|
"The most eloquent speech this country has ever given" is a line of Gold Star mothers heading overseas to their sons' graves, John Ford follows one from the farm to Argonne and back. Rural life is a tableau of gnarled trees and powdered moonlight, a rather Germanic Arkansas where the old pioneer widow (Henrietta Crosman) watches witheringly as her son (Norman Foster) sneaks off at night. The barbershop doubles as a draft registration office in curious anticipation of Judge Priest, she signs up the lad to separate him from his pregnant sweetheart (Marian Nixon) and a dissolve summons forth a locomotive packed with doughboys. A minute and a half in the trenches is enough to summarize the waste of war, back home the mother is shuddered awake by a thunderstorm in one of the film's various Griffithian flashes. Mater monstruosa, mater dolorosa, "ten years of remembering to forget" brought to an end by a trip to La Tombe du Soldat Inconnu. (What can the French officer possibly tell the bereft visitors? "The altar is freedom is wet with tears.") Ford's matriarchs in The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley descend from Crosman's magnificent ogress, a hillbilly Hecuba who buries her own grief until it hits her like lightning in the midst of Parisian festivities. Her conflict is resurrected into that of the suicidal youth (Maurice Murphy) on the edge of the bridge, and resolved with the shunned grandson embraced at last. The torn portrait pieced together, the emotional gaze directed straight into the camera (cp. Dreyer's Prästänkan), an entire screen full of crosses—the absurdity of heroism and the maternal bond that strangulates, piercing visions from a filmmaker still remembered as a spring of patriotism and sentimentality. With Heather Angel, Lucille La Verne, Robert Warwick, Charley Grapewin, and Hedda Hopper. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |