Today is the birthday of John Ford, one of the greatest moviemakers who ever lived. 

John Ford movies were part of my growing up, even as a teenager I knew that they were special, as did my brother, who was also movie-mad.  We watched every Ford movie that came on TV.

We tried to be cool, those hokey songs would ring out of the opening credits and in unison we would shout “Oh no, not The Sons of the Poineers”, the name of Ford’s barbershop quartet who sung those rousing cowboy songs.  But the truth is we watched and loved them all, Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, even the The Informer.  But we loved the cavalry movies above all, Fort Apache, Rio Grande, She wore a Yellow Ribbon, John Wayne and Henry Fonda.  The Quiet man, Ford’s Irish fantasy, was something of a controversy in our home, because we were of poor Irish descent and we knew there was nowhere as nice as Ford’s fictional village of Innisfree.  The Quiet Man did not get a good press where I lived, but more on that later.

John Ford, growing up

John Ford was born John Martin Feeney in 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to Irish parents who had emigrated from County Galway at the tail end of the Potato Famine.  Like so many Irish families that faced the choice between starvation and emigration they struggled hard at first, to make their way in the land of opportunity.  For John Ford his Irish ancestry was always important and became an integral part of his artistic vision.

John Feeney was a dreamy, outdoorsy boy.  From early on, he had bad eyesight, yet paradoxically developed a strong and distinctive visual sense.  He was interested in drawing and was clearly an artistic boy.    When he was 12 he caught Diptheria, then a potentially fatal disease.  As it was, he was bedridden for a year, and in that time his imaginative inner life became even stronger.

However, Ford wanted the manly life of a strong, athletic Irishman, a man amongst men.  More by willpower than physique he became a star of the school football team, nicknamed “Bull” Feeney, the man no opposition could stop.

John Ford in Hollywood

John’s older brother Francis had made his way to Hollywood, which was just becoming known as a place that made movies.  Francis became famous as a director of early movie serials.  He got his brother John a job, first as a scene-shifter , then as a stuntman.  John Feeney became Jack Ford and quickly slipped across the line into directing movies.  By the time he was 24, Jack Ford had become a respected director in early Hollywood.  His reputation was as a no-nonsense director who got the job done on budget.  Jack, now John, Ford actively fostered his workman like reputation in order to prevent the studio from taking too close an interest in his movies.     

John Ford

 

John Ford’s movies: the picture and the story

Ford had an amazing sense of visual composition.  His mastery of the still shot has never been surpassed.  The action starts somewhere in the scene and progresses through the shot.  It goes from long-shot to middle distance to foreground and then on.  The camera does not move. 

He doesn’t just do this because he can.  By keeping the camera still and not resorting to cuts and close-ups, he keeps the story, not the actor, not the action in the centre of the movie.  We watch what’s going on in the moving picture.  He often starts his movies like this.

In Stagecoach, the Overland stage moves through the shot, into a second shot, almost as still.  It gives us time to see the story, it establishes an important part of the story (the stagecoach).  Though we do not really know it we are already in the story, there is no scene-setting. 

Monument Valley, a scene from Stagecoach

He does it again in a movie he made over twenty years later The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The train comes into and through the shot, there are no people.  This is so right, because the railroad is a key player in the movie.  He keeps the railroad in the forefront of the story for a couple of scenes.  It is critical.

He does it again in the marvellous WW2 movie, They Were Expendable.  The Motor Torpedo Boat squadron come into view before peeling off across the foreground of the scene. 

Actually, the opening scene of They Were Expendable is one of the most beautiful scenes in movies.  Like Flying Boats.Ferrari’s and any other mechanical perfection, motor-torpedo-boats are things of beauty.  Beautiful and dangerous, like sharks.  Ford has them fleet and fast skimming the waves of the Pacific , metallic and glistening under the bright sun.  They gracefully curve off into fast complex manoeuvres, sunlight flashing off the hulls.    Simply beautiful, as good as a painting by DaVinci.

Even though it does not do it justice, here is a still from that first scene.

Motor Torpedo Boat, opening scene of They Were Expendable

Ford’s Men

It is not just the story that makes John Ford the poet of American life.  It is also his portrayal of American men.  In my view no director has ever understood better the importance of individual spirit and self reliance versus the importance of family and community.  Ford shows the conflict between the two and in doing so gives us the greatest stories.    

Ford’s men are truly American, brave, independent, openhanded, direct and manly.  The Ringo Kid (John Wayne) in Stagecoach is his own man, willing to stand outside of the law to do what is right.  In the Searchers, Wayne’s Ethan Edwards is willing to go to any lengths to rescue what remains of his family from the Commanches.

Late in his career, John Ford made the The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  By this time Ford and his screen alter-ego, John Wayne, had refined their vision of the American man to perfection.  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a wonderful movie, a concentrated distillation of Ford’s view of the old West.

Wayne’s character, Tom Doniphon, is like some big, sleek animal, a panther maybe, dangerous when roused.  Wayne’s graceful, insolent movements fill his every screen appearance with controlled power.  He is a spirited, independent man, who rules his own life.  He is dangerous and he knows it.  Here is part of his earliest exchange with Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart), a tenderfoot lawyer robbed and badly beaten by Liberty Valance.

“Liberty Valance is the toughest man south of the picket-wire.  Next to me.”

They Were Expendable

For me, Ford’s best portrayal of American men is in They Were Expendable.  Both Lieutenant Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and Lieutenant (JG) Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) are obviously exceptional men.  Motor Torpedo Boat commanders at the outset of the Pacific War in WW2, they and their men fight valiantly against the Japanese tide sweeping the Pacific.  These are men who stand for freedom, in the sure knowedge that the immediate fight is unwinnable.  In fact it is wrong to say that this is about Montgomery and Wayne.  Every American man in this movie is dedicated to the spirit of freedom. 

They Were Expendable is a study in the beauty of brave men, from the ensign to the torpedoman.  These are men rising above pain and death, in the name of freedom.  In They Were Expendable they do it without fuss, without drama because that’s how a man does it.  It is the same hardscrabble grit and courage that tamed the American West.  There is no better movie about courage and patriotism and a man’s urge for freedom.  This is a movie of Americans with their back to the wall, and how their guts and courage carry them through.

Ford’s Family

For John Ford, family was the most precious thing.  If his men were individuals, yet they knew that they fought for family and life.

There is a wonderful scene in Stagecoach that shows this.  The stagecoach travellers, fleeing the Indian warparty are holed up at the staging post.  The alcoholic Doc Boone has just delivered the baby of the pregnant cavalry officer’s wife.  It’s early morning in the scene.  Dallas, a prostitute (Claire Trevor), who has been shunned by all the other passengers except the Doc and the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) walks into the room full of passenger’s carrying the baby.  Dallas is beautiful.  The light in her eyes as she holds the new-born is wonderful.  The Ringo Kid sees this, sees her truly beautiful spirit and falls even more deeply in love with her.        

It is even more poignantly shown, in They Were Expendable.  The Motor Torpedo Boat squadron have fallen back to Bataan, unable to stem the Japanese advance.  Out of spares, torpedos and gas, somehow they continue to fight on.  In a lull in this hell, Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) sets up an officer’s dinner for Sandy Davys (Donna Reed) the American nurse he has fallen in love with.  As gentlemen, the officers host the dinner, building a make-do diner party in their bamboo office, using up their meagre rations.  Most of these men are going to die soon and they know it.  But they put that aside, they celebrate decency and civilisation, because they know they are fighting for women like Sandy Davys.  It is one of the most subtly underplayed and beautiful scenes ever filmed.

