.
And that doesn't look as good, to say the least.
- Norman: Even in 1939, not convincing?
- Yeah, I mean, now, of course,
with image compositing, digital image compositing,
you can have as many layers of the image
as you want, and it doesn't matter.
You can shoot things with a blue screen or a green screen
as they're called, and then add in all kinds of background,
Mars, whatever you want, and you can't tell,
but you can tell in Stagecoach, you know.
- Some better than others,
but when you're seeing close-up of the stagecoach in motion,
I think even in 1939, it's like, "Oh, wait a minute.
Not suspending my disbelief here."
Just for a few seconds, but still.
- Yeah, and also, the backgrounds are out of focus.
You're rephotographing an image that's being projected.
So, think about the actual image size.
It's about one inch by one inch.
The negative that that image is coming from,
then it's being projected big, and it's designed to be,
so with a good projector and all that,
but then you're rephotographing it.
It's gonna be fuzzy.
And you can see that in Stagecoach
when you see the shots that were taken
with the stagecoach in the valley
and the rock formations in the background versus the ones
which are done with,
you know, somebody talking in close-up
and the background is completely out of focus.
- Well, speaking of focus, right around this time,
1939, '40, '41, something called deep focus.
I don't know if it came into vogue exactly,
but it started getting attention.
- Right. - Famously in Citizen Kane.
- Most famously, yeah.
So, what happened was that, I mean, film stock at the time,
of course, now we don't have film stock anymore.
But at the time, film stock was always--
Kodak and the other manufacturers
were always experimenting with film stocks
and improving them.
And one of the things
that happens across the course of the '30s
is they make them more and more and more sensitive to light.
If you have a very sensitive film stock, you can do more.
You can shoot darker scenes.
You don't need to put as much light on the set.
And you can also do things with the camera
that makes it possible to improve the focal depth.
So, deep focus is really
the stock that permits the very deep focus
that we associate with Citizen Kane
was first introduced in the fall of 1939,
which is when Ford made Stagecoach.
Sorry, the fall of 1938.
He didn't know what he could do with it.
He was experimenting, as I was saying, just like with sound.
He was trying to do stuff.
And you see this not so much in the exteriors,
'cause they didn't have those kind of focal depth problems
in exteriors where there's lots of light.
Sun is a very powerful light source,
but when they're shooting in the studio on set and they can,
they can really, they can get this enormous depth of field
so you can get people moving into depth.
You can get very, very precise control
over the very tiny figures at the back of the shot.
So, in the scene where Dallas comes out holding Lucy's baby.
- Norman: At the back of the room.
- Lea: She's at the back of the room.
And at first, she's even in the dark.
You just see a halo around her head
because she's backlit, of course,
and you could see her shadow on the door as it opens.
And there's all this action in the foreground,
but she's the focal point,
and she comes not very far into close-up.
I mean, she's still quite far from camera,
but even so, every detail is evident.
And it's a very magical moment.
And it couldn't have been shot that way
unless they had deep focus.
- Norman: It's interesting what he's doing in this scene too,
with the gambler, the hat. - Lea: Yeah.
- Norman: It's so bright that it draws attention to itself.
But then it also points over to Claire Trevor, doesn't it?
- Lea: Yes, right.
And, of course, if you look at John Wayne,
he was actually, at the beginning of the shot,
he was actually blocking her.
So, the door opens and then he turns to look,
and that turning of his face
reveals her coming out of the door.
So, it's very precisely blocked.
- And this shot is fascinating too,
where she's coming out of a very tight frame there
of that doorway in darkness,
and then becomes increasingly defined, in part by her dress.
- Lea: Right, that shot is amazing to me.
I don't think I've seen a shot before that
where you have such a dark foreground
and you have a light source that's illuminating her
when she gets outside the door,
'cause you can see before that, she's silhouetted,
but she gets outside the door.
We can see every detail of her dress in focus.
And this is a turning point in the story,
because this is after Dallas has helped Lucy give birth.
And it's a kind of spiritual rebirth for her too.
And this shot kind of celebrates that
in the movement from darkness to light.
So, it's just spectacular.
Very nice use of depth.
