Dr. Stewart Donovan sdonovan @stu.ca Office 307 Hours: Covid 19 means no in person office hours but students are free to contact me by email at any time. If you wish to "chat' on video we can use Microsoft Teams which the university has acquired for all students and faculty.

Two essays 50%, final at home open book exam, 50%. Topics for your first paper include: “Guns, priests and boxers: Hollywood's image of the Irish”; Leo McCarey, Catholics, and the Hayes Code;" "John Wayne, John Ford and the myth of Irish America." Students may also choose five or more feature films prior to 1980 and discuss their treatment of Irish themes. Your second essay topics are "Ethnicity, Race and Identity: Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York"; "Irish America's Long Days Journey Into Night: reading and watching Eugene O'Neil's masterpiece." Miller's Crossing and the Myth of Irish Emotionalism"; "Institutions, Catholics and Cinema: from the Bells of St. Mary's to Philomena and the Magdalene Sisters". Your papers should be between six and eight, typed pages double-spaced. NOTE: There are two ways of passing in your first essay: students who miss the deadline on Wednesday, October 21, 2020 may send their paper in at the end of term. All papers should be between 6 and 10 typed pages double spaced . Your second essay is due on the last day of class in December.

Because of Covid 19 you must do your final exam as a take home open book essay. You will be sent 6 or more questions on the last day of classes from which you will choose two questions and write two essays from four to six typed pages in length. All take homes are due on the day of the exam. Only a legitimate excuse from the Registrar’s office will be accepted for late exams or papers at the end of term.

Course description.

This course is, among other things, a study of the portrayal of the Irish in feature films from the birth of cinema to the present day. The course is interdisciplinary by nature and includes Film and Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature, History, Sociology, Political Science, Native Studies and Religious Studies.

Lesson I Lecture Topics: Overture to Ethnicity: diaspora, nation, identity and race in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York. Intro to film as cultural studies, art, narrative, history and politics.

Readings: Chapter One of The Lie of the Land, Fintan O'Toole, Verso, 1998. The Lie of the Land is a highly engaging study of Ireland's fractured and shifting identities. From its sometimes confused sense of place, caught somewhere between Europe and America, Ireland has redefined itself in the1990s. Fintan O'Toole highlights the contradictions and the mythologies at work in Ireland's ever-changing idea of itself. A riveting look at the state of Ireland at the end of the century. Drawing from two decades of writings, Irish Times columnist O'Toole discusses everything from parallels between the American West and Ireland, John Ford's films and the myth of JFK. O'Toole introduces the collection with an examination of what globalization--Ireland's entrance into the ""world's fair of consumerism""--means for a country where ""emigration has been the single biggest fact in the 75-year history of the Irish state."" He also examines the previously taboo--including the Catholic Church and its silences regarding adulterous priests and pedophiles. O'Toole is at his most affecting when he recounts the story of the birth and abandonment of a baby in the west of Ireland in 1995. A country where the illegality of abortion is written into the constitution now has a tacit understanding that the death or abandonment of an infant doesn't require prosecution or punishment. While such a position would be considered shocking in the US, O'Toole counts it as progress for Ireland, a sign of compassion toward women. Affirming the long-term existence of the Irish diaspora, O'Toole says, ""Ireland is something that often happens elsewhere."" These writings serve as a reminder that global, mass culture is formed by experiences on both sides of the Atlantic. Heartfelt and passionate, O'Toole's ruminations effectively map a changing Ireland.

Lesson II

Gangs; Interviews with cast and director. Clips from Gangs

Overture to ethnicity PART II : diaspora, nation, identity and race in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

Recommended reading and viewing: How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev YouTube lecture by Noel Ignatiev time to time a study comes along that truly can be called 'path breaking,' 'seminal,' 'essential,' a 'must read.' How the Irish Became White is such a study.' John Bracey, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University ofMassachussetts, Amherst The Irish came to America in the eighteenth century, fleeing a homeland under foreign occupation and a caste system that regarded them as the lowest form of humanity. In the new country - a land of opportunity - they found a very different form of social hierarchy, one that was based on the color of a person's skin. Noel Ignatiev's 1995 book - the first published work of one of America's leading and most controversial historians - tells the story of how the oppressed became the oppressors; how the new Irish immigrants achieved acceptance among an initially hostile population only by proving that they could be more brutal in their oppression of African Americans than the nativists. This is the story of How the Irish Became White, Routledge, 1995. See also Chris Hedges on the old South.