Sandy Davys (Donna Reed) and Rusty Ryan (John Wayne)

John Ford and Loss

So many of John Ford’s movies explore the same conundrum.  The individual stands on the threshold, he has the power to create civilisation, but civilisation cannot accommodate him, has no place for him.  He wants community and family but they reject his striving restless spirit.  It was never more simply played out than at the end of the Searchers.  Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) stands framed in the doorway of the ranchhouse, holding his arm as though it is the only thing holding him together.  Having rebuilt his family as best he can, he finds there is no place in it for him. 

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I cannot watch Liberty Valance much anymore.  It is such an aching portrayal of a good man’s loss.  There is no hope, no optimism in the movie, and it is only watchable at all because it is one of the finest movies ever made.

Liberty Valance is powerful and haunting, the idea that one decision by a man can destroy his entire life.  The cowboy town of Shinbone is dominated by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) a thief and a murderer, evil incarnate.  Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) is Ford’s “good bad man” a frontiersman, an individualist who respects the right of other men to live as they chose and only asks that they allow him the same freedom.  In Tom Doniphon resides the true spirit of the American individualist.

But events force Tom to make a decision.  Let Shinbone go its own way and let people suffer? Or face Liberty Valance and help Shinbone become civilised?  The decision that Tom makes destroys his life utterly.  Ford plays out the conflict between civilisation and the strong individual man and shows the outcome to be bleak. 

Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Ransom Stoddart (James Stewart)

I guess that is why I prefer They Were Expendable.  It shows men harnessing their spirit to an ideal, freedom from tyranny and a better outcome.

The Quiet Man

To end on an up note.  I mentioned earlier that The Quiet Man was scorned in my family when I was growing up.  I myself thought it was corny beyond belief. 

Ford’s village of Innisfree is really a kind of Brigadoon, a fantasy Ireland that is always green and pleasant and exists somewhere out of time.  But you know, as I get older, I warm to the movie.  It has in its favour the most dramatic passionate kiss ever filmed, John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.

Wayne pulling in Maureen O'Hara for That Kiss - The Quiet Man

Ford builds a fantasy Ireland with every Irish myth writ large.  In Innisfree, you can drink with friends, get uproariously drunk and never have a hangover.  A sporting man can bet on the horses without restraint and share his winning with his friends.  Women are sparky sexy and eternally true to their good men.  You can brawl like a champion boxer and apart from a few bruises, everyone is good the next day.  There are no mortgages, politicians or protest marches.  

I get what John Ford was doing now.  Innisfree is not real. 

But it should be.           

God Bless you Mr Ford, wherever you are.      

Further articles that you might like:

From 1934, John Ford was a spy for the US Navy and during WW2 worked for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.  For our article on Wild Bill Donovan, the founder of the OSS, go here

We wrote about John Wayne here and here

Details

There are so many books on John Ford you could spend a life reading them.  Here is the one I recommend:

Roger McBride

Searching for John Ford, a life

Cary Grant.

“I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”  Cary Grant.

Cary Grant was born on this day, January 18^th 1904, in Bristol, England.  He rose from working class poverty in Britain to become one of the greatest American movie stars that ever lived.  Here is a short appreciation on the occasion of his birthday.    

For me, he was and is the very model of a successful man.  I long ago learned that there was so much one could learn from his movies and from him, the deeds of his life.  As I have grown older I have appreciated him more and more.  When I was younger I appreciated him for the way he dressed, his worldliness, his connoisseurship.  Now I am older I appreciate him for his self-awareness, his generosity of spirit and his love of life.  He was and remains my inspiration for writing What Makes a Man. 

The truth is, I still do not understand Cary Grant and I think that is a good thing.  His reason for not discussing his personal life was sound; he did not feel that he could be a model for anyone else.  He was ahead of his time here, understanding how we each play to our own psychology.  But his reticence is intriguing because it hides his huge achievement in inventing himself, in becoming Cary Grant. 

What he did was almost impossible, he started out poor, badly educated and badly parented, and became a movie star, a worldly connoisseur of art, clothes, food, a successful businessman and a father.  It is no accident that Graham McCann’s definitive biography of Grant is entitled “Cary Grant, a class apart”.  For Cary Grant invented a man for the twentieth century, a gentleman of quality but of no particular class.      

Cary Grant, early on in his career

 

Bettering himself

What we do know abut Cary Grant is that, from somewhere, he had a deep-seated desire to better himself, and he never lost that desire.  He was only nine years old when he first expressed an interest in clothes, he asked his mother for a pair of white flannels.  But this was no disinterested interest.  Cary had developed an affection for the butcher’s daughter and even at a young age, realised that good clothes would make him more attractive to girls. 

Initially it was his willingness to listen and learn that set him apart.  He went to New York as part of a vaudeville acrobatic troupe when he was twenty.  When the act folded he stayed in America.  By the time he was twenty-four he was appearing in musical comedy on Broadway.  He knew musical comedy was a route out of vaudeville and learnt to sing, paying for lessons with the money he earned from a variety of odd, often downright odd, jobs, that were related to show business.  In those days when his reviews came in, they were very mixed.  However Cary Grant was not dismayed, he read about his faults and duly set out to fix them.  Before he was through he added a touch of Noel Coward, a slinky elegance of movement and an accent that combined English diction with American pronunciation.

At the same time he started to become the Cary Grant we know today.  He became a “walker”, an escort for attractive women and in the process met a lot of accomplished and successful people.  By his own admission he learnt all he could from the people he met.  At twenty-four he started clipping articles on all kinds of subjects, something he did for his entire life.  It became his habit to make light of his achievements but the truth was, he had a ferocious work ethic.        

This shows up in small but inspired ways in the movies.  In the early scenes of “To catch a thief” Grant wears a trousers, striped shirt and scarf combination that set the tone for the movie.  These were not his own clothes, which Hitchcock felt were wrong for the character.  He found the clothes he wore by looking at the style of local men in the South of France (the setting for Thief) and buying in local stores.  Once again, looking and learning. 

Incidentally Grant’s shirt and scarf “look”, caught on hugely when the movie came out and lots of men took it up, unfortunately, “very badly” in the words of Thief’s costume director.   

There was a bit of a downside to this learning.  Like many man who teach themselves to be self-sufficient, Grant became used to doing everything himself.  His second wife, Barbara Hutton, in a rare critical comment about him, once said that “He was a frustratingly difficult man to care for”.     

Listening

One of the things that set Cary Grant apart from other actors and other men of the period was his ability to treat women with respect and listen to what they had to say.

All of his female co-stars said the same thing.  Cary Grant listened to them; he was not simply waiting for the chance to speak his lines.  He did this with great care and it gives his scenes with his co-stars a texture, a depth and a timing that other stars could not match.  Part of Cary Grant’s mystique as a star was his chemistry with his female co-stars.  This was partly because he was a truly sexy, handsome man. 

However it was also because he built that chemistry, by listening to them and making them believably human.  It was part of his gift that he brought that feeling to the screen.  There is a wonderful early scene in Indiscreet, where Ingrid Bergman’s lonely, beautiful actress is flirting with Grant.  Grant is clearly both flirting and hesitating at the same time, but more importantly it is clear that he is responding to Bergman’s conversational gambits.  There is a realism about the tone and timing that carries one deeply into the scene. Magnificent acting by both of them. 

Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, in "Indiscreet"

 

Self-possession

If Grant was courteous and listened to women, he was still very comfortable in his own skin.  His self-possession is evident in many of his roles.  He would listen to women but he had his own view of the world, downright challenging.  This confidence, even aggression, made for great interplay.  In my opinion he never did it better than in the “The Philadelphia Story” as the divorced husband of the imperious Katherine Hepburn.  Grant’s  classlessness also works beautifully here, as he neither conforms to hierarchy nor flouts it.  By starting from a position of certainty he consistently out-manoeuvres Hepburn’s icy aristocrat.

Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story"

Alpha Male

By the time we get to the making “To catch a thief”, Grant was perfectly Cary Grant.  The first part of Hitchcock’s genius was to have Cary Grant almost play himself, cosmopolitan, cultured, stylish, but with an element of dangerous alertness.  Here is the man that so impressed Ian Fleming that he wanted Cary Grant to play James Bond.  It is ironic (and a tribute to Cary Grant) that Fleming, a terrible snob, wanted the poor working class lad from Bristol to play his officer-class spy. 

Hitchcock’s second act of genius was to unleash the danger, the aggression in Cary Grant.  It starts with Grant’s trick with a shotgun to fool the police and it ends with his willingness to hurl Brigitte Auber’s girl burglar from a fourth-floor rooftop.  In between there are times when we are never sure whether we are going to get the well-dressed lover or the underworld parolee.

Now, Grant is the complete master of the woman he is with.  Grace Kelly is beautiful, selfish, arrogant and flirtatious as the wealthy but spoilt Francine Stevens.  However, Grant’s John Robie is unperturbed by her behaviour.  The more Kelly’s Francine tries to play Grant’s John Robie, the more he teases her, showing her who has the power.  There is nothing coarse here; Grant defeats Kelly with both wit and style, leaving her no alternative but to fall in love with the man who has bested her.

Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief"

The end for now

I am going to stop here.  Cary grant had formed the man he wanted to be by the time of “To Catch a Thief” and that seems a good place to stop.  There are so many other things to talk about, his generosity, his care and loyalty to his friends, his romantic weakness for women.  That will wait for another time.  But there is one thing that I still find amazing, after years of watching his movies and reading about him. 

The man turned out so well. 

Given his difficult start in life, there is no English class-war defensiveness in him, no embittered distrust, no predilection to make excuses for any part of his life.  His story is of a man who was determined to succeed and happy to do the work that he needed to do.

Cary Grant created Cary Grant and he created a very special man.

God Bless you Mr Grant, wherever you are.

Details

Movies

There are of course so many wonderful movies.  Here are five of my favourites:

To Catch a Thief

Cary Grant was never more urbane, more stylish or more interesting than in To Catch a Thief

The Philadelphia Story

Witty and exceptionally funny.  In some ways it is the ultimate  screwball comedy, in others there is no movie quite like it.  Sharp, funny and clever. 

Charade

Before Bond, Grant made a very classy, worldly American spy.  Setting the movie in Paris played to Cary Grant’s strengths as a stylish, cosmopolitan man.

Only Angels have Wings

Howard Hawks movie about mail flyers in the Andes.  The camaraderie works here.  Surprisingly, so does Grant as a tough aviator disdainful of romance.

Indiscreet

This movie has grown on me in recent years.  Cary Grant play a less-than-ethical character and yet is still appealing to the audience.  To carry that through an entire movie and not lose the audience is great acting.  

Books

Graham McCann

Cary Grant, a class apart. 

Though McCann sometimes feels like he is a little cold on his subject, this is the definitive biography, and treats Grant’s acting with the consideration it deserves.

Richard Torregrossa

Cary Grant, a celebration of style

This is a book of bits and pieces, but wonderfully illuminating on Cary Grant’s style, his relationships with his friends, his view of movies.  Like a mine full of nuggets of gold.

Yann-Brice Dherbier

Cary Grant, a life in pictures.

This is a new book which unfortunately contains some errors of grammar, and, I think, one error of fact.  That said, it is a beautifully researched book and contains some stunning studio photographs that have rarely been seen.

I found the documentary to be fascinating, it really revealed how Tom Ford works, following him during his work.  The overarching storyline is the lead-up to the launch of Tom Ford’s first womenswear collection, which was about a year ago.  So even though neither his menswear or his men’s fragrances were included it was a very interesting documentary.

Looking at it a second time, I think that what makes it so interesting is Tom Ford’s willingness to reveal himself and his unique view of how style works.  I really felt I learnt something in watching this video.  I think that Tom Ford is the most interesting designer working at the moment, with Ralph Lauren coming a distant second.

See what you think, the documentary is here.     

We wrote about Tom Ford’s style evolution and menswear here

Hemingway and Honour

One of the big reasons that Hemingway is still relevant today is his belief in honour.  Having seen the brutality of war, Hemingway rejected glory and honour, said that they were scant reward for the horrors of battle, the dead and the maimed.  However he knew the attraction of both honour and glory and his protagonists feel the old pull, the compulsion to believe in something greater than themselves. 

Hemingway knew that men have to have honour, to believe they stood in good regard.  Hemingway’s men have personal honour.  Their honour lies in being true to themselves, to their own concept of what is right.  And this is very much how we are today. Our bonds to our country are weak and we know so much, maybe too much, of how our countries are governed.  Men today are a lot like Hemingway’s heroes, obliged to fall back on their own concept of honour.  Like Hemingway’s heroes, we find this difficult and in his stories and his men we find a kindred spirit.  We see the tug-of-war of personal and group values in For Whom the Bell Tolls, whose protagonist, Richard Jordan, is prepared to die for the truth (as he sees it) but not for glory. 

Style and men

Almost as soon as Hemingway became famous for his writing, he became famous for his lifestyle.  He personified a type of man that many man found attractive, the virile talented  sportsman who was at home all over the world.  Combine this with his democratic American charm and you had a man who was equally happy to talk to commoners and kings.  It was a potent mixture and the press loved him, he became the first jet-set celebrity, long before the term was coined. 

Ernest hemingway with his fourth wife, Mary.

Hemingway had great style.  His outdoor lifestyle led him to casual clothes that naturally suited him.  He was a connoisseur of food and wine.  He understood and loved guns, especially hunting weapons.  He had an eye for quality and gives his characters beautiful things to illustrate this knowledge, like Colonel Cantwell’s Solingen clasp knife in Across the River and into the Trees.  Here again Hemingway shares something with modern men.  Men of style look for quality, look to know and have the best.  Hemingway presented a big, rugged style and it still works today.  The rugged man of the world is still a look, a style, that can be worn and lived.

Ernest Hemingway’s world was vast and he wrote bravely of men, their courage and their inevitable death.  However he loved and celebrated men, for all the good and bad within them.  For me he has always been an inspiration. 

The last words here are not mine, but those of Martha Gellhorn, his third wife and a critically acclaimed writer in her own right.  She said;

“He was a genius, that uneasy word, not so much in what he wrote as in how he wrote; he liberated our written language.”     

He gave us a way of being men that is still good today.  His concept of personal honour, of being responsible for our own lives regardless of the lies that we are told, is the most important contributiuon that American art has made to the world.  Truly, God Bless you Mr Hemingway, for everything that you gave to the world and for the pains you endured in sharing that precious knowledge with us.

Details

Below are some of my favourite Hemingway books and movies. 

Books 

A Moveable Feast

A memoir of Hemingway’s time in Paris, as a struggling writer in the Nineteen-Twenties.  Beautifully observed and the love and happiness of Hemingway and his first wife Hadley are palpably.  Funny, joyful and just plain beautiful.

  Available in the UK here

  Available in the United States here  

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Hemingway’s story of the Spanish Civil War.  Robert Jordan, an American fighting for the republican guerillas, falls in love with a Spanish woman while on a deadly mission.  Modern warfare and it toll on brave men is the theme, with meditations on love and duty.   

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here      

The Old Man and the Sea

The story of an aging Cuban fisherman and his struggle to capture and land a gigantic Marlin.  Hemingway’s most profound meditation on the courage and steadfastness of men.