- And the use of light by John Ford,
setting the scene with even a single image,
he can kind of establish the nature of the character,
can't he?
I'm thinking of Henry Fonda in Young Mr. Lincoln.
All it needs is one shot of the young Lincoln,
played by Henry Fonda, who actually
may be a little too handsome
for the part. [both laugh] - Lea: Yeah.
- Norman: But can be modified enough to look very convincingly
like a young Abraham Lincoln. - Lea: Yeah.
Supposedly, Henry Fonda was frightened
when he saw the screen tests of him in makeup.
It was too uncanny.
And he was like, "Well, I don't know if I can do this."
Ford talked him into it.
But yeah,
so this image we're looking at is Henry Fonda on location
where they shot the scene with Ann Rutledge.
I think that tree is one that figures in the film.
And you can see the huge reflectors
that they use to bounce light onto Henry Fonda's face
when he gets into the shot.
He's off camera here, which is one of the nice things.
It looks to me like Lincoln is just relaxing by the river.
- He's folksy. - Yeah, yeah.
- But they did do a little bit of, like,
rebuilding of Henry Fonda's face
to be a little more Lincolnesque with the nose.
- Lea: They did, yes, and the chin.
I think they changed the chin a little bit too.
- Did John Ford experiment with makeup at all?
Because it seemed to me that, you know,
the technology for makeup
would be improving too, over the years.
- Yeah, I think he left that to staff.
I know that at least in the case of the Lincoln makeup,
those screen tests were done
while he was still shooting Stagecoach.
So, he was away from the studio.
So, it's a factory system of production.
And that's one of the things
that brings us back to that question
of how much control does the director have?
You have a whole system.
It's not just that there's a producer that's running things,
although there is a boss, and it wasn't Ford always.
But also that there's all these
what they call below-the-line people
who are making up Henry Fonda, helping decide his costume,
all that kind of stuff.
Now, I do know, 'cause there are many stories about it,
Ford was very particular about costuming,
and particularly for the cowboys, his cowboys.
He didn't want them to look, like, too duded up.
So, he would tell them, "Bring three old hats."
You know, he would tell them, "Just find a hat," you know,
and he would want them to look-- - Something lived in.
- Yeah, yeah, same with boots.
He was very particular about boots.
So, he did think about clothes a lot,
but I don't know if he finessed makeup so much.
- Looking at Stagecoach and to a lesser extent,
something like Young Mr. Lincoln,
it's fascinating the amount of,
I'm gonna call it choreography required
or, you know, blocking in a theatrical sense.
But we're way beyond that when you're looking at a crowd scene,
for example, in a John Ford film.
- Lea: Yes, it's amazing.
And that's because the way the camera frames things,
as opposed to when you're in a theater,
you have this very wide foreground.
You can see the whole stage, right?
Right at the footlights.
But the way a camera works, there's a very narrow foreground
and it's like a cone, a light cone.
And so, when you're staging for the camera,
you have very precise control over what you can see
in front and back and back and back.
And that's what he does in Young Mr. Lincoln
in the trial scene, is he's very tightly controlling
where the figures are in the front
and what you can see behind them.
And it's a tour de force, that trial scene,
because you can see Lincoln pursuing the culprit
that he's trying to get to confess in the trial,
who's played by Ward Bond.
So, they're moving slowly towards the foreground.
But all around Lincoln you can see, you see the judge stand up,
you can see the jury stand up so they can see what's going on
as these characters move towards us.
You can see the sheriff circling around.
And then slowly, the camera tracks back
and you can see the people
who have come to see the trial moving in
when they realize that this person
who they thought was their friend and an innocent guy
was actually the murderer, when he confesses.
And Ford stages this so you can see different people
visible at different points.
So, in the middle slide at the top,
you can see the prosecuting attorney visible
between Henry Fonda and Ward Bond.
But later on, you could see the innocent boy
who was accused in place of Ward Bond.
And he figures between them as Henry Fonda,
as Lincoln is saying, "You did it,
you did it," and you could see the innocent boy in back.
And then way at the bottom slide there
you can see the judge standing,
and you can see an actor standing next to him very,
very far in the background.