Lesson III Lecture 3 Angels with Dirty Faces

Race, violence, religion and the image of the Irish: Scarface. Paul Muni as Tony Carmonte
Angels With Dirty Hell's Kitchen colourized; Cagney and O'Brien Bogart as Irish in Dark Victory Irish Bogart;

St. Dominic, the mortgage, and the myth of Irish emotionalism: The Bells of St. Mary's and Going My Way religion (Barry Fitzgerald and Maureen O' Hara as the tourist 's/stage-celluloid Irish). Ginger Rodgers as Bowery Cinderella, Kitty Folyle (1940); The Fighting Sullivans (1944) as tragic elegy and war-time propaganda (inspiration for Saving Private Ryan).

Lesson IV

Race, violence, religion and the image of the Irish. Part II. Philomena with Judi Dench and Steve Coogan; Book: The Lost Child Philomena Peter Mullen's The Magdalene Sisters Film ( Documentary: Sex in a Cold Climate) and Spotlight. Film clips 20 priests. Joni Mitchell in Japan with the Chieftains

Readings

James M. Smith, Ireland’s Magdalen Laundries: And The Nation’s Architecture of Containment Indiana: university of Nortre Dame Press, 2007. P.155. Smith’s book is the most exhaustive study available thus far of the laundries and their impact on Irish society: “In late August 2003, almost one year after Mullan’s film premiered a the Venice Film Festival and within weeks of its release in the United States, The Irish Times revealed disturbing details of the exhumation, cremation, and reburial of 155 Irish women who had lived and died at the High Park Magdalen asylum operated by the Sisters of Our Lady of Refuge in Dublin (Humphreys 2003). Buried between 1858 and 1984 and interred anonymously, these women were denied a proper burial and final resting place. The religious order sought and received the required state license to exhume the bodies in 1993. However, the license listed only 133 sets of remains. Death certificates, legally required, in Ireland, were missing in some fifty-eight cases (Raftery 2003). It was not until 2003, ten years later, that Irish society learned about the twenty-two bodies for which the nuns could not account. Although such irregularities should have led to an immediate police investigation, Ireland in the early 1990’s on the cusp of an economic and cultural transformation popularly termed the Celtic Tiger, had little interest in digging up old ghosts. Instead, the state provided the Sisters with a hastily reissued exhumation license, and all the bodies were cremated and reinterred anonymously at Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery. Creamation, of course, destroys all trace of historical evidence, and thus no one will ever know with certainty who is buried at the Glasnevin plot (Raftery 2003). The history of the Ireland’s Magdalen asylumns is, then, incomplete and the still-emerging facts are even more disturbing than the fiction of Mullan’s film.” p. 137. See also Diarmaid Ferriter’s Occasions of Sin (2009). The critic and writer Patricia Craig has written that Occasions of Sin “shows the puritanical system evolving into a monolithic monstrosity.” See also Joni Mitchell’s song Magdalene Laundries. Her version recorded with The Cheiftans on the Tears of Stone (RCA, 1999) CD is the most poignant. Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter "Sex – my introduction to sex was in the back kitchen of Letterfrack, jammed up against a boiler, getting my leg burnt and getting raped by Brother Dax." Testimony such as this has racked Ireland since the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its report in May this year. The 2,600-page Ryan report exposed "endemic" physical and sexual abuse in church-run schools and orphanages in Ireland – 800 alleged abusers in more than 200 institutions during a period of 35 years. This grim litany reveals obvious failings in the Catholic church, the negligence of the state and an alarming capacity for collective bad faith, which no amount of public hand wringing now can mitigate or disguise. Diarmaid Ferriter's Occasions of Sin is thus an important and timely book: it is a richly textured history of modern Ireland's complicated attitude to sex." David Dwan

From the Biographical Dictionary of Film David Thomson on John Ford, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara; Michael Rogin on John Wayne from The London Review of Books. Andrew O'Hagan on John Ford from the London Review of Books. Hollywood Censored, Gregory D. Black, Cambridge University Press, 1994. In response to a series of sex scandals that rocked the movie industry in the early 1920s, the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency implemented a code stipulating that movies stress proper behaviour, respect for government, and "Christian values." Based on an extensive survey of original studio records, censorship files, and the Catholic Legion of Decency archives (whose contents are published here for the first time), Hollywood Censored examines how hundreds of films were expurgated to promote a conservative political agenda during the 1930s. By taking an innovative view of how movies were made, and the conditions that made them, Hollywood Censored brings together such chapters as "Movies and Modern Literature," "Beer, Blood and Politics," and "Film Politics and Industry Policy" to form a rare look at America's most famous industry.

