More John Ford.

 Time was John Ford stood in for the entire American Cinema. Sergei Eisenstein, Fritz Lang, René Clair and John Ford, and you were sweet. The rest was national local consumption or mere commercial product. It was a simpler era but vapors of sanctity still swirl about the great man. I must admit that my own admiration was second to none and was boosted as the films of the early thirties escaped the vaults.

However, though he’s on the way to being the most documented figure in film, the John Ford cult sweeps a lot of his work under the mat, his military moral boosters which include a sex hygiene movie, his silent cowboy two-reelers and his stumbling first ventures in sound. 

One of these, Born Reckless of 1930, another William Fox Company early talkie production, has bubbled to the surface of the U-Tube swamp in a just about watchable copy.

This was obviously an A feature with a decent budget and using the Fox company’s best personnel. At this stage it’s hard to tell whether they were Fox people or Ford regulars. Jack Penneck and Ward Bond show up briefly as noncom. Doughboys.

The plot  reads like a first draft of next year’s much better John Cromwell film The Mighty - gangster is drafted and, after distinguished service comes back home to sort out the mob. Dudley Nichols, who would become Hollywood’s most respected writer, largely through his collaboration with Ford, is responsible.

The opening is a good clue, with a striking silhouette shot of a team of safe breakers at work, framed by stilted dialogue and filming in a cramped studio street setting. The background noise comes & goes on edits.

The bulls arrive for star Edmund Lowe and, at headquarters, it looks as if the gang will be sent up the river until reporter (again) Lee Tracy suggests the mayor can win votes by having the members join up. “You  let these guys go to France and the whole East Side will be proud of you.”

Ed pals with fresh faced Frank Albertson with an eye on his sister Catharine Dale Owen but she’s got Randolph Scott lined up, in possibly his first speaking part. His couple of scenes are filmed to favor the other players but he comes across effectively as a well-spoken and dignified disposable consort. 

D'Avril & Lowe

There's labored military comedy with the fat corporal given the bat after a baseball has startled the officer’s horse or Ed working his way into the good graces of village girl Yola d'Avril with a bag of stores sugar. To remind us this is a talkie, the military keeps on breaking out in song. Things pick up briefly when the Boche bomb the column but we get back civy-side uncomfortably rapidly.

There our hero is torn between his old loyalties to Big Shot Waren Hymer and the gang and his clean record new start. A "Two Years Later" title dissolves to the awning with Ed’s name and he’s running an up market night club. However the mob kidnaps Dale Owen’s baby and outraged Ed goes into action rescuing the kid and facing off the low-lifes. He and Hymer stand hands in the pockets of their overcoats - exchange of shots in the dark, (briefer  than The Mighty but quite effective) and Ed staggers on like Jimmy Cagney in The Public Enemy or Jean Servais in Rififi. 

Hymer & Loew

Though this one is “A John Ford Production” it has a credit for staging and The Faithful attribute its shortcomings to Andrew Bennison who would quickly disappear from the scene. The comedy is feeble and attractive Marguerite Churchill wasted. The family material with Ma and Pa Ferike Boros and Paul Porcasi is particularly cringeworthy.

The shadow of Sunrise can still be seen with shooting on that film's swamp set and the occasional piece of Germanic lighting, as in the robbery and gunman shadow falling across the bar’s center opening doors but these fail to redeem the general clumsiness. Still it’s better than Ford’s   The Black Watch and his next film Up the River would be quite presentable. Our man was on a steep learning curve.

    

I see Ford's recently uncovered 1918 Hell Bent as altogether more rewarding. It's his number five feature as director and is full of things that we will find in his mature work. 

Remington

Ford

They even sing “Genevieve” (mute). This one makes explicit the connection with Frederick Remington by starting with the failing writer drawing inspiration from the Remington painting “The Misdeal” which they re-stage and bring to life. Throw in having an extended male rivalry horseplay section and featuring picturesque western vistas - the bad hats signaling from increasingly scenic peaks before they join up, Duke Lee and the Indian guide (one feather) against the sunset.

 We kick off with Cheyenne Harry Carey, presumably fresh from the incidents in the painting, producing the cards concealed all over him, on the run from a posse blazing away till he’s safe across the river in Gil county. Arriving in Rawhide Town he rides his horse onto the The Last Bet Saloon and Dance Hall floor and demands a room only to be told all the beds already have three men in them, except for the one occupied by Cimmaron Bill / Lee who won’t share, so Harry rides on into his room, where Harry’s horse munches on the hay in the mattress while its rider ejects the tenant out the window at gunpoint, into the muck heap below. Lee comes back and it’s Harry out the window but, before they shoot it out, they discover a mutual enthusiasm for song and buddy up.

Harry Carey

Meanwhile things are tough with serial queen, winning Neva Gerber and her no good brother Vester Pegg, whose ailing mother appears to have been cut out of this copy. Pegg tells Neva she's squeamish about taking the only jobs on offer as saloon girl. When she appears in her floozie outfit, she is terrified at being mobbed but Harry recognises her distress and comes to her aid before putting moves on her himself. Being a gentleman beneath his rough exterior, he  backs off.

Slicker Joe Harris recruits Pegg into his stage robber gang and, when Harry bails them up, he un-masks Pegg, making our hero retreat, to protect Gerber.

The gang is holed up in familiar locale, Beale’s Cut Newall County (the one they run the stage coach race through in the Tom Mix The Last Trail) where Harry sets out to rescue the girl and he and Harris end up taking rounds in a shoot-out in the desert (“you’ll cook with me”) leaving the one horse for Gerber to escape. Harris doesn’t survive the dust storm but Harry is rescued by Lee and his Indian guide and presumably lives happily ever after.

This one is not just a start point for the development of John Ford but in itself a lively depiction of frontier life, with cheated card games, rough saloons, stage bandits, pelting rain storms and the Pony Express rider racing through the main street with a delivery. Add a struggle through the desert that anticipates Greed. The cast inhabit their stock characters effectively.

Hell Bent - Duke Lee & friend

The film is better and more characteristic than the other circulating early John Fords and I enjoyed it. It gives the impression of being the work of people who liked competing with their great cowboy film maker contemporaries - with William S. Hart, Tom Mix and company. It's a quality that leached out of the bloated films of Ford's last years.

There are two copies on You Tube, an un-restored print up of an original tinted Czech copy with an awful organ score or a cleaned up B&W that runs too fast. You choose.

Barrie Pattison 2023