And Henry Fonda has moved so that we can see that actor,
and that actor is playing Stephen Douglas,
who we know was Lincoln's rival for the presidency.
- When we start talking about history in particular,
but it could apply to any film usually
or often an adaptation of a novel.
How much control does the director have over the story?
Now, in the case of Lincoln,
of course, yeah, there was a famous trial,
but not much like the one in the film.
- Right.
- And films of the '30s and '40s and '50s,
notorious for just running riot over historical facts.
How does John Ford play in that? - Yeah, good question.
Well, and it's really the question
about script development.
Because I always say there isn't just one script.
There's usually at least two or three.
And while that script is being formulated,
a lot of people have input.
For example, the set designer or the art director
might be called in to say, well,
"Can you build us this kind of street in Monument Valley?"
You know, there's all kinds of people
that are giving technical advice.
There is location shooting that's,
scouting that's happening.
So, where are we gonna shoot this?
And that will figure into the script.
It's a process of script development.
And the director is often not involved in the earliest stages
because he's shooting another film.
It's a factory system. - Norman: Uh-huh.
- They're not, you know, they're not just in their study,
like, working on script.
No, they're off...
And so, one of the,
one of Ford's tricks was to have screenwriters that he trusted.
Now, he couldn't always get them because a producer knew
that he was doing this.
But Dudley Nichols and Lamar Trotti,
who wrote many of his film scripts for Fox,
they were trusted friends and allies.
Even if he's off on location, they can talk to him, right?
So, they're telegraphing back and forth,
and thank goodness it's not email because I have those
so I can see, you know, what they're talking about.
And I can see what's going into that script development process.
In the case of Young Mr. Lincoln,
it was basically a pet project of Lamar Trotti
based on another film that he had written for Ford,
which had a trial scene.
And so, even though he didn't necessarily, to my knowledge,
talk to Ford about it, at least we have no record
of that conversation,
he was taking things that Ford had done before
that he knew Ford liked,
and putting them in a new spin on them,
because now it's Lincoln.
You know, that is how Ford himself
often was able to affect script development
'cause he often couldn't control.
Now, that's different in Stagecoach
'cause Stagecoach was his project,
he bought that property, which was called, um,
Last Stage from... - Uh, Lordsville.
- Lordsville.
He had-- - Which was based on a story
by Guy de Maupassant, apparently.
- That's right, it is. - How strange is that?
- "Boule de Suif," yeah.
But Ford owned that.
He had bought the rights,
and he knew that he wanted to have John Wayne
and Claire Trevor in the leading roles.
And the great Thomas Mitchell,
who's the secret star of the movie.
So, he knew all that.
And he wouldn't work with any independent producer
that wouldn't give him that.
So, he walked away from his negotiations
with David O. Selznick, 'cause Selznick was not about
to let Ford cast that movie or write the script.
And so, he found a director, a producer, Walter Wanger,
who would let him do those things.
So, in that movie, he did control script development.
But in Young Mr. Lincoln,
I would say that he had in Lamar Trotti,
a guy who was a complete stickler for Lincoln lore.
- Norman: Truly? - He was an amateur historian.
He knew everything, he had read all the great sources.
And I can go back to Carl Sandburg's monumental...
- Oh, the famous biography. - ...biography.
Yeah, and there's, I mean, little bits,
little lines of dialogue, tiny little things
are taken from Sandburg.
So, he really knew that book backwards and forwards.
And the same with the set design,
which I think is,
it's very beautiful early American kind of interiors.
- For the interior shots.
They actually went authentic for that.
- Yeah, and that's definitely something Ford liked.
He was into interior design,
although he would never have admitted it
'cause it wasn't his conception of what a man should be.
But he has a beautiful-- [Norman laughs]
If you look at The Searchers,
this is one of his most famous films from the '50s.
- Norman: Yeah, sure. - There's this house
that's in the middle of Texas, in the wilderness.
- It's like in a desert, though. - Yes.
- I've never figured out, so these guys are ranchers,
but there's not so much as a weed within sight for miles.
- It's a desert, well, that's the whole point.
They have to-- generations before they can farm, really.
