![]() ![]() At least, the first half hour is a complete throwback to Ford’s prewar Westerns. Complaints aside, it should also be noted how Ford manages to leave his fingerprints all over the film. that Ford was able to slip in between his cavalry trilogy. Hence, the film seems more like a launching vehicle for Harry Carey Jr. who starred in the film Three Godfathers (1916), which Ford himself remade three years later. One also gets the feeling that Ford made this film more as an obligation and as a tribute to his one-time collaborator Harry Carey Sr. But the film feels more like a showcase of Ford’s directorial skills than a coherent work driven by a vision. Technically, Ford is at the top of his game here, walking through the film with ease, conjuring up one larger-than-life image after the other. Yet another remake of a story filmed multiple times before, 3 Godfathers is the kind of movie that can pass off as a Sunday school lesson. To borrow Manny Farber’s terminology, 3 Godfathers (1948) is a very powerful termite that gradually grows into a giant white elephant (Compare John Wayne’s blue moon laughter in the first scene with his laboured theatrics towards the end). Ford would take a decade and a half to convert the cynicism of this film to a monumental tragedy. Consequently, the film, like most of Ford’s subsequent works, is full of petty rituals – ball room dances (compare this mechanical waltz with the divine dance sequence in The Grapes of Wrath), coldly worded field orders, automated salutations and bookish sentences. These are also invariably the men who believe in establishing hierarchies and locking people into rigidly defined categories that could systematically be manipulated and deployed (Ford’s reaction to such men would move from fascination to ambivalence to utter contempt, as is evident in his last Western). These men abandon what is essentially human for some vaguely defined concepts of glory and martyrdom (One can imagine how much Ford would have admired Stanley Kubrick’s first masterpiece). ![]() He’s the first of Ford’s many men to show loyalty to external ideologies than to his conscience (“ Tell them they’re not talking to me, but to the United States government” says Thursday). Colonel Thursday is a prisoner of his own position in the army. His actions seem increasingly misguided and the only force of sanity comes in the form of captain York (John Wayne) who acts as our mouthpiece in the film. For one, the central protagonist, Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda), is gradually alienated from us. It is from this film onwards that Ford’s view of the west becomes progressively unromantic. Fort Apache (1948), first of the director’s cavalry trilogy, marks a stark shift in tone and attitude for Ford. ![]()
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