Gene Tierney in Tobacco Road

Glenn Kenny's "The Discophile"
(posted 12/04/07)

Perhaps it's a bit of an overstatement to call this column "The John Ford Nobody Knows." The director revealed here is certainly known to Ford's protean biographer, Tag Gallagher; just as assuredly known to Rudy Behlmer and Joseph McBride, two of the passionate movie scholars who appear in Nick Redman's highfalutin doc, Becoming John Ford, an extra included in two of the boxes Fox is putting on sale today; and to a handful of other film scholars. But for both the eager-to-consume-more cinephile and the Searchers-slagging-contrarian-dilletante, the John Ford found in these discs will be a largely new quantity.

Let's outlay the sets and the discs. The little ones first: "John Ford's Silent Epics," featuring 1920's Just Pals, 1925's The Iron Horse, 1926's 3 Bad Men, and 1928's Four Sons and Hangman's House; "John Ford's American Comedies," featuring the three films Ford made with Will Rogers, those being Doctor Bull, Judge Priest, and Steamboat Round the Bend (all 1933 or thereabouts) along with 1950's When Willie Comes Marching Home, 1930's Up the River and 1953's What Price Glory; and "The Essential John Ford Collection," featuring 1946's My Darling Clementine, 1939's Drums Along the Mohawk, 1941's How Green Was My Valley, 1940's The Grapes of Wrath, the Becoming John Ford doc, and, um, Allan Dwan's 1939 Frontier Marshall, for reasons that are still obscure to this reviewer. Not that the film isn't welcome.

And then there's the whole Ford at Fox box, the mother of all Ford boxes as it were, and the box this column recommends (along with recommending that after the purchase the buyer should just sequester him or herself in a cave equipped with first-rate viewing gear and get down with the immersion). This box contains — take a deep breath — the content of all the above boxes minus Frontier Marshall (again, for reasons mysterious to this reviewer) and adding 1937's Wee Willie Winkle, starring Shirley Temple; 1939's Young Mr. Lincoln, 1936's Prisoner of Shark Island; 1940's Tobacco Road; 1938's Four Men and a Prayer; 1930's Born Reckless; 1934's The World Moves On; and 1931's Seas Beneath.

And there you have it. (By the way, various and sundry of these titles are also available as single or double-feature discs.)