But if you look at that house,
it's got this beautiful early American pewterware
up on the mantel of the fireplace
and this gorgeous China.
And yeah, it's beautiful early American furniture,
which is then often wrecked in fights and stuff.
- So, knockoffs of beautiful early American furniture.
- Hopefully.
- So, what are some of the kind of paths that John Ford took
from inception to completion of a film?
I mean, who came up with the idea
and said, in some cases,
"Well, oh, here's a great story that I just read.
Let's see if we can turn it into a film."
Who's gonna do the casting? - Yeah.
There's so much variety,
especially for somebody like Ford,
because although he had a contract with 20th Century Fox,
in the 1930s, he also could freelance.
He could work for other studios.
And that's what he did when he made Stagecoach.
He didn't make Stagecoach at 20th Century Fox.
He made that at United Artists with a producer, Walter Wanger,
who gave him his head.
When he's at 20th Century Fox,
he has to convince his producer, Darryl F. Zanuck,
to let him do stuff.
So, that's a little bit different, you know, situation,
because Zanuck usually came up with story ideas.
He didn't like his directors coming up with story ideas.
Zanuck was a great story editor,
and he would basically often come up with an idea
or find a property, buy that property,
and then start several screenwriting teams to work
to adapt it.
And then Ford would be brought in for the,
not the very final script,
but the second to the last or the third to the last.
There could be many drafts with Zanuck.
And then he would have input.
He would say, "Well, I've been out to location."
Like, he would go out to location
'cause he was that kind of a guy.
And he would say, "You know, we've got this great,
you know, we've got this great cliff here."
- [laughs] Somehow I knew you were gonna say that.
- Yeah, and so he would convince Zanuck that they should,
you know, change things around.
- Adapt the script to the landscape or...
- Yeah, so I would say when he's working at 20th Century Fox,
he's "improving" the script.
And that was his job, I think.
I think Zanuck expected him to improve the script.
He wouldn't have been paying Ford top dollar as a director
if he didn't think Ford could improve the script.
But Zanuck kept control at that level,
and Zanuck also was very involved
in post-production and editing.
So, Ford would famously try to finesse that
by only giving Zanuck so much footage.
He would do what was called cutting in the camera.
So, he would not take a million close-ups.
He would only take a couple of close-ups
that he knew he had to have, or that he personally wanted.
- Choose A or B. - Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, he was very protective of his footage.
And there's some very funny memos.
Like there's a funny memo from How Green Was My Valley.
Ford is out at Malibu, shooting,
because that's where they built the Welsh village
that the story takes place in. - Norman: Of course.
- And so, he's out in Malibu.
And so, he shoots the footage for the day.
And it's a scene with Walter Pidgeon and Roddy McDowall,
who's playing a boy who's been temporarily paralyzed
and is learning to walk, okay?
So, and they're up on this hillside
and there's all these daffodils, very Welsh scene.
- Norman: Did they have the daffodils brought in,
or how does that...? - Lea: Yeah,
they're really there, and there's a lot of 'em.
Anyway, so there's this very moving scene,
but the landscape is very important in this movie.
And so, there's this long, this long shot
with a lot of landscape, light at the back, dark foreground.
We know how Ford rolls.
So, Zanuck prints this up,
and he sends a telegram to Ford the next day and says,
"Are you gonna shoot some close-ups of Huw?
"I really, I really think we need some close-ups of Huw
as he's walking towards camera and he figures out he can walk."
You know, he's being very careful with Ford
'cause Ford is a prima donna.
You could tell Zanuck is handling him.
And Ford was so mad, he wrote in pencil on the telegram,
"Dear Darryl, at 6 o'clock, the sun goes down out here."
[Norman laughs] So, and he did shoot some close-ups,
but you could tell Zanuck thought he might well not,
because he was-- He liked to control the editing,
but Zanuck wanted to control the editing.
And so, he had to make sure he had the footage he needed.
- Were we in, let's see, by the time we get
to How Green Was My Valley, that's 1941.
Is Ford dealing at all with color at this point?
I mean, obviously there has been color very effectively,
Wizard of Oz just a couple of years before.
And experiments well before that.
But at what point does he pick up color?
