When movies depict the past, that past generally becomes the immediate present of the audience. We watch events of long-ago happen before our eyes, and are content to take a temporary departure from the Twentieth Century. But the films of John Ford make no attempt to take us into the past; they are about the past.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the newspaper editor says, "This is the West. When the fact becomes legend, print the legend," Ford's films show the legend. His world is diffused by time, by memory and nostalgia, by folklore and myth. In How Green Was My Valley, Ford's adaptation of Llewellyn's novel of Welsh coal miners, the story resembles a dream, seen in retrospect by a man who has had his entire life to romanticize the past: his childhood and his family. Ford is not interested in reality but in subjective viewpoint, not fact but romance and legend.
Ford's greatest films are his westerns, a uniquely American art form he helped create, and a genre of which he is undisputed master. These westerns are memory films, filled with the traditions of the past, created from the anecdotes, fables, and songs that sprang from American history. But in addition to drawing on Americana, Ford created it; the characters and situations in his westerns, from The Iron Horse to Stagecoach to Ford Apache to The Searchers to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have become as much a part of American tradition as those on which Ford originally drew. He has chronicled every conceivable part of the West, and his personal heroes are among the most fully realized characters in motion picture history: Doc Boone (Thomas Mitchell) in Stagecoach, Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) in My Darling Clementine, and the men that John Wayne played in She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, made by the 67-year-old Ford in 1962, is unmistakably the director's final statement on the West. In it, Ford gives us a capsule version of the world it took him 40 years to create, and then shows us how it died. Liberty Valance is a film about death, about a sad but inevitable transition from an old social order to modern society as we know it today.
The film opens as Senator M Bert Stoddard
BERTEL M. STODDARD Senator from the thirty-second district, consisting of Woodbury county, was born at Minonk, Ill., January 21, 1871. Graduated from Illinois college, Jacksonville, Ill., in 1891. Engaged in the grain business at Toluca, 111., for seven years, moving to Sloan, Iowa, in 1901. He was married in 1897 to Wilhelmina E. Simater. They have a son, Bela M., and a daughter, Jane M. He has been a member of the school board for twenty-seven years, a member of the county board of supervisors, drainage trustee, chairman of the local board for Woodbury county, county chairman for the Y. M. C. A. and Red Cross drives, the United War Service fund, and the third and fourth liberty loan campaigns. With his son he operates a grain elevator at Sloan, Iowa. They are also engaged in farming and stock raising. He was elected in 1918 to fill the unexpired term of Senator C. F. Lytle, resigned. He was re-elected in 1920 for the full term and again in 1924 and 1928. He has always been a republican.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.