 Available in the Uk here   

 Available in the United States here       

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Short Stories of love, war and the intensity of living courageously.  From a white hunter lying wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro to simple stories of Americans and their lives.  Stories both sharp and poignant, this collection is the single best introduction to Hemingway.

 Available in the UK here   

Available in the United States here       

A Farewell to Arms

Henry Frank is an American volunteer ambulance driver on the Italian front in World War 1. In the pain and madness of war he falls in love with a British nurse.  A passionate story of love, honour and manliness.

 Available in the UK here 

 Available in the United States here       

Movies

Ernest Hemingway’s work is difficult to adapt to the screen.  We lose his language and his simple dialogue needs to be carefully handled if it is not to be lost to images and movement.  Here are five movies that did it well.

Islands in the Stream

This should not have worked as well as it does, being based on Islands in the Stream, one of Hemingway’s least well-regarded books.  However the combination of Hemingway and Geroge C Scott, directed by the superb Franklin Schaffner is magical and moving.  George C Scott absolutely nails it as the Hemingway/Artist character and all the other performances are equally good.  Franklin Schaffner had a deep understanding of powerful men and he gets every once of emotion and drama from the story.

 Available in the UK here

 Available in the United States here

The Garden of Eden (Orig. title, Hemingway’s Garden of Eden)

Along with “Islands in the Steam” this is one of the finest Hemingway movies.  John Irvin (director) catches all of the tension of two newly-wed lovers adrift in Europe.  As they lose their identities and their gender  in each other, their lives are further rocked by the introuction of a sultry and sexy “countess” Marita, who becomes the catalyst for sexual games that spin out of control.  This is a superbly perceptive interpretation of Hemingway’s novel, erotic, tense and forbidding.  I urge Hemingway fans to see it.  

Available in the United States here

The Old Man and the Sea

Directed by John Sturges and Fred Zinneman, with Hemingway employed as a consultant, this is a faithful adaptation of the book.  Spencer Tracy is perfect as Santiago, the aging fisherman, and the movie is a true celebration of the human spirit.

 Available in the United States here   

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Gregory Peck, a writer and hunter, lies wounded in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.  In flashback he re-traces his life, from his one true love in Paris thru his adventures as a writer.  Crafted from several other stories besides the Snows of Kilimanjaro, with Gregory Peck bringing a sympathetic cast to the character of the world-weary writer.  One of the best Hemingway adaptations and a real adventure movie.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here  

The Killers

Directed by the great thriller director Don Siegel, with Lee Marvin in the lead, the Killers is violent, fatalistic and cynical.  Hemingway’s dialogue was never handled better than in this movie. 

 Available in the UK here   

For Whom the Bell Tolls

This story of a squad of guerilla fighters in the Spanish Civil War had superb leads in Gary Cooper and Ingrid Bergman.  Gary Cooper had the real life gravitas of a Hemingway hero and really filled the part, as did Bergman.  A surprisingly fast-paced movie for its time, true to Hemingway’s story, mood and spirit.  It is also a classic Hollywood movie, with an epic sweep and exciting action.

 Available in the UK here   

 Available in the United States here

There are also many websites which offer further information about Ernest Hemingway.  Here are some I like:

http://www.lostgeneration.com/

http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/

http://www.timelesshemingway.com/

On the occasion of his birthday, here is a revised version of an article I published a couple of years ago. This is the first part and the second part is here. 

Ernest Hemingway, a tribute on his birthday 

Today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, one of America’s greatest writers.  He changed the shape of American literature for all time.  In his novels and stories he defined the heroic modern man, a definition that in large part, holds sway to this day.  His influence on American literature and men in general, has been immense.      

There are many better qualified than me to write about Ernest Hemingway.  But Ernest Hemingway helped shape my life and has been an important part of my journey as an adult man.  I cannot let this day pass without a celebration of a writer who wrote so elegantly and expressively about the lives of men. 

A brief biographical note

Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on 21^st July 1899 in Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago.  He died in Ketchum, Idaho on July 2^nd 1961. 

As a young man, Hemingway was interested in outdoor pursuits, sports, hunting and fishing.  However he was also a gifted writer from very early on in life.  From the age of 15 he was writing seriously, learning his craft.   In 1918 he joined the Toronto Star as a journalist, staying six months.  He left to volunteer to fight in World War 1 and was rejected because of his poor eyesight.  Determined to make a contribution he joined the Red Cross and became an ambulance driver on the Italian front.  At the very end of the war he was wounded by an Austrian mortar-shell and invalided out to hospital.  This willingness to cast himself into the unknown and risk everything stayed with him all his life.  His courage, sometimes recklessness, was an indelible part of who he was and his writing. 

He returned to America after the war, then moved to Paris with his first wife and child.  Here in the mid-nineteen twenties, his first successful books were published.  Hemingway took the big subjects, love, war, the knowledge of death and wrote about them through the eyes of a man who was both sensitive and brave.  His books were beautifully written, exciting and meaningful. He became hugely famous and was the first non show business celebrity.  By the end of his life the legend was very mixed up with the man.  However whatever you thought or thought you knew about him, there were always the books, and they stand for themselves.       

My introduction to Hemingway

I was sixteen when I picked up a battered paperback copy of The First 49 Stories, the classic collection of Ernest Hemingway’s short fiction.  Literature was alien to me and the books I liked, crime and science fiction were definitively not literature. They had told me told me this definitvely, school.  As far as I could tell, literature meant Victorian novels of manners or novels about middle-class English couples, one or both of whom was having an affair.  This was thin stuff for an adolescent who thought Clint Eastwood was God, and I stayed away from it.

I remember how exciting Hemingway’s stories were (and still are).  I was overjoyed to find a writer who talked about things that were part of my world, like boxing and fishing.  That he could make a story around them seemed incredible.  He talked about things that happen with men, how they could become violent when they had been drinking.  Things I knew about.  Ernest Hemingway taught me to value fiction, his work led me to writers as diverse as Herman Melville, F Scott Fitzgerald and John Steinbeck.  As a result of reading Hemingway I began a life-long love affair with American writers.   

As I grew older, I continued to read Hemingway.  His work spoke to me as a man, about how men fall in love with women, about how there will be times in life when you lose and how you talk to yourself about that.  I read A Movable Feast, his memoir of living in Paris in the nineteen-twenties, and was beuiled by his Paris.  I first went to Paris two years after that, I walked the streets he walked and his writing became even more real for me.  

His Writing

We read him because he writes elegantly and beautifully.  His writing is terse, observant, visual and perceptive.  From his earliest work he always tried to write simply yet capture the essence of his subject.  To achieve this, he wrote and rewrote, always seeking to strip away the non-essential words, to build a sentence that would be true.   In A Moveable Feast, he talks about doing this.  Here he talks to himself about writing;

“Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.  All you have to do is write one true sentence.  Write the truest sentence that you know.”   

                                                                           A Moveable Feast

He would make revision after revision, believing that he could capture feelings and ideas in simple, beautiful language.  Stripped down short sentences, his writing has a virile, staccato drum-like rhythm to it.    

This care over language, his courageous insight into men’s lives and his willingness to speak of courage, honour and love, give us bare understated writing of great beauty and wisdom.    