- So, Ford's first color film was shot in 1939.
In 1939, Ford shot, finished Stagecoach,
he shot Young Mr. Lincoln,
he shot The Grapes of Wrath with Henry Fonda.
- Seven big films in three years.
- Yeah, and then he shot Drums Along the Mohawk,
which is about the American Revolutionary War.
And it was shot in Utah, of course. [Norman laughs]
And that was his first color film.
- Norman: Drums Along the Mohawk?
- Lea: Drums Along the Mohawk.
And then, he didn't go back to shooting in color
until late 1949.
But the thing is that Zanuck wanted to shoot
How Green Was My Valley in color,
because How Green Was My Valley, right?
He wanted it to look green. [Norman laughs]
And he wanted to shoot in Wales, in color.
And Zanuck, of course, had bosses too.
This is a hierarchical system.
- Who would that be, the financiers?
- The studio president who's in New York,
Sidney Kent and his minions who said, "No, you can't.
It's too much." - Too expensive.
First of all, you're gonna have to take
all those people on location.
And second of all, you're gonna have to shoot in color,
which is more expensive.
- And the weather has to cooperate.
- Yeah, yeah.
If you're there a long time, it's gonna be bad.
So, he didn't get to shoot in Europe in color
'til The Quiet Man, which is a great movie.
And it's gonna be in volume two
of John Ford at Work. - Oh, well, I was gonna say--
- It's the ending, 'cause it's kind of an end point.
But How Green Was My Valley is beautiful.
It's in black and white, but it has this terrific,
monumental set of the valley itself.
And it also, huge, a huge set, and it has some
very beautiful black and white cinematography, so.
- He does some lovely things with interior shots
in that film too. - Yes.
- Right out of like a Vermeer or some,
you know, painting.
- Yes, it's very beautiful,
especially the shots inside the...
This is a Welsh mining valley.
The houses are small, the ceilings are low.
Ford loved to build his sets with ceilings
because then he felt it was more realistic.
And so, you have these supposedly cramped
Welsh mining village houses, row houses.
Actually, they're quite big.
If you've ever seen a row house, which I've been in,
they're not, they're not as big as they look here.
But the great thing about the interiors is, again,
the use of depth,
the kinds of things we saw with Stagecoach earlier
where we have these beautiful light,
this beautiful light at the back of the set,
these dark backgrounds,
these long lines of people set up.
These are the brothers of this family.
The little boy who narrates the film in flashback,
his name is Huw, played by Roddy McDowall.
He's sitting foreground left.
And then, there are--
- He actually was a boy actor at that point,
but he played boyish actors for, like, the next 40 years.
- Yeah. [both laugh]
So, then there's four brothers standing in a row,
meeting the bride of the oldest brother,
who's standing in the background.
This whole composition is set up to make an aperture
around the actress who's playing Bronwen, the new bride,
the first marriage of the first and oldest son.
So, this moment in the family is monumental,
and her importance is emphasized not by close-ups,
not by fancy, you know, effects, but by this light
that's just coming through the lace curtains,
and it's diffuse and it gives her this beautiful halo.
And then, this backdrop of all the boys, it's like--
- Norman: Their hands. - Lea: Yeah.
- Norman: They're pointing. - Lea: Right, right down, yeah.
And we know Ford planned this
because the brothers are standing in their height.
The first three, [both laugh]
they're standing in the order of height.
And then way at the right
is that little face of the dad, who's the patriarch
and the boss of the family.
So, it's so beautiful.
Everybody's where they have to be in that shot.
And the whole family hierarchy is replicated.
But the important point is that this shot is
actually the acme of the movement.
It's the end point of a lot of movement.
- Norman: He didn't hold this shot and let you admire it
for ten seconds. - Lea: He didn't cut to it.
Yeah, and people move into the room,
the boys line up to say hi, the dad moves to the back,
the boy sits down in the chair to be out of the way,
and all of a sudden, we have this composition.
But there's a naturalness to it that you don't...
So my slide, I always say you can--
Anyone can make brilliant slides with a Ford movie,
but it doesn't capture the way that movement works
or that performance unfolds into these images.
