Orson Welles once famously said: “I learned filmmaking by studying the Old Masters – and by that I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford.”
Ford’s position as one of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers is largely founded on the Westerns he made elsewhere in the last third of his 52-year directing career, but there’s plenty of visual poetry to savor in “Ford at Fox,” the year’s best DVD box set, out Tuesday.
The most ambitious set ever devoted to one director collects Ford’s four masterpieces for 20th Century Fox – the Oscar-winning “How Green Was My Valley,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Young Mr. Lincoln” and “My Darling Clementine.” But its value rests in the chance to explore 20 lesser-known titles he made for 20th and its predecessor, the Fox Film Corporation, between 1920 and 1952, 18 of which have never been available before on DVD.
The collection’s centerpiece – presented in two versions – is Ford’s first huge hit, “The Iron Horse,” a 1924 silent epic about the Transcontinental Railroad that’s still impressive in its sweep and location shooting. Fascinating in an altogether different way is “Four Sons” (1928), an antiwar drama he shot on the sets of “Sunrise,” the expressionist F.W. Murnau masterpiece that hugely influenced Ford’s aspirations.
John Wayne, who would often work with Ford, makes his first appearance as a featured extra during a race scene in “Hangman’s House,” while a young Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart act on-screen together for the only time in the prison comedy “Up the River” (1930). But the real gem of the Fox period is “Pilgrimage” (1933), a moving and surprisingly astringent story about a farm woman (Henrietta Crosman) who sends her son off to die in World War I rather than letting him marry his pregnant girlfriend.
To those who know Ford as a director of Westerns, the range of subjects he filmed with consummate skill is surprising. There’s “The Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936), depicting the unjust imprisonment of Samuel Mudd (Warner Baxter), the doctor who innocently set John Wilkes Booth’s leg after the Lincoln assassination. He also shot everything from superb vehicles for Will Rogers (“Judge Priest”) and Shirley Temple (“Wee Willie Winkie”) to “Four Men and a Prayer,” a sort of screwball comedy adventure in which Loretta Young watches Latin American civilians being massacred.
The “Ford at Fox” set also includes an informative new documentary, “Becoming John Ford,” and a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. Even at $300 (as little as $209 online), it’s a bargain.
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