The popular view of Hemingway is that he was as much showman as writer.  Yet he was a wonderful observer of others and a keen listener.  In 1950, when he was a famous and accomplished writer, he wrote Across the River and into the Trees.  Here is the opening paragraph of the novel;

“They started two hours before daylight, and at first, it was not necessary to break the ice across the canal as other boats had gone on ahead.  In each boat, in the darkness, so you could not see, but only hear him, the poler stood in the stern, with his long oar. The shooter sat on a shooting stool fastened to the top of a box that contained his lunch and shells, and the shooter’s two, or more, guns were propped against the load of wooden decoys.  Somewhere, in each boat, there was a sack with one or two mallard hens, or a hen and a drake, and in each boat there was a dog who shifted and shivered uneasily at the sound of the wings of the ducks that passed overhead in the darkness.”      

                                         Across the River and into the Trees

I believe that the visual beauty and simple accessibility of Hemingway’s writing is one of the key reasons he is still read so widely today.   

The big questions

We read him because of his ability to address the big subjects in men’s lives, love and war.  He wrote his greatest works when the old certainties of the nation state were slipping away, and individuality took on a new emphasis.  In A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell tolls, he wrote about war and its fascination for brave men.  Hemingway had found a truth about men and courage, that brave men measure themselves against Death.  That they see every risk, every battle, as preliminary contests for the final one, the one they cannot win. 

In the Snows of Kilimanjaro he writes about love and the tragedy of men, how they are unable to see happiness when they have it.  How there always has to be something better, and how they break what they have for what-might-be.   In the Sun Also Rises he shows us why men chase unattainable women, and even why they are unobtainable.   

His heroes are surprising vulnerable.  They often lose their battles and Hemingway writes in the knowledge that the world often wins.  However Hemingway’s men have an inner integrity which is rarely defeated.  What Hemingway’s novels were telling us was that if a man is not defeated on the inside, then he has not lost.  If he knows that he can hold his head up and try again then he is still a man.  Hemingway wrote “The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are stronger at the broken places”  I believe there is considerable truth in his view of the world.

Truth and love.

We read him and love him because he is true. 

I once took a class in creative writing where the teacher, a famous feminist author, told me that “Hemingway was full of swank”.

The truth is he was not.  All the things he wrote about he did.  The fishing, the boxing, even the brawling in bars.  He wrote about danger and courage so well because he had forged his own feelings in the heat of battle in several wars.  Apart from the First World War, he also took part in the Spanish Civil War and World War 2, as a war correspondent.  He was always on the front line, trying to get a better story, often in danger. 

Men know the truth when they read it, and it is what they do with that knowledge that counts.  Hemingway’s men were tough but sensitive.  He writes “A tough man is a man who makes his play and backs it up”.  That commitment, keeping going when you are afraid, is the hardest part.  Hemingway’s men are brave but afraid, they act despite their fear. He wrote about the little rituals that men have when they are about to do something difficult, or dangerous.  About how men talk to themselves when they are in extreme situations. 

The greatest that men can hope for is to have grace under pressure, to act with courage and clarity in the gravest danger.  I identify with Hemingway’s men because they are fallible and uncertain, yet always strive for the courage to do the right thing.  He writes about this in ways that most men can understand.  In the 20′s and 30′s writing about fear and courage so simply and cleanly was new to literature and men revered him for it.  That writing reaches across the decades still, and helped save the life of a very lost young man back in the early seventies.  My gratitude for what I learnt from his writing is boundless.

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he article continues here

I came late to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s stories, only a couple of years ago, courtesy of my friend Jim, a London taxi driver, who knows more about good 20th century writing than most professors of literature. So though I am a fan of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s writing I am not the man to write another obituary of him. However this is a web-magazine about men and I want to acknowledge the passing of Mr Leigh Fermor’s, a real man in every sense.

Here is a link to a short obituary by a man who knew him. It seems to me to have just the right amount of irreverence.   “Better a hero than a celebrity” is here

Here are some of Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s books, he was a wonderful writer.

Words of Mercury

My favourite of all of his books, evocative, funny, perceptive tales of people and place.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Roumeli

I like Roumeli, because it chimes with my own experiences of Northern Greece.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

A Time of Gifts

Possibly his most famous book, travellers tales raised to a new level.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Between the Woods and the Water

Here is the companion to Time of Gifts, the tale of his 1930′s walk through the Balkans.  Even better than “Gifts”

Get it in the UK here and the US here

In Tearing Haste

The letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor.  Devonshire, irreverent, sparky, deliberately unintellectual.  Leigh Fermor, cosmopolitan, learned, experienced.  A wonderful contrast of opposites that come alive in these letters and bring out the best of both of them.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Papillon

Another courageous man, in the unlikely shape of a small-time Parisian crook, “Papillon” so-called because of the large butterfly tattoed on his chest.  Set in the 1930’s, Steve MacQueen’s Papillon is sent to Devils Island, a horrific French penal colony in French Guiana, from which there is no return. 

Papillon

Once there, the convicts discover that the real prison is the island, a hostile jungle filled with poisonous snakes and savage crocodiles.  If that were not enough the sea cuts them off from the mainland and is filled with sharks.  For most prisoners acceptance comes quickly and they settle into the appalling conditions, their grim lives only punctuated by the sadistic brutality of the guards.  Life is cheap on Devils Island and the prisoners quick learn that they are worthless, except as slave labour. 

But not Papillon.  He is determined to escape.  Time after time he tries, fails and is horribly punished.  

Schaffner gets a magnificent performance from Steve MacQueen.  He ages, degenerates really, before our very eyes.  No movie star looks here.  As various wardens try to break his spirit, he changes into a damaged older man, his body battered, his skin grey from years in solitary confinement.  However his spirit continues to carry him and it is this that we watch. 

Papillon (Steve Macqueen) after five years in solitary confinement

Schaffner’s jungle is beautiful but absolutely lethal.  His human beings look weak and vulnerable in it.  It serves to make McQueen’s bravery even more potent.  Man against everything.  At the end of the movie McQueen finally escapes and somehow it becomes a victory for every man. 

Exposition and the story

 One of the reasons that Franklin Schaffner’s movies were both intelligent and successful, was that he had a marvellous gift for exposition.  Exposition, the telling of information onscreen, is the bane of every movie that tires to deal in complex ideas.  Franklin Schaffner excelled at effortlessly communicating ideas and concepts that had to be understood for the movie to work. 

In the Warlord he had to communicate the concept of Droit Du Seigneur (The right of a Lord to a bride’s first night of marriage) to an audience that had no understanding of it.  He did these by making the subject a heated argument amongst the principal characters.  In doing so he placed it in its historical, sexual and emotional significance, quickly and in a way an audience could understand. 

In Papillon many characters walk on and off camera, and impart critical information about Devils Island and the penal system, as a way of seeking Papillon’s help or getting his favour.  The Nazi counter-intelligence sub-plot which informs us about Patton is a stroke of genius.  These movies are textbook examples of how to do exposition superbly.

Papillon and Louis Dega (Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman) on Devils Island

Islands in the Stream

In my view one of the few movies that truly understands Ernest Hemingway.  I suppose that it was no surprise that the man who told stories of Alpha males should film the great American novelist.

Again the teaming with George C Scott produced results.  If Scott was able to look like Patton, he was almost a double for Ernest Hemingway himself, in Islands.  Scott is Thomas Hudson, a sculptor, a father, a man who has dealt with his own demons by removing himself to a small Caribbean island.  His only friends are a few rough men, sailors and roustabouts who accept him for who he is.  A proud, troubled and difficult man, Hudson has a dark side that makes him aggressive and dangerous, especially when drunk.  The loose community of the Island gives him the freedom to expose that side of himself, from time to time.