He plans the shot,
but then he plans the movement that will achieve the shot.
And it's quite brilliant.
And sometimes there are two or three,
like there are other intermediate stages
before you get to one, so he's quite clever.
- It seems like it's a bit of a tightrope to walk
between creating a shot like that,
and then holding it too long and calling too much attention to it
and stopping the action. - Right.
- It's kind of art concealing art.
- Yeah, and I think Ford's strategy,
and I don't know how he did it, believe me,
but all his actors say he--
not the famous actors like Henry Fonda
or Maureen O'Hara, who plays the lone sister in this family.
He didn't rehearse them and he didn't want to rehearse them,
especially for big scenes.
He would run lines with them,
which means they would read the lines back and forth,
maybe with a group of actors involved in a scene.
But he didn't stage, he didn't like...
Some directors will take an actor and say,
"I want you here, and then I want you to look left
and raise your cheek."
And you know,
he didn't do that. - Micromanaging.
- Yeah, right.
He didn't do that at all.
He set up a shot.
And what he would tell the actors is,
"I want you to line up."
But he wouldn't say more than that.
And that gave it a feeling of like,
the actors are trying to figure out where they stand,
which is, you know, in real life,
if you've got a small room, that's what people do.
- You get a little spontaneity that way.
- Yeah. - If things work out right.
Now, How Green Was My Valley was,
it was a, I'll call it a family film, it's about family.
It's about place, certainly,
but it's about how the place and the times affect
and actually, in some ways, destroy the family.
- Yes, exactly.
It's a very sad movie,
and I imagine it would have been very effective
for Depression-era audiences, because it's about a family
that's ripped apart by social forces beyond its control.
And the novel is about that too.
But it had a particular poignancy
in the American context.
So, it's a Welsh mining village.
The sons, the older sons, are involved in organizing a union
and are gradually expelled from the mine.
They're fired, basically, for organizing the union,
and, or punished in various ways and have to leave the town.
So, gradually the sons peel off, and it's very sad
because it gets worse and worse and worse.
So, these are the first two sons that have to leave
because of their union activities.
And you see,
young Huw, this is before he's recovered his,
the ability to walk.
He was in an accident.
So, he's recuperating, and the boys sneak off
while the family's out, and he hears them going
and he sits up in bed to call for them.
And we see him in that second shot in the room,
and it's empty because the boys have left to go away
and never come back.
And it's really sad.
And it's the first of a series of very,
very sad moments in the film.
And this is complicated by the danger
of the work that the men do.
So, Ivor, the oldest who marries Bron,
after the birth of his son,
he is killed in a mining accident.
And so, the whole family has to deal with the,
you know, the loss of the new head of the family.
So, this shot here shows his wife, Bron,
who we saw getting married in the earlier shot.
She's holding her baby and she's talking to her mother-in-law,
and she's saying, "Oh, it's lonely, I am,"
you know, after her husband's death.
And in front is Huw, our narrator,
talking with his father.
Huw has just successfully graduated
from the, not the village school,
but the town school.
And he's excelled as a scholar.
And his father's saying to him, "Okay, what do you wanna do?
Do you wanna be a doctor, do you wanna be a lawyer?"
You have, you know, a new, a future that's better than mine,
better than being in the mine.
And Huw looks back at his mother and his sister-in-law
and his nephew, and he goes,
"I wanna go in the mine with you."
And it's such a poignant moment,
especially for Americans, I think.
I mean, we believe in bettering yourself,
you know, and this is an inversion of that.
And it's so understandable.
But it's also so frustrating.
No, don't do this, don't do this.
And his father is like, his father's really mad
and very upset, but he does, he goes back in the mine.
And I won't tell you what happens,
but even more sad things happen.
But then the ending,
and the ending really is Ford's, I think.
A lot of this script was Zanuck's or other people
who were involved in the writing of the script.
But Zanuck wanted to have a happy ending somehow,
some kind of a happy ending. - Wow, that's a heavy lift.
- Yeah, it was a heavy lift, and Ford said...
He didn't say it to him directly
'cause he couldn't,
but what he emphasized and what he built up to
was a happy epilogue,
which is a memory of the early part of the film.