Lesson V

John Ford, John Wayne Sands of Iwo Jima Clip Clip 2; The Searchers clip1 The Searchers and American racism; clip 2 the Captivity Myth Walt Disney, and the celluloid Irish: from The Quiet Man Dragging her back. Spielberg's mistaken tribute to the Quiet Man in E.T. Darby O'Gill and the leprechauns with 007 (with a footnote to Francis Ford Coppola and Finian's Rainbow). Tom Moore's Song of the Sea: reclaiming Irish myth and legend.

Lesson VI

Strange interlude: Eugene O'Neil's "Long Days Journey Into Night". Being Irish in the Empire:

from Sidney Lumet to David Wellington.

Lesson VII

Miller's Crossing, Gabriel Byrne and the myth of Irish Emotionalism. Interview with Byrne; interview with

Harding breaking cliches; Gangs of N.Y. , Chicago et.al.; homage to Howard Hawks' Scarface

Lesson VIII Neil Jordan's Michael Collins: Interview with Neil Jordan: lessons in Irish Nationalism.

Recommended Reading: Tom Hayden, Irish on the Inside "A pugnacious autobiographical treatise, in which former California state senator Hayden reclaims his Irish identity. Hayden's family emigrated to the US during the years of the Famine and quickly assumed the assimilationist role, both out of a desire to survive (the "wild Irish" were perhaps as despised as Natives and African-Americans, though they had an ace up their sleeve: the right to vote) and out of the shame that accompanied the Great Hunger and the subsequent flight into amnesia. Here, Hayden tells his story of regaining his Irishness, and why In the Irish soul he finds appealing elements: rebelliousness, moral idealism, communal ethics, mysticism, all still in circulation despite the best efforts of the church and an occupation state. He finds in the language and music a cultural diversity akin to biodiversity, not only an intrinsic value but a strengthening and protective character for society writ large, for it is at once very much itself and inclusive. Equally attractive are historical ties of the Irish to radical movements and their experience with servitude: As both victims and victimizers—Hayden draws upon the treatment of African-Americans by the American Irish during the latter half of the 19th century—he also considers the Irish experience invaluable in examining how racial attitudes are formed, and how it can be subverted to form links with the nonwhite world through a common history of colonialism, starvation, poverty, and threats of genocide. The heart here, though, is in Hayden's time spent in Ireland, particularly Northern Ireland, and his efforts to understand—more so, to live—the unfolding of Irish history as it is played out along political, economic, and human fronts. An electric piece of emotional archaeology and a welcoming back of an ethnic spirit—nonconformist, open, ancient—that anyone could be proud to claim. "Kirkus Review.

Lesson IX

Neil Jordan and Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy. Popular Culture, Cold War politics, Catholic hegemony, hysteria (moral panic), the Kennedy apotheosis, and small town Ireland.

Lesson X Back to the future: Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1992); Marketing 'the other' in America; sexual politics vs colonial politics: theorist and author Jack/Judith Halberstam argued that Dil's transvestism and the viewer's placement in Fergus's point of view reinforces societal norms rather than challenging them.^[15]Interview with Jordan and cast.

Lesson XI In Brughes; Martin McDonagh. Ireland after Hollywood, the Troubles and the hegemony of the Catholic Church. Non reluctant Europeans or, we are happy in this diaspora.