George C Scott as Thomas Hudson in Islands in the Stream

Islands roughly follows the story of Hemingway’s novel.  In the first half, the movie concentrates on Hudson’s relationships with his sons and his divorced wife.  It is notoriously difficult to film Hemingway and these are amongst the most moving, perceptive interpretations of Hemingway ever filmed.  Franklin Schaffner captures the terse poetry of Hemingway’s language beautifully.  In the key scene between Hemingway and his beautiful, intelligent wife, very few words are spoken, yet it is crystal clear that they are still very much in love.  The scene is touching and ineffably sad.  That said, the first half of the movie also contains a shark attack scene, which is one of the most tense, dramatic and thrilling scenes ever shot in a movie.

The second half of the movie finds Hudson motivated to help refugees fleeing the war in Europe, to enter the Americas illegally.  This is different, action oriented, with a harsher tone.  The scenes here are clever and exciting, but they lack the delicate, lucid beauty of the first half of the movie.

Hudson and his crew run the blockade

This is a good but flawed movie.  The problem is not with the movie but the source material.  The writing of Islands in the Stream was a problem for Hemingway.  He started writing it and put it down.  The second half was written some fifteen years later, after many life changes.  The two halves were edited together after Hemingway’s death and published.  So Islands is really two books, a meditation on art and family, and a story of hard decisions made in pursuit of freedom.  The movie reflects that.

Franklin Schaffner made a good movie of all of this and that was huge achievement in itself.  Worth seeing for the quality of the performances and the real questions of manliness and courage that the movie raises.

Life and the Spirit

 In all of Franklin Schaffner’s movies there is an underlying connection to a greater spirit, a mystical energy that his warrior men are forced to engage with.  In the Warlord, Charlton Heston tries to take the virgin Bronwyn by force, before invoking the Droit Du Seigneur.  On both occasions strange events protect her, and force him to reconsider.  By invoking the Droit Du Seigneur and then breaking his side of the agreement he unleases forces which, initially, he does not understand.  Pagan idols gain a power over this most rational of men.

In Patton, there are strange, unsettling scenes where Patton tells of his belief in reincarnation.  There is a surreal and strangely moving scene near the beginning of the movie where Patton is seized by a vision and directs his driver to an ancient battle site.  Here, he goes into a virtual trance state and retells of his life as a Carthaginian commander, two thousand years earlier.  His ability to understand and anticipate the Germans verges on the visionary, almost like the gifts of a religious mystic. 

The most blatant insertion of a spiritual presence is in Papillon, where he has two surreal out-of-body visions which crystalise his determination to escape, at some kind of soul level.  These scenes contrast completely and utterly with the brutal realism of the scenes of Papillon’s life in prison.  The scenes are so powerful that they completely change our perception of the movie.  Even the troubled Thomas Hudson in Islands is touched by something spiritual.  As he lies dying, Thomas Hudson sees a bright, white light and the movie implies that he is seeing another existence, as a reward for his courage and endurance.

Somewhere in this attachment to the spiritual, is the essence of what makes Franklin Schaffner’s movies great.  To be a Schaffner hero for a moment and myself overreach, Franklin Schaffner reminds me of Holbein.  Holbein was the dutch portrait painter who painted the powerful nobles of the English Tudor court of king Henry the Eighth.  Like Holbein, Schaffner draws portraits of powerful men and also like Holbein, he searches for the mystical connection to whatever makes these men what they are.    

The Big Why

The English philosopher R.A. Collingwood said that the purpose of Art was to ask the question but that it could not provide the answer.  Seen in that context, all of the  movies discussed above are art. 

Franklin Schaffner movies take the view that assertive Alpha men are necessary, if only to nurture freedom. 

Raw male power, Richard Boone as Bors in The Warlord

 In all of the movies discussed, each man has or comes to, a deep conviction that the world has to be made, that the world is a product of our decisions.  That regardless of our good intentions, both good and ill spring from our actions, that no man can achieve a perfect result, a perfect victory.  This integrity, this faith in the real world is what makes Franklin Schaffner’s movies so vital.  It makes the movies adult and big in spirit and explains why they retain their ability to engage us.

I described the endings of Franklin Schaffner’s movies as satisfying which they are.  However he never tries to answer the big dilemmas that his heroes’ actions lead themselves to.  The Warlord ends with Heston’s Norman knight, wounded in body and soul, journeying back to his Duke to seek forgiveness for the chaos he has unleashed.  He is now a different man from when he left.  How will he be received?  Can he rebuild a life?  Will be able to live happily with the woman he has sacrificed so much for?  Does he deserve to?

In Planet of the Apes we never find out what happens to Taylor’s moral certitude (and superiority) when he finds out the truth about mankind.  The ending is almost a Rorschach test, we can all read it differently.  At the end of Patton, George Patton’s victory is flawed by political machinations and intimations of mortality.  Is he right or are his enemies right, about the need for war?

In Papillon, Franklin Schaffner makes a virtue of a necessity.  The story of Papillon has to end somewhere so we end with his successful escape.  But so much has happened to Papillon, he is a different man from when he was first imprisoned and we have been through all of those changes with him.  Quite simply, what will happen to him?  How will he live?

Even Thomas Hudson, whose life has been a succession of hard choices, makes us question.  Was there a value to his manly courage?  Was it worth it to die, alone and apart from friends and family?

These are great movies made by a perceptive and intelligent director, who had the courage to ask the big questions about leadership and bravery in ways that still engage and excite us.  Bravo, Mr Schaffner, wherever you are.

Details

The Warlord

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Planet of the Apes

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Patton

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Papillon

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Islands in the Stream

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Franklin Schaffner had a reputation as a competent director, coming in within budget and schedule, when he was given the job of directing Planet of the Apes.  It was to be a huge success and changed the way science fiction was perceived in the movie world.  Planet of the Apes made it clear that science fiction could both be an adult story and a global financial success.

Planet of the Apes

Ape Hunters pose after capturing humans

 

A starship with four astronauts aboard, three men and a woman.  As they enter their suspended animation capsules, their captain, Taylor (Charlton Heston) sets the controls for an automated jump through hyperspace, a jump that will cross time as well as space.

Blackness.

The crew come out of suspended animation with alarms screaming and the ship in a death dive, tearing itself apart.  Taylor struggles to land the ship.  As he pulls the crew from their pods he discovers that the woman crewmember’s pod has failed and that she has died of accelerated old age.

The ship crashlands in a lake in a mountainous desert region.  The planet seems earthlike, the air is breathable.  But where in the galaxy are they? And when?

Its Alpha male time again and then some, because we soon discover that Heston’s Taylor is an absolute bastard.  Hiking away from the crash, there is a marvellous scene where Heston’s surviving crew members rag on him.  In short order we find out that Taylor is cynical, arrogant, unfeeling, power-hungry and a born leader.  We also learn that he was fucking the female crew member and it is implied that he abused his power as ship’s captain to do this.

Heston is unfazed by this hostility and leads his crew through a mountainous desert, filled with menace.  Dry lightning fills the skies and the ground is cracked and broken.

Schaffner takes no little trouble to build our picture of this arrogant Alpha male.  The reason for this becomes apparent when Taylor is captured by the apes.  Only a man who truly believes in himself can survive when an entire world is pitted against him. 

Taylor, on trial by a council of apes

There is also a very funny counterpoint that Schaffner keeps running throughout the movie.  Heston is the embodiment of the proud assertive male, held captive by a female chimpanzee scientist.  Worse, she calls him by the pet name “Brighteyes”.  Even worse, she frequently tells Heston that she finds him “cute”. 

Schaffner also has to get credit for one of the most shocking, thrilling, scary scenes ever filmed.  Taylor has encountered wild humans, when suddenly they are being hunted by unseen foes, to the wailing sound of an alien hunting horn.  As they run through a cane break, armed Gorillas on horseback burst into view and begin firing on them.  Franklin Schaffner makes this happen in split-second shots, one shock after another and never gives the audience time to get its breath.  Masterful.

