john ford Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Reading about movies, you hear stories of some films shot in five days and other films shot over three years. Some of the poverty-row directors and B-movie makers cranked out as many movies as they could during a calendar year, while filmmakers like Charlie Chaplin and Stanley Kubrick waited years between projects (making each release a new "event"). Most filmmakers, I think, given the chance would probably release one film per year, keeping their toes in without burning out. But sometimes, whether it's a trick of the calendar, or some peculiar rhythms of timing, some of the greatest directors manage to release two films per year. And even less often, both of these films turn out great. The following is my not-exactly-extensive, but enthusiastic celebration of the one-two punch or the director's double-whammy.

1. Jacques Tourneur: I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man (1943)
The world has frankly been a better place to live since Warner Home Video released the five-disc, nine-film DVD "Val Lewton Horror Collection" box set in 2005. I have often promised myself that, if ever en route to a desert island, it would be the first thing I'd grab (provided that said island came with its own entertainment system). Four directors worked on those nine great horror films (counting poor Gunther von Fritsch, a footnote in film history for being too slow, getting fired from The Curse of the Cat People, and thus launching Robert Wise's career). But Jacques Tourneur -- son of silent era filmmaker Maurice Tourneur -- is undoubtedly the most talented of the group. He started the cycle with the extraordinary Cat People in 1942, and followed it with this one-two punch in April and May of the following year. Sure, they're cheap, quickly-made B-movies, but few films have ever been made -- in any genre, for any price -- with so much textured atmosphere and such a resounding sense of dreamy dread.

On the comprehensive movie list site, They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, John Ford currently ranks #4 on the list of the all-time 100 greatest film directors (with Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Federico Fellini ahead of him), though he has placed more films than anyone else, 18, on the list of the all-time top 1000. I think the reason he doesn't rank higher is that he was one of the few great film directors to be fully appreciated in his own time. He won the Best Director Oscar four times -- still a record -- and took home an additional two Oscars for his wartime documentaries.

Welles was once asked whose films he studied when he made Citizen Kane in 1941, and he replied: "the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford." Of course, even by the time he was an "old master," Ford would continue to make films like They Were Expendable, My Darling Clementine, The Quiet Man, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It's no fun, when making lists, to mention people who are already so well covered.

The critics have spoken and the massive, $300 box set Ford at Fox was named the best DVD of 2007 by the contributors at DVDBeaver.com. For the fourth annual poll, Thirty-six DVD critics from all over the world submitted their individual top ten lists -- each of which is featured -- and then editor Gary Tooze tallied up points for the final results. The coveted John Ford box contains 24 John Ford films on 21 discs; kudos to any critic who had time to watch it all.

In second and third place are The Films of Kenneth Anger Vol. 2 and Vol. 1, both distributed by Fantoma Films. Volume 2 earned a few more points, probably due to the inclusion of Anger's most famous work, Scorpio Rising. In fourth place is another huge box set, the Criterion Collection's Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980), assembling Rainer Werner Fassbinder's 15-hour film on 7 discs. Showing off DVDBeaver's dedication to international DVDs, fifth place went to the BFI's second Region 2 box set of films by Mikio Naruse, containing When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), Floating Clouds (1955) and Late Chrysanthemums (1954). The US release of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs from the Criterion Collection was counted as a tie.

Sixth place went to my personal favorite of the year, Criterion Eclipse's five-disc box set Late Ozu, featuring five great films from the 1950s and 1960s by the Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. In seventh place was Warner Home Video's Film Noir Classics Collection, Vol. 4, with ten films on five discs, including Nicholas Ray's debut They Live by Night (1949) and Andre de Toth's essential Crime Wave (1954). Milestone's amazing 2-disc Killer of Sheep DVD, featuring several more features and short films by Charles Burnett, ranked eighth. Paramount's Twin Peaks: The Definitive Gold Box Edition took ninth place, sneaking out a few months after people spent their hard-earned cash on the Season Two box. Criterion sealed up the list at tenth place with their two-disc Sansho the Bailiff (1954), directed by Kenji Mizoguchi.

Tooze also included the first 40 runners up. Top vote-getters include Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Inland Empire and Ace in the Hole. Other categories are "best commentary track," "best extras" and "best transfer." Voters included Jonathan Rosenbaum, Theo Panayides, Tom Charity and the staff of Slant Magazine.

Over at The Guardian, blogger Ronald Bergan has written an incredibly snobby article called "Dumb Hollywood is Forever In Debt to Europe." The purpose of the piece seems to be to anger readers -- I assure you it's no accident that he published an article trashing American film on Independence Day. Bergan starts by taking aim at The Guardian's recent list of 1,000 Films to See Before You Die. He says, presumably while wearing a beret and enjoying a snifter of brandy: "A list that includes Dumb and Dumber and not Boudu Saved from Drowning renders itself worthless." He adds, presumably while cleaning his monocle with his ascot: "looking at the American Film Institute's recent list of Top 100 American Films made me think how much richer in masterpieces would be a similar list of non-American films." Please go and read the tremendously one-sided, reductive, dismissive article, which closes: "I suggest that American cinema -- with exceptions that prove the rule -- still lags behind the times. For anyone with an interest in films that explore the cinematic language and who sees film as a radical, contemporary art form on a par with the other arts, American cinema holds little interest."

Does Bergan think any American filmmakers are worthwhile? Yes -- three of them. "The only American-born film directors that truly belong in the Film Pantheon are John Ford, Howard Hawks and Orson Welles." Oh, and according to Bergan, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Douglas Sirk, Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock don't count, because they're "emigres" who "brought what they had learnt in Europe with them to America." Does he respect any living American directors? Not a one: "By the highest standards of cinema, American films fall short. There are no living American directors who can compete in innovation and depth with the likes of Theo Angelopoulos, Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, Bela Tarr, Pedro Costa, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Abbas Kiarostami, Manoel de Oliveira, Alexander Sokurov, Jia Zhang Ke or Tsai Ming-liang."

Now, I majored in film in college, and I love foreign cinema, but I'm fairly certain he made a couple of those names up. David Lynch? The Coen Brothers? Stanley Kubrick? Spike Lee? Steven Spielberg? None of these guys impress him? Bergan's failure to even mention Martin Scorsese is particularly inexcusable. By the way, there's the author's photograph in the upper right corner. Do you really think that dude's even seen Dumb and Dumber? Going off of that mug shot, I'd imagine Bergan also doesn't enjoy ice cream, sunsets, and the laughter of children.

The UK's Times Online has an interesting piece up about great Hollywood director-muse partnerships, from John Wayne and John Ford, to George Cukor and Katherine Hepburn, to Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman. As the article's author Ian Johns notes, these kinds of filmmaker-actor partnerships are less common these days, as directors have a wider array of big-name stars to choose from. Yet, there are still some profitable and creative partnerships out there. Martin Scorsese appears to have moved on from this 1970s and '80s pairing with Robert DeNiro to his modern creative muse, Leonardo DiCaprio, with whom he has made Gangs of New York, The Aviator, and now The Departed, with a fourth partnership -- a film about Theodore Roosevelt -- reportedly in the works. Russel Crowe and Ridley Scott worked together first in The Gladiator, then most recently in this year's TIFF offering A Good Year, and they went straight from that into shooting American Gangster together.

Johns goes on to make mention of Pedro Almodóvar's ensemble cast in Volver, where the director featured his favorite muse of the moment, Penelope Cruz alongside Carmen Maura, whom he directed in the 1980s. He doesn't mention my favorite director/ensemble combo of the moment, Christopher Guest and his amazing repeat performers, including Eugene Levy (with whom Guest also co-writes), Fred Willard, Catherine O'Hara, Bob Balaban, Michael McKean and Parker Posey, to name only a few. So pivotal are these actors to Guest's latest films that I can't imagine him making a film without them at this point. They work together with an incredible ease that makes the improvisational style of Guest's films really work.

The article does give props to one of my favorite director/actor pairings: François Truffaut and his on-screen alter-ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud. One of the greatest joys of watching movies in my cinematically geeky life has been watching Léaud grow from boy to man as Antoine Doinel, starting in 1959's The 400 Blows, the film that first earned Truffaut respect at Cannes, when Léaud was just 15, through 1979's Love on the Run -- a 20-year run of great filmmaking. Leaud worked with other directors as well, of course, including Jean-Luc Godard, with whom he made 10 films, including Week End in 1967 and, nearly 20 years later, Détective in 1985, but nothing ever quite matched the magic of Léaud with Truffaut.

Who are some of your favorite director-actor pairs? And who would you like to see work together more?