Readings

Leo McCarey

(1898–1969), b. Los Angeles1921: Society Secrets. 1929: The Sophomore; Red Hot Rhythm. 1930: Let’s Go Native; Wild Company; Part-Time Wife. 1931: Indiscreet. 1933: The Kid from Spain; Duck Soup. 1934: Six of a Kind; Belle of the Nineties. 1935: Ruggles of Red Gap. 1936: The Milky Way. 1937: The Awful Truth; Make Way for Tomorrow. 1939: Love Affair. 1942: Once Upon a Honeymoon. 1944: Going My Way. 1945: The Bells of St. Mary’s. 1948: Good Sam. 1952: My Son John. 1957: An Affair to Remember. 1958: Rally Round the Flag, Boys!. 1962 Satan Never Sleeps. Society Secrets, an Eva Novak picture made for Universal, is now only an item in the reference books. McCarey claims to have begun as a “script girl,” so enthusiastic that he accepted work usu-ally passed off on women. He dogged the steps of directors, learning whatever he could, and became assistant to Tod Browning: The Virgin of Stamboul (20) and Outside the Law (21). In the mid-1920s, he made several comedy shorts with Charlie Chase and, in 1926, as production executive for Hal Roach, he was responsible for pairing the innocent Stan Laurel with the worldly Oliver Hardy. He made some of their finest shorts—including From Soup to Nuts and Putting Pants on Philip—developed one of the classic comedy teams (with all its undertones of scrawny mysticism and fat stupidity in mutually dependent disharmony), and discovered his own talent as a purveyor of visual gags. One could easily list most early Laurel and Hardy films under McCarey’s name in that he effectively supervised everything they did from 1926 to 1929. Supervision, at that time and place, meant: “writing the story, cutting it, stringing the gags together, coordinating everything, screening the rushes, working on the editing, sending out the prints, working on the second editing when the preview reactions weren’t good enough and even, from time to time, shooting sequences over again.” Thus McCarey is a useful warning that in early American films we often need to look beyond published credits to discover actual authorship. Laurel and Hardy refined McCarey’s intuition of comedy in disaster, and his use of the “slow burn,” which runs all through his best work, even the much more sophisticated The Awful Truth. That film was made at Columbia as proof that the studio could manage without Frank Capra. It is an exuberant, tender comedy of feelings thrusting aside the proprieties of an imminent divorce. In Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, McCarey found the right balance of warmth and comedy technique. And as always with McCarey, it is our ability to see the joke coming and then watch the small improvement on expectation that constitutes the real impact. The “slow burn” is the deliciously delayed reaction to disaster on the part of a clown. It works because the audience responds to this superb intellectual disdain of the quantity of custard hanging from the comic’s face. McCarey is best with the audience in the palm of his hand, encouraged to improvise by that confidence, but never betraying the characters in his story. His warmth consists of liking virtually everyone in his films, often against expectations. Even Rally Round the Flag, Boys!—an uneven movie—has moments of absolute glee, and it is typical of McCarey that he should make Paul Newman the straight man and Joan Collins so tipsily funny. Beneath that, however, there was too wide and coarse a vein of sentiment that produced movies such as the Grant character in The Awful Truth might have flinched at. That bizarre wartime interlude with Crosby and Barry Fitzgerald as a Roman Catholic double act was carried off with skill, but they remain appalling projects. Good Sam and My Son John, equally, hardly seem the work of the man who established Laurel and Hardy. As with Capra, another gagman, there were ominous signs of solemnly pondered balderdash. My Son John, made at the time of McCarthy, is an obnoxious endorsement of patriotic and familial loyalty—the blunt doctrine of those playful priests. The closer one looks at McCarey’s career, and his own memories of it, the more contradictions appear. For instance, McCarey reported that he was overwhelmed by the Marx Brothers on Duck Soup, and that he was a little sorry to have to fall back on Groucho’s verbal jokes. Whereas Duck Soup is the most audacious of Marx Brothers films, with a war sequence that shows how deeply their surrealism could penetrate the real world. And although Groucho was a dispenser of verbal jokes, it is lopsided to see him as nothing else. On the other hand, in Ruggles of Red Gap McCarey drew out the comedian in Charles Laughton more subtly than anyone else. Even in the potentially crazy plot of Satan Never Sleeps, he manages to find the comedy—and find it in the tight anxiety of William Holden. Against that, he was clearly devoted to the adroit romantic comedy of Love Affair—remade as An Affair to Remember—and faintly regretted that Grant’s irony in the remake had offset the “beauty” of the original. Make Way for Tomorrow is his most serious and touching work, an uncommonly fond look at old age.Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition (Kindle Locations 29751-29755). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle E

