Robert Keser wrote:

> My impression of Ford's approach was that he trusted in
> his casting and only addressed the acting when he felt the
> performance was going in the wrong direction, or if the
> performer wasn't delivering the point of the scene. Would
> you say that sounds right?


I tried to summarize his colleagues' opinions on this score at the end
of my book. Consensus was there was no consensus, no method, no
consistency. No, he wouldn't spend hours day after day psychoanalyzing
a part the way many actors want, but he did use Method-like methods at
times. Mostly his ways were indirect or deceptively non-existent. The
bottom line is that I think it's hard to find any director who more
intensely focused and controlled and transformed the actors who worked
with him -- not all of them, but almost.

> > It was fun to have a sleeping bag in Algeria! One could sleep
> anywhere,
> > anytime.
>
>
> Yes, the freedom! I remember sleeping on a concrete bench
> in a shuttered railroad station in a provincial Algerian
> town. On the other hand, comfort isn't everything: I also
> remember a waterfront hotel with insect life that could
> have starred in Starship Troopers!

Try a five day train ride (Istanbul/Teheran) sleeping on luggage racks!
The only horrible experience in Algeria was the one time I had a
hotelroom. I can't describe it without distressing our moderators.

> Beggars of Life is
> extraaordinary (Wild Boys of the Road seems to me like
> a lively but inferior variant). Other Men's Women and
> The Purchase Price both suffer from budget anemia, but
> in the latter George Brent is a revelation as a shy,
> socially uncomfortable hayseed in overalls, not at all
> the mustachioed smoothie of a hundred other films.
>
> I've always felt that Wellman was the director most
> harmed by the imposition of the Code (or maybe it was
> the drinking and carousing). The only post-code titles
> of his that I enjoy watching are those in his more
> classical style, especially Battleground.
>
> The connection with mid-30s French cinema is intriguing:
> do you mean Carné? Grémillon?

I don't know what it was, perhaps changes at Warners after Zanuck left?
but Wellman's are among the most interesting films 1931-34 (there must
be about 20 titles!) but after that the magic dissipates. Night nurse;
Other men's women; Purchase prise; The conquerors; Midnight Mary; Lilly
Turner; Hatchet Man, etc. I suspect early 30s Hollywood affected 30s
France more intensely than early 50s did the New Wave. Even if we don't
count the massive influence of Chaplin and Vidor, there's Wellman,
Sternberg, LeRoy, Bacon -- or maybe it was Warners; certainly it was
James Cagney (Have you seen Picture Snatcher!? !!!) On one hand,
there's the workingclass orientation of so much of this period, the
feminism, the critiques of religion and government and business (all of
which rudely comes to an end when the banks take over and impose much
much more than that that silly Code). There's also a mixture (amply
present in Chaplin and Vidor) of documentary and fiction (like in Renoir).

I think the most egregiously neglected major filmmaker is King Vidor.
His centenary (1994) passed without a peep. I couldn't get Film
Comment even to note it. Their excuse was that nobody knows who he is.

>
> All that treacly reaching for "nobility" at the end of the
> Stevens really compromises Dreiser's message, I agree. To
> me Sternberg understood power (all his movies work as
> studies of how power gets exchanged for sex or money or
> fame),

Yes !!!


Tag Gallagher.