Four Men and a Prayer

Where to begin? Well, first with a possibly obvious observation, that not every film collected here is a masterpiece. This set is as much a portrait of Ford as a working director in collaboration with a studio as it is a study in Ford as auteur. Maybe even more the former than the latter. That the relatively turgid Tobacco Road, a workmanlike adaptation of a once wildly popular stage work starring poor Gene Tierney in a hilariously inapt dirty-gal role, could exist in such close temporal proximity to the sublime How Green Was My Valley is a question worth pondering. That Ford was able to produce two full-fledged masterpieces and one excellent entertainment in 1939 alone — the masterpieces being Young Mr. Lincoln and the not-included-here Stagecoach (which was an independent production) and the entertainment being Drums Along the Mohawk — testifies not just to Ford's talent/genius but to a studio system that was far more efficient than any contemporary film production apparatus. Looking at some of the more seemingly unusual-for-Ford projects here — his assignments as it were — it's instructive to try and find some personal signature. That the fiercely self-identified Irishman made the four British heroes of the globetrotting adventure Four Men and a Prayer (played by George Sanders, David Niven, Richard Greene and William Henry) carry on for much of their screen time as if competing for some Upper Class Twit of the Year award couldn't have been a coincidence. And the picture's storytelling style is typically brisk and fluid. What's the deal, then, with the intergenerational saga The World Moves On, which is as stodgy as its title implies? Worth pondering indeed.

Most of the revelations, though, are on the unabashed plus side. It's great to see Ford's first epic Western, The Iron Horse, presented here in two versions, beautifully restored and featuring a very evocative new score. Aside from its visual and narrative sweep, it shows, as critic Dave Kehr has pointed out, the Fordian view of American history fully formed. It's also wonderful to have the oft-eerie, uncanny Prisoner of Shark Island, a knotty story of Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth and went to prison as a result, which has only been available as a foreign-region DVD, in a domestic version. Winkle, the first summit between film legends Ford and Temple (they would work together again when Temple was a young woman, in the great 1948 Western Fort Apache), is an unusual delight. Varied other pictures give privileged glimpses into Ford's collabs with performers George O'Brian and Will Rogers (the view of the post-Reconstruction South in Judge Priest, one of the three Rogers films, is a jaw-dropper — discomfiting for sure, but a fascinating window on the perspectives of race relations held in popular culture in both the era the picture is set in and when it was made). And finally, there are the greats — Lincoln, Valley, Clementine, and more.

This is a rich, remarkable package, and Fox is hinting that if it performs well, sales-wise, they may plunge back into the vaults to do similar feats of restoration and presentation with works by Murnau and Lang and the like. Wouldn't that be something?