- Ciara Moloney
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- The Open-Hearted Solidarity of Wagon Master
The Open-Hearted Solidarity of Wagon Master
I wrote about a great John Ford western for Crooked Marquee!
I wrote about John Ford’s underrated Mormon western Wagon Master for Crooked Marquee on its 75th anniversary. A preview:
Claiming that John Ford is the greatest director of all time is like saying Shakespeare is the greatest playwright, Mozart is the greatest classical composer, or The Beatles are the greatest rock band. It seems like a cliché masquerading as an opinion. It rings false just because you’ve heard it all before. But then I sit down and watch a supposedly minor Ford – like with Shakespeare, like with The Beatles – and it blows my hair back. Received wisdom, it turns out, is wisdom all the same.
Wagon Master, released 75 years ago this week, gets overlooked in a filmography that includes the likes of Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Yet Ford told Peter Bogdanovich that Wagon Master – along with similarly sidelined The Fugitive and The Sun Shines Bright – “came closest to being what I wanted to achieve.” It was a flop on release, which Tag Gallagher, in his book on Ford, calls “no surprise”: “It was a personal project, with no stars, little story, deflated drama, almost nothing to attract box office or trendy critics.” When filming on location in Utah for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, local stories of early Mormon expeditions inspired Ford to write his first screen story in twenty years (his son Patrick Ford and Frank S. Nugent developed it into a screenplay). The resulting film is both intimate and epic: a loose-limbed, ensemble-driven tale that trundles along like a wagon train, while cumulatively, covertly telling the story of America itself.
Read the rest of the article here! Enjoy.
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