So, these, both these shots are from early in the film.
You see Huw walking with his father
in the village early in the film,
and the voice-over tells us,
"My father never taught me anything that was bad.
My father was always right."
And then, there's this shot of the family
sitting down to dinner.
And finally, you see the women of the family,
including the transcendently beautiful Maureen O'Hara
as the sister who's helping the mother
serve the meals as the men eat.
But this also is a shot that recurs at the end.
That is, as memory, Huw in memory remembers these times.
So, the happiness is the community
and the family that was lost.
It's very poignant, that movie.
I highly recommend it.
It won the Academy Award over Citizen Kane.
- Over Citizen Kane, one of the great upsets
in film history, isn't it?
- Yeah, and I have to say, it was just.
It's a better movie. [both laugh]
- Well, it has this great emotional resonance,
as you say, Lea, to the situation.
Actually, any time. - Yeah.
- When you're talking about family and how
they can get pulled apart even for short periods of time.
And so, that had to really resonate,
dare I say it, more than something like Citizen Kane,
which have its poignant aspects
but was a little more self-conscious, maybe.
- Yeah, I mean, Citizen Kane is about the wonder
of this puzzle that you put together, you know?
Whereas this, I mean, they're both flashback movies.
And that was something that filmmakers and screenwriters
were experimenting with at the end of the '30s
and beginning of the '40s.
I mean, people were very interested in the flashback.
Now, we're so used to that,
but it was considered interesting and novel,
and especially to tell a story in pieces
like Citizen Kane was very novel.
But just for heartfelt feeling.
And then it's exacerbated-- Ford loved music.
I haven't mentioned this, but--
- There's singing in surprising, like,
even in The Grapes of Wrath...
- Yes. - ...he has Henry Fonda singing.
- People sing in Ford movies.
And Ford himself came from a family,
you know, an Irish family of Irish immigrants who sang,
and he loved ballads.
And in some of his earliest sound films,
he was reportedly wanted a sea shanty sung in a scene.
And so, he just got some people together
and he sang the baritone part. [Norman laughs]
According to legend, I don't know.
- The Long Voyage Home, maybe? - Oh, there's a lot of--
- I think that has some shanties in there.
- Oh, yeah. - From 1940.
- Yeah, and of course, a great...
"When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," a great drunken rendition
of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," just unforgettable.
But, yeah, but so this film
was shot with a Welsh choir in Los Angeles
who sing in Welsh.
All the hymns are sung in Welsh
and they actually appear in certain shots.
But their music, a lot of the scenes are staged
to their music.
So, I imagine it was, Ford loved to do this, pre-record music
that the actors could then react to.
Like the men are marching home from the mine
and they're supposedly singing.
Well, that's pre-recorded music.
But they heard that music while they're marching down the hill.
- So, it's suggesting what they were hearing
in their imaginations when they did that.
I can't resist though, as long as I've mentioned this title
that we've skipped over a very big film
that John Ford did,
but it also has to do with family
and the dissolution of the family
because of the failure of the landscape
and the failure of the government.
And it's called The Grapes of Wrath.
- Lea: Yes.
- Norman: But I don't know why, but the last couple of days,
there's one brief scene in there that I've been thinking about,
and that is the scene where Ma Joad, they're getting ready--
I know why I'm thinking of this
because I'm throwing out stuff at home.
[both laugh] So, you know which scene
I'm referring to? - Yes.
- They're getting ready to leave Oklahoma for California.
They have to get rid of things.
And postcards, memorabilia, putting them in the fire.
- Lea: All to Red River Valley. - Norman: Yeah.
- Lea: It's really a very touching scene, yeah.
I mean, that script and this script
were both prepared by Zanuck.
He expected, in the case of How Green Was My Valley,
he was following up on Young Mr. Lincoln.
He had Henry Fonda under contract
because Henry Fonda wanted the part of Lincoln so badly,
even though he was nervous about it.
He wanted it so badly that he signed a contract,
an exclusive contract with Fox, so.
So, he follows it up
with How Green Was My Valley right away.
And in fact, they were preparing the script,
and they had to, of course,
they had to get the rights from John Steinbeck
and they had to consult with him.
