Entries associated with the tag "John Ford":

This week's repertory pick is John Ford's classic American myth Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which screens Saturday at 8 PM at Bank of America Cinema, 4901 W. Irving Park. Tickets are $5, and parking is free in the Bank of America lot, which is where the theater entrance is squirreled away (turn south on Lavergne, then east into the lot).

Nowadays, when most teenagers can't tell you when the Civil War was fought, a filmmaker can expect to get rapped hard for fictionalizing any aspect of history. (Oliver Stone, this means you!) But back in Ford's day—perhaps because more Americans could be trusted to tell fact from fancy—there was a little more tolerance for fond invention. Young Mr. Lincoln may not be too accurate as a lesson in American history, but it's such a moving expression of Lincoln's memory that it's become history itself.

Here's a clip from the movie, centering on young Abe Lincoln's ill-fated romance with Ann Rutledge. The lovely score is by Alfred Newman.

Last week at the Cinematheque Top 5 Project, site proprietor Kevyn Knox posted the results of his best westerns poll. No surprises among the top five finishers (save number three—The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly??), though when it comes to handicapping oaters I'm the last person you'd ever want to rely on.

Let's see ... it's probably Bud Boetticher's Ride Lonesome (1959) in my number one slot (for the minimalist desolation, a hardscrabble dry run for Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, all broken waste and laconic cowboy palaver), then Sam Peckinpah's Ride the High Country (1962) at two (for the austere classicism—horse, rider, sky, mountains, piney breaks—with sudden pointillist spurts of color, e.g., in the mountain mining camp, to counterpoint the Zen-like stripping down), and ... then what?

3. Not The Searchers. Not that I have anything against John Ford, but the stylization's too schizoid for comfort: e.g., all that naturalistic Monument Valley rhetoric (shades of Sergei Eisenstein, in the heroic up-angle shooting) versus the boxy studio artifice of Natalie Wood's Indian encampment. If The Sun Shines Bright (1953) were even remotely feasible as a western—and to me it does actually feel like one—I'd unreservedly put it third (click here for Jonathan Rosenbaum's warm appreciation). But the river that says yes to The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and The Long Riders and even The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (!) unfortunately says no to Kentucky. So y'all go figure.

4. The Ruse, William S. Hart (1915). Because something by or with this silent-era icon has to be on the list, and since (shame, shame) I haven't seen Hell's Hinges ... Come to make fun, then go away astonished: as an early modernist study in the psychology of underplaying, the guy's at least 30 years ahead of the competition.

5. The Phantom Empire (1935). With, gulp, Gene Autry—which probably isn't anyone's idea of a "good" western, or even a good serial, a singing cowboy chapter play that takes place mostly underground. Like a Max Ernst bricolage, in the thematic mating of misaligned elements—but aside from Cameron Menzies's Things to Come and Powell/Berger/Whelan's The Thief of Bagdad, no movie sparked my childhood imagination more. And where would The Mole People be without it!

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, the University of Chicago's Documentary Film Group (that's Doc Films to you) will be displaying some of its coolest possessions from July 16 to August 31 at the Joseph Regenstein Library, 1110 E. 57th. Along with old programs, posters, and programming calendars, you'll find correspondence from Samuel Fuller and Jean Renoir, rare personal-appearance photos of John Ford and Howard Hawks—even Fritz Lang's martini recipe.

Curator Kyle Westphal just completed a bachelor's degree in Cinema and Media Studies at UC, and his thesis documents the history of America's "longest continuously running student film society." About half the items were culled from alumni association materials donated to the library's special collections; Westphal, Doc's current programming chair, dug the rest of the stuff out of the group's archives. Among the artifacts on display:

•  A cartoon by Fritz Lang, drawn in 1970 for a Doc staffer living in Los Angeles. Lang had recently visited the Hyde Park campus for a screening of Hangmen Also Die (1943); mostly blind by then, he had to be led around on both arms, but according to Westphal he insisted on attending the screening and shouted from the back of the theater that the print was out of focus.

•  Silk-screened posters for Psycho and To Catch a Thief, autographed by Alfred Hitchcock during his 1967 visit, as well as excerpts from an unpublished interview.

•  Letters from Jean Renoir in 1969 and Sam Fuller in 1970 regarding their campus appearances.

•  Correspondence from Pauline Kael, Josef von Sternberg, and Stanley Kubrick, collected during the 1962-64 run of the Midwest Film Festival (a precursor to the Chicago International Film Festival).

•  Photos of John Ford (sample above), taken during a 1968 visit to screen The Long Voyage Home, and of Howard Hawks in 1971.

•  Publicity materials for Maya Deren's 1951 lecture at the university.

In addition to these items, says Westphal, the group's calendars also allowed him to track programming trends and critical ideas that influenced Doc's offerings to students over the years. "Doc Films at 75" is free and open to the public weekdays from 8:30 AM to 4:45 PM and Saturday from 9 AM to 12:45 PM. Westphal will give a guided tour of the exhibit during the opening reception on Monday, July 16, 3 to 4:30 PM. For more information contact the university's Special Collections Research Center at 773-702-8705 or specialcollections@lib.uchicago.edu.