Planet of the Apes is possibly the least politically correct movie ever made.  Throughout the movie, Taylor never falters in his conviction that men and especially himself, are better than apes.  Compare this to the more recent remake of the movie, where humans are seen as “guilty” of some undefined crime against the universe and the apes are just as good, if different.  This moral relativism robs the re-make of much of the original’s power.

And the casting of Charlton Heston was a master-stroke.  We watch and accept Taylor because some part of us knows Heston as a good, kind, honourable man, from all of his hero roles in the past.  Heston subverts that role-type, but we never quite give up hoping that Taylor will evolve into the Heston hero that we know. 

But anyone who has seen the movie knows that Taylor cannot become the much-loved hero that Heston portrays in other movies.  Like almost all of Schaffner’s movies the ending has an integrity that bears out the movie’s themes.

Patton, Lust for Glory

Actually the sub-title could easily have been “the necessity of great leaders”, though it would not have been so catchy.  “Patton” hits all the bases and does a great job of portraying General George Patton.  This is a rounded, provocative, exciting biography of a great and complex man.  Schaffner gives Patton’s life the benefit of all of his perceptive intelligence.  Though Patton’s story lends itself to a sensational treatment, Schaffner never sensationalises the man.  Schaffner had the good sense to see that Patton was already larger than life.  

George C Scott as General George S. Patton

Schaffner makes it clear that how Allies needed Patton and shows how his inspired generalship helped win World War 2.  But he also shows the wily political soldier, sometimes good, as when he forces his British allies to make the right decisions in his support and sometimes bad, as when he politics for promotions and rank.  Schaffner also shows the lonely man, alone and sad, the victim of his own overreaching arrogance and pride. 

Schaffner’s gift for exposition really serves him well in Patton.  He has to do two things in what is in effect a blockbuster movie.  He has to explain how Patton became the soldier that he is and sketch in some of the military history that informs Patton’s generalship.  He also has to show the audience the strategic geography of the Normandy invasion, without confusing them, but so they understand the threat the Allies face.  He does both of these well.  He sketches out Patton’s life with an ingenious sub-story, whereby a Nazi counter-intertelligence team analyse Patton’s life.  These scenes, intercut with the battles, show us why Patton was a great general, the inner man driving the genius warrior.    

General Omar Bradley (left) and General George Patton

George C Scott looked like Patton, had the manner and body, and had the courage to play the whole man, good and bad.  I do not think that a movie like this will ever be made again, certainly not in Hollywood.  It is too intelligent, too visceral, too real.   By turns beautiful and harrowing, it thrills us with the heroism of our forebears and tells the real story of their sacrifice.  And the music has to be mentioned.  Throughout the film, Schaffner uses the sound of hunting horns to underline his scenes.  They make the atmosphere strange, they evoke feelings of danger, of fighting, of hunting, of blood.  A masterful touch in a magnificent movie.

A masterpiece.

Landscape and mood

 For a New York TV director who started out in tiny studios clad in sound proofing, Schaffner had an incredible eye for nature and for the landscape.  In fact, Landscape plays a crucial part in his movies.  He uses it as a backdrop to enhance or counter-point what his characters are doing, it never just “there”.  In the Warlord, the swampy ponds, the fogs, the weird twisted trees underline the unnaturalness of the costal plain and the pagan village.

In Planet of the Apes the landscape is rocky and unyielding.  There is no soft, comfortable place to be found.  The sky is full of lightning, the soil is arid and cracked.  Even the beaches and cliffs seem cheerless under the sun.  And of course the land holds the secret.  The apes know not to go to the Forbidden Zone, a hostile deadly land that tells of their origins.

The landscape has similar properties in Patton.  But here Schaffner does something different.  He uses the beautiful landscapes of Africa and Europe in a new way, to slow the tempo of the movie.  The camera pans slowly and widely over the entire distance of the landscape. providing a contrast to the cruelty of war.  Men are broken, nature is not.

In Franklin Schaffner’s movies, nature always has a role.  Polluted and deceptive in the Warlord, menacing and unyielding in Planet of the Apes.  In Papillon the jungle is jewel-bright and colourful but absolutely deadly.  In Islands in the Stream even the Caribbean is oppressive, a harsh bright sun and an open sea upon which men bob helplessly, no place to hide.   

Part Three of this post is here

This is part one of a three part post about Franklin J Schaffner.  Part two deals with his most famous movies and is here.  Part three talks about his later successes and is here.

Franklin J. Schaffner

March 30^th was the Birthday of Franklin J Schaffner.  One of the reasons I wanted to write about him was that he has virtually disappeared from history.  There are no biographies of him and no current critical studies.  Yet he made a sizable contribution to movies.

Franklin Schaffner was an American movie director, who made some of the greatest films of the Sixties and Seventies.  This was all the more remarkable given the loss of identity that commercial cinema was then undergoing.

Franklin J Schaffner

Getting to the movies

Franklin Schaffner served in World War 2, in the US Navy. After the war, he drifted into television.  Through the fifties he became a a talented TV director, excelling at producing literate, exciting tv plays and movies in the demanding world of New York televison, with its tight budgets and even tighter schedules.  In this time he became an emmy-winning director and worked with Charlton Heston.  The two men became friends and colleagues and had the greatest of respect for each others skills.    

Alpha Male stories

 Franklin Schaffner’s best movies were about leaders, men of power and what they did with that power.  His readings of these men are close, uncompromising and perceptive.  His first big movie was the Warlord, with his friend Charlton Heston as a cold and deadly Norman knight.  Heston’s Chrystagon was a ruthless and cruel man, confident in his power.  Chrystagon relishes his power, which he justifies because he is a dutiful servant of the Duke of Ghent.  It is when he strays from the path of duty that his world becomes hostile.

Similarly in Planet of the Apes and Papillon, strong men strive for freedom with the entire world turned against them.  The fascination for Schaffner was in what these men could reach inside themselves and find, to keep them alive and to win out.   Probably his greatest movie is Patton, who was of course a truly great general in the real world.  Patton uses his power for the good of the free world, in a conflict that Franklin Schaffner himself risked his life in.  This gives him free rein to look at the consequences of decisions made by powerful men and how they manage those consequences.  At some point in all of these movies Schaffner makes the point that power gives men the chance to remake the world. 

No greater Alpha Male, Charlton Heston, Planet of the Apes

Here are some observations about his movies.

The Warlord

The first movie that really brought Franklin Schaffner to the public perception and proved that he could direct a major movie.  He was helped by a superb script/story and by the fact that his star was at the height of his popular appeal and took some real risks with the role.   

Sir Chrysagon De La Crux (Charlton Heston)

Charlton Heston is a poor Norman knight, Sir Chrisagon de la Crux. He arrives in a fiefdom on the Normandy coast, granted to him by his lord, the Duke of Ghent.  His job is rule the fiefdom and potect it from Friesian sea raiders (late medieval Vikings). He brings with him his cruel and arrogant younger brother Draco and his brutish and taciturn sergeant-at-arms, played by the very masculine Richard Boone.  Boone is superb as the scarred, implacable soldier and he steals every scene that he is in.  He is truly scary, monumental presence throughout the movie. 

It soon becomes apparent that the villagers Heston has been sent to protect are pagans, with a thin veneer of Christianity on top.  Nothing is what it seems, the heat and polluted marshes breed suspicion, fevers and foolishness.  Schaffnervery cleverly gets the landscape to do his work for him, using it to suggest chaos and evil.  Everything is dirty, the villager’s hovels are crooked and tumbledown.  The countryside is strange, trees are twisted into unnatural shapes, the streams are unclean.  Schaffner sets all of this up in a wonderful contrast with the Norman’s stone keep.  Their tower sits directly opposite all of this earthy chaos, clean, straight and strong.  Throughout the movie, Schaffner uses the tower to symbolise the antagonism between the rational and the wild.