John Ford (Sean Aloysius O’Feeney) (1895–1973), b. Cape Elizabeth, Maine 1917: The Tornado; The Trail of Hate; The Scrapper; The Soul Herder; Cheyenne’s Pal; Straight Shooting; The Secret Man; A Marked Man; Bucking Broadway. 1918: Phantom Riders; Wild Women; Thieves’ Gold; The Scarlet Drop; Hell Bent; Delirium; A Woman’s Fool; Three Mounted Men. 1919: Roped Fight for Love; The Fighting Brothers; Bare Fists; The Gun Packer; Riders of Vengeance; The Last Outlaw; The Outcasts of Poker Flat; Ace of the Saddle; Rider of the Law; A Gun Fightin’ Gentleman; Marked Men. 1920: The Prince of Avenue A; The Girl in Number 29; Hitchin’ Posts; Just Pals. 1921: The Big Punch; The Freeze-Out; The Wallop; Desperate Trails; Action; Sure Fire; Jackie. 1922: Little Miss Smiles; Silver Wings (codirected with Edwin Carewe); The Village Blacksmith. 1923: The Face on the Bar-Room Floor; Three Jumps Ahead; Cameo Kirby. 1924: Hoodman Blind; North of Hudson Bay; The Iron Horse; Hearts of Oak. 1925: Lightnin’; Kentucky Pride; The Fighting Heart; Thank You. 1926: The Blue Eagle; The Shamrock Handicap; Three Bad Men. 1927: Upstream. 1928: Four Sons; Mother Machree; Napoleon’s Barber; Riley the Cop; Hangman’s House. 1929: Strong Boy; The Black Watch (codirected with Lumsden Hare); Salute. 1930: Men Without Women; Born Reckless (codirected with Andrew Bennison); Up the River. 1931: Seas Beneath; The Brat; Arrowsmith. 1932: Air Mail; Flesh. 1933: Pilgrimage; Doctor Bull. 1934: The Lost Patrol; The World Moves On; Judge Priest. 1935: The Whole Town’s Talking; The Informer; Steamboat Round the Bend. 1936: The Prisoner of Shark Island; Mary of Scotland. 1937: The Plough and the Stars; Wee Willie Winkie. 1938: TheHurricane; Four Men and a Prayer; Submarine Patrol. 1939: Stagecoach; Young Mr. Lincoln; Drums Along the Mohawk. 1940: The Grapes of Wrath; The Long Voyage Home. 1941: Tobacco Road; Sex Hygiene (d); How Green Was My Valley. 1942: The Battle of Midway (d). 1943: December 7th (d); We Sail at Midnight (d). 1945: They Were Expendable. 1946: My Darling Clementine. 1947: The Fugitive. 1948: Fort Apache; Three Godfathers. 1949: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. 1950: When Willie Comes Marching Home; Wagonmaster; Rio Grande. 1951: This Is Korea (d). 1952: What Price Glory?; The Quiet Man. 1953: Mogambo; The Sun Shines Bright. 1955: The Long Gray Line; Mister Roberts (codirected with Mervyn Le Roy). 1956: The Searchers. 1957: The Wings of Eagles; The Rising of the Moon. 1958: The Last Hurrah; Gideon’s Day. 1959: Korea (d); The Horse Soldiers. 1960: Sergeant Rutledge. 1961: Two Rode Together. 1962: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. 1963: How the West Was Won (Civil War episode); Donovan’s Reef. 1964: Cheyenne Autumn. 1965: Young Cassidy (a Ford project, taken over by and credited to Jack Cardiff). 1966: Seven Women. 1968: Vietnam, Vietnam (d). Sheer longevity made Ford a major director. If that suggests no personal enthusiasm, I must confess to being daunted by the booze mythology of complacency and sentimentality sentimentality in Ford’s films. No one has done so much to invalidate the Western as a form. Apart from The Searchers—which is a very moving and mysterious film that does not cheat on a serious subject, and that beautifully relates the landscape to its theme—I find his Westerns pictorial, tediously rowdy, and based on cavalier treatment of American history. With Liberty Valance and Cheyenne Autumn, Ford had seemed slightly guilty about the travesty of Tombstone in My Darling Clementine and the offhand dismissal of Indians in the cavalry films. But it is notable that Cheyenne Autumn was disorganized, deprived of Ford’s ball-and-socket military simplicity. It might be argued that Hawks’s West is equally romantic. But in Red River and Rio Bravo it is only a background for character studies that are profound, humane, and touched by sadness. Ford was so often bigoted, grandiloquent, and maudlin. It cannot be escaped that his curious Irish/American romance celebrated the tyrannical hero without any great qualification or demur. The rank emotionalism of the Victor McLaglen character in The Informer is the obverse of the vaunted resolution of the John Wayne character in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, The Horse Soldiers, and Donovan’s Reef. Ford’s male chauvinism believes in uniforms, drunken candor, fresh-faced little women (though never sexuality), sexuality), a gallery of supporting players bristling with tedious eccentricity and the elevation of these random prejudices into a near-political attitude—thus Ford’s pioneers talk of enterprise but show narrowness and reaction. Above all, his characters are accepted on their own terms—the hope of every drunk—and never viewed critically. In Red