The Fugitive

Ford's sanctification of a Mexican whisky priest, from the Greene novel, _The Power and the Glory_. It is Ford's highest-striving movie, which for him will have to mean his most experimentally Expressionistic. (It is also, as he stubbornly maintained in the face of public and critical rejection, his personal favorite.) Seldom on screen has such intellectual naiveté been put across with such visual suavity.

A beautifully photographed but rather dour picture based on The Power and the Glory. Ford said this was one of his personal favorites among his work. It's a deeply personal story of a man holding on to his faith amid the encroaching darkness. Everything here is understated, and Ford's willingness to follow his maxim (I let the pictures do the talking) is more in evidence here than in almost any of his other sound films.

The photography is beautiful and the whine/brandy scene is a minor masterpiece of cruel comic tension, but on the whole it never captures me as much as I expect it to.

(Viewed on 15/01/19): Like The Informer, it's a well crafted genre piece that is clearly influenced by German expressionism and neglects to really explore the deeper themes at the heart of its material, but in The Informer's case that is compensated somewhat by the brisk pace whereas The Fugitive is rather languid, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's certainly an attractive film, and the opening scene hints at a holy atmosphere that is quickly abandoned for a slow chase narrative.

The film's unyielding approach - full of operatic acting, heightened expressionism, primitive dialogue - drops several huge hints that Ford means for this to be absorbed as a dream, perhaps, appreciated more as elevated myth or fable than a piece of straight drama. Doing this, though, places the humanity at a distance, and undercuts the impact the story so clearly could have had. The brandy-for-Eucharist-wine scene is the closest this gets to greatness, mostly because it's just people in a room.

Minor Ford, but its pictorial beauty cannot be denied.

John Ford's Via Crucis

We must salute religious John Ford

Interesting attempt at doing something different that doesn't quite work

Almost wish I hadn't read the book before seeing the film, as it's impossible not compare the two while watching. The visual storytelling is often breathtaking, occasionally veering into heavy-handedness. Much of the complexity (and meaning) is lost from the novel, but the emotional power is unabated.

75.500

Is it Ford's best film? No. But that opening sequence is certainly one my my favorite thins he's done. Perhaps its a bit pretentious and it certinaly demands a bit more suspension of disbelief (indeed, why does Pedro Armendiaz not recognize Fonda in the lineup, especially when Fonda literally comes right up to him and begs to be taken instead), but it recalls the best of Murnau and Griffith for me.

More evident than anything was that Ford was trying to recreate the aesthetics of Emilio Fernández successful Mexican films pairing Dolores del Rio & Pedro Armendáriz while adding his own Hollywood touch. Fernández worked alongside Ford on this picture, but I'm unsure how the work was divided, but just by looking at it, it feels more like a Fernández production than that of John Ford. Unfortunately the characters drown in the ambiance. A interesting artifact from this shifting period in hist