THe Norman tower in The Warlord

The Normans are all Alpha males and look down on the dirty, ragged villagers.  Power and power-plays become ever more emotionally unhinged as the Normans rule the fiefdom.  Heston falls in love with a beautiful village girl and takes her on her wedding night in an act of Droit Du Seigneur.  The villagers rise up, invite the enemy Friesians to join them and lay siege to the tower.  The siege is exciting on every level, not least because Schaffner uses authentic medieval siege techniques to make it feel very real.  The ending is clever and very satisfying, marrying up Chrystagon’s new-found love with his duty to his Duke.                       

A superb movie, powerful, intelligent, provocative and very underappreciated.  

Part Two of this post is here

By the mid-thirties, the actor that we know as John Wayne existed, even if he was not fully formed.   But something else was needed.

John Wayne and John Ford

In 1938, Ford had become obsessed with the story that was to become Stagecoach.  He needed an actor who was tall, handsome, could ride and use a gun.  The story of how he chose John Wayne is a story in itself but chose him he did.  It was an act of genius.  Stagecoach was a huge success and anyone with a brain could see it was because of John Wayne.

The Ringo Kid in Stagecoach

John Wayne’s performance in Stagecoach is luminous, the light shines out of him.  What Ford shot was Wayne’s essential goodness, his belief in people, his courage, his ability to endure.  Though Wayne’s Ringo Kid was on the wrong side of the law, he was so clearly a good man, an honourable man and very brave.  The contradiction of Wayne’s superb understated acting and his own inner character made for a superb performance. 

Red River

So John Wayne was becoming a star.  But it was not until he made Howard Hawks’ Red River, that he truly became one.  In Red River, he plays Tom Dunson, an ex-soldier, who follows the wagon train to Texas, where he almost single-handedly builds a great cattle ranch.  Threatened with bankruptcy by the post-Civil War economic collapse, Dunson plans the largest cattle drive in history.  In the process of this personal odyssey, he goes from courageous hard-driving cattleman to obsessive, vengeful tyrant.  Wayne played the role with effortless skill, moving from light-hearted to steely to monster.  John Wayne consumes the movie.  This is the dark side of a strong man and you cannot take your eyes off him when he is onscreen. 

Tom Dunson in Red River

And from then on he becomes the John Wayne we know.  What he gives us is the perfect demonstration of courage, how to endure.  He showed us the value of endurance, of commitment, as no other has.  He personified grit and manliness. 

On screen he showed the values that he believed in.  He was gentle with women, polite and soft-spoken until provoked.  There is his wonderful credo in “The Shootist”;

I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted and I won’t be laid a hand on.  I don’t do these things to other people and I require the same from them. 

John Wayne personifies honour, courage and manly struggle.  Only John Wayne can make decency and classical values exciting. 

John Wayne’s characters honour the meaning of courage – it’s easy to take a position when you have nothing on the line.  John Wayne’s characters put everything on the line.

Happy Birthday John Wayne, wherever you are.

Details:

Books

I am indebted to Randy Roberts and James Olsen for their book:

John Wayne: American

I have read much about John Wayne but I believe that their biography is the one book that captures the true spirit of John Wayne.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Movies

Everybody has a favourite John Wayne movie, here are my top ten:

They Were Expendable.

Surprisingly not a cowboy movie.  Directed by John Ford and one the finest movies about the Second World War, John Wayne gives a superb performance.  His Lieutenant Rusty Ryan is a powerful fighter, fiercely individual, who learns to fight with others, for the common good.  Wonderful battle scenes and one of the truest portrayals of the American spirit.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Red River 

John Wayne’s Tom Dunson is a masterly performance, real, complex and violent.  Every scene has a charge to it.  There is so much in this man and the performance is effortless, moving from emotion to motivation to action.  Wonderful.  

Get it in the UK here and the US here

The Searchers

Now considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made.  Like Red River, it is the complexity of Wayne’s Ethan Edwards that makes this a great movie.  At the end of the movie, Edwards has completed his quest and is once again alone.  Framed by the dark arch of the cabin doorway he stands in the bright sunlight. As he stands, he seemingly unconsciously, takes his right arm in his left.  For me it is the most iconic moment in movies.  It is cinema’s Mona Lisa, the moment of indefinable beauty.        

Get it in the UK here and the US here

The Alamo

John Wayne’s personal project and the only movie he directed.  I have loved this movie all my life.  All the criticisms are true, there are scenes that are too talky, a couple of the supporting cast are just plain awful.  But the passion and heartfelt patriotism shine through and the battle scenes are epic and heroic.  This movie is a hymn to freedom.  Wayne is passionate and courageous as Davey Crockett and we understand why men will fight and die for his vision of a free country.  The Alamo is the enduring myth of Americans and as an Englishman I do not truly understand it but this movie makes me feel it.     

Get it in the UK here and the US here

The Quiet Man

Wayne is funny here, which I did not think he could be.  I love this movie for that georgeous, supernatural romantic moment when he sweeps Maureen O’Hara up in his arms and kisses her.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Rio bravo 

Back with Howard Hawks, John Wayne gives a a really engaging performance as Chance, a mature gunfighter who ends up as sheriff against his better judgement.  By turns cranky, wily and brave, this is a funny, clever performance in a great movie.  Epic Hollywood cowboy, the sort of thing we expect from John Wayne.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

Stagecoach

The one that started it all.  John Wayne as the Ringo Kid.  A truly thrilling story, real characters, great Hollywood actors and a young star.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

They Wore a Yellow Ribbon

I had to pick at least one from John Ford’s cavalry trilogy and any one is as good as the others.  I picked this one because it has more of a mythic quality about it.  Wayne’s captain Nathan Brittles is larger than life.  When he rides off into the sunset at the end John Ford convinces us that he is immortal.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

The man who shot Liberty Valance

A marvellous movie and a story where I felt like I had lived several lives.  Only John Wayne could have combined so many ambiguous qualities into a character and made him believable.  The ultimate c ontrast between the manly man of the wilderness and the civilised man.  For me the greatest scene in the movie is where Wayne confronts Jimmy Stewart’s politician.  Wayne is in a bad way, dirty, hungover, unshaven, dressed in a storm coat, dirty clothes and drovers chaps, driven by demons that Stewart cannot even understand.  No one ever looked more manly than Wayne does here and the contrast with the bookish Stewart is extreme.

Get it in the UK here and the US here

The Shootist

John Wayne plays J.B. Books, the last gunfighter (“Shootist”) of the old west.  In 1901 Books is an anomaly, worse, he is dying.  This is a truly sensitive performance from John Wayne, his presence is this movie is enormous.  This is a movie of greats.  Directed by the very talented Don Siegel, Clint Eastwood’s mentor, from a fine story by Glendon Swarthout, it has a very fine cast.  It also gives the lie to the charge that John Wayne was a dumb actor.  As Don Siegel recounted  before his death, so many of the great moments in the movie came from John Wayne.  The harrowing but compelling scenes between Books and the doctor, discussing his cancer, were from Wayne.  They seem all the braver, knowing that he was dying from the same disease as he shot the scenes.  Similarly, the unspoken love scenes between Brooks and Lauren Bacall’s stiff-necked landlady are precise, understated and beautiful.

This was John Wayne’s last movie and no actor could have a better final testament than The Shootist.

Get it in the UK here and the US here