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Marital pangs of the birth of a nation comprise the airy parable, thus newlyweds roughing it in Mohawk Valley circa 1776. He's "a natural born farmer" (Henry Fonda) and she's "no frontier woman" (Claudette Colbert), their honeymoon is a fragile candle in a darkened log cabin. (The couple's stop in an inn evokes Lang's Destiny, John Carradine black-caped and pipe organ-voiced as an eyepatched Tory might be the Reaper himself.) Crops and burnings, the nascent community already in danger of extinction, "this revolution has turned into a real war." John Ford's Eden, its beauties and savageries at once virginal and ritualized. Fort and church are pillars, the German-accented general (Roger Imhof) loses his leg and the blustery reverend (Arthur Shields) deals the bullet of deliverance, the domesticated Oneida (Chief John Big Tree) exclaims "hallelujah" at will. The imperious widow (Edna May Oliver) orders about the Seneca braves who've come to burn her lair, smooches Ward Bond at an open-air celebration, thunders from the barricades during the siege. "Shoot the breeches off of them... if they're wearin' breeches!" Leutze and Millet figure in rich Technicolor harmonies, the most pictorial mix of humanism and history (Colbert drops to her knees on a hill as Fonda marches into the distance to "Yankee Doodle") goes into Wyeth. The newborn's cry is mistaken for a calf's bleat, it later guides the father across a roomful of wounded and slain settlers. ("I'll be doggone" is the stupefied paterfamilias' byword, cf. Bergman's Brink of Life.) The horrors of the battleground are given by the protagonist locked in a numbed incantation, and there's the national struggle as a decathlon silhouetted against a ruddy sunrise. "A pretty flag, isn't it," flapping at the end of one war and the start of another, "a heap to do from now on." The great heir is Troell in The Emigrants and The New Land. With Eddie Collins, Dorris Bowdon, Jessie Ralph, Robert Lowery, Tom Tyler, Russell Simpson, and Francis Ford.
--- Fernando F. Croce |