You can't, I mean, you can't fool around with John Steinbeck.
You've got to make a script that he's gonna like, right?
So, Zanuck's working on that.
And Ford is still working on Young Mr. Lincoln
with Henry Fonda.
And then, they move into that film and,
but you can hear, as you say, there's echoes of that in this.
And I think... I do...
For me, I do think of these films as, you know,
it wasn't when they were--
When the studios were right in the worst
and the country was right in the worst of the Depression,
they tended to make musicals, happy movies.
- Yeah, escape. - Yeah.
I mean, they did make some movies
about runaway boys and things like that.
- Or a runaway girl in the case of Judy Garland.
- Yeah. [both laughs]
But these films are very much, it seems to me,
banking on, you might say, they're not directly
about the Depression, but they're banking on...
Well, of course, How Green...
There is a connection
between the Dust Bowl and the Depression.
And so, in that case, it's more directly about the Depression.
But they are trying to appeal to people
and to the collective experience of the Depression,
I think, and it seems to me
that there are certain scenes, for example,
How Green Was My Valley,
Zanuck was a pretty conservative guy, a Republican.
He didn't want pro-union sentiment in the movie.
- In The Grapes of Wrath? - Well, in The Grapes of Wrath--
- Or How Green Was My Valley, same kind of thing.
- Yeah.
But there are scenes of people organizing.
- They're certainly in the books.
- Yeah, and they come right out of those
Depression-era photographs by Dorothea Lange.
And, you know, they're very much referencing,
and there's that scene in the first migrant camp
when they're, they haven't gotten to California yet.
Somebody's playing the banjo and people are sitting around,
but they start talking about, you know,
what they've left behind,
and they don't know what they're gonna find.
And you just get this feeling of people not knowing
where their next meal is gonna come from.
- Literally. - And that was,
we had that in America on a wide scale that we haven't had since.
- Too big for him to overlook. - Yeah.
- Quite the contrary, he called attention to it.
- Yeah, and I think both those films did very well.
How Green Was My Valley won Best Picture.
There were Academy Awards for Grapes of Wrath too,
but it didn't win Best Picture.
- Let's look forward to the end of the career of John Ford.
What was he working on and what was he working with?
- Well, by the end of his career,
he was no longer in control again.
He had this brief moment right after the war,
where he had his own production company,
which had its own financing and its own distribution deals.
That's what you want.
You don't want just a little independent producer.
You wanna know you have access to banks
and you have access to theaters,
'cause if you have those things,
you can take a lot of risks.
And he had that for a very brief period.
He and a producer called Merian C. Cooper,
who was the guy who produced King Kong, [Norman laughs]
they had an independent production company
and they were successful enough to keep going,
largely thanks to a series of Westerns starring John Wayne.
And so, they were able to keep going.
And in those films, which pretty much end with The Quiet Man,
Ford had a lot of say.
He could pick his properties,
he could manage script development,
and he could work with John Wayne
and with people he loved,
cameramen and so on, to arrange his films.
I mean, he didn't do it all himself,
but he was in charge of it.
And those are his greatest films, to my mind.
Those films, from the post-war films between Fort Apache
and The Quiet Man, that set of films.
Then he's an independent producer,
but he doesn't have access to banks
or he doesn't have the kind of control
that would give him access to theater.
So, then he's back to having to please
some anonymous production company
that's actually bankrolling the project.
Now, he's John Ford, he's won a lot of Oscars.
He has a lot of say, but he's not,
he doesn't have the same kind of control.
And often what would happen
is a producer would come to him and say,
"Okay, I've got this script.
"You know, we want you to shoot it.
"If you can bring us John Wayne, that's good.
We want John Wayne."
And then... So, he had some, you know,
Ford can do a lot with images and music.
So, if he has control over those things, he's got control.
But he's not completely in control,
not like he was in that post-war,
immediate post-war period.
- Well, Lea Jacobs, it's been quite an exercise in the world,
the world of Americana as seen through the lens of John Ford.
- I'm glad you enjoyed it.
- I'm Norman Gilliland,
and thanks for joining me for University Place Presents.
[gentle music]