River, Wayne’s brutality is revealed as odious, and in Rio Bravo he is made to respond to other characters. But The Quiet Man is an entertainment for an IRA club night, the cavalry films as much endorsements of the military as the wartime documentaries, and My Darling Clementine nostalgia for a world and code that never existed. The Ford philosophy is a rambling apologia for unthinking violence later disguised by the sham legends of old men fuddled by drink and glory. The visual poetry so often attributed to Ford seems to me claptrap in that it amounts to the prettification of a lie—Fonda in the chair in Clementine, the lines of cavalry in so many films, the lone figure in Monument Valley, the homestead interior, as airy and vulgar as gravure advertisements for kitchenware. It is worth emphasizing how far Penn, Anthony Mann, Fuller, Nicholas Ray, and Peckinpah have disproved those rosy, statuesque images. Could Ford match the harrowing historical perspective of Little Big Man, the moral ambiguity of The Far Country, the painful violence of Run of the Arrow, the passion of Johnny Guitar, or the unsentimental veterans of The Wild Bunch? But if the Westerns are fraudulent, what of Ford’s other movies? When diverted to literature or socioreligious gravity he is as bad a director as Kramer. The Grapes of Wrath is an appallingly hollow posture of stoicism; The Informer risible; How Green Was My Valley a monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust; Tobacco Road meandering nonsense; Three Godfathers shameless; and The Fugitive inane. Mister Roberts is pious; Gideon boring; The Long Gray Line monotonous. Stagecoach is sometimes cited for its masterly construction. But it stresses narrative sequence and visual prettiness to the disadvantage of character, action, and the out-of-doors. The assembly of stock caricatures, the ritual images of Monument Valley—of Wayne firing into the back projection and of Indians tumbling in the dust—are as mechanical as the supposedly more reflective “human” touches: Mitchell’s alcoholic doctor being regenerated, for instance. As for the very striking interior compositions—at the prairie way station—next year, in The Long Voyage Home, Ford innocuously indulged Gregg Toland’s deep-focus studio photography in as senseless a display of beauty as Hollywood ever achieved. Ford’s visual grace, it seems to me, needs the flush of drink in the viewer before it is sufficiently lulling to disguise the lack of intellectual integrity. It is a tipsy, self-regarding director that could repeat the abstract elegance of shadows on the ground before the house is destroyed in The Grapes of Wrath. Ford is walled up in a tradition of helpless, rosy lament, the cinema of distracting pipe dream. I should add that Andrew Sarris has compared Ford with Orson Welles, as two poets of nostalgia. But that seems to me only to reveal Ford’s weakness. Welles recalls a lost order, but sees all its flaws; whereas Ford dumbly regrets the passing of a make-believe stability that has served as an obstacle to any necessary critical sensibility. It is sometimes claimed that Ford is a superb visual storyteller; that he unerringly places his camera and edits his footage. But the same could be said for Leni Riefenstahl. The glorification of Ford’s simplicity as an artist should not conceal the fact that his message is trite, callous, and evasive. Sadly, it comes as no surprise to discover that Ford was most attached to the reckless, barnstorming bigotry of Steamboat Round the Bend and The Sun Shines Bright. His message is the stupid, beaming farewell from Stagecoach, as Wayne and Claire Trevor go off together—“They’re safe from the blessings of civilization.” The above was written for the 1975 edition, when Ford was already dead. It was also written before the author had spent any time in the American West, and before he had begun to consider the tangle that has been made between Hollywood movies and what Americans take for their history. I say that to deter the hopes of those who like Ford and this book, and who anticipated some greater kindness toward the director. My dismay is deeper now; my case, it seems to me, is more damning. Still, I erred if my earlier blast suggested that Ford was without talent or interest. He was a natural storyteller; he made lovely scenes—he understood his own effects; he had an eye. Though, with the latter, I would point to the odd artistic link between Ford’s Monument Valley Westerns and the current wave of automobile and fashion advertising that has seized on the Valley as a backdrop. In both cases, there is a lust for epic, clichéd panoramas, which forgets or forsakes the real meaning meaning of that location—as geology, for its natives, and for the rest of America living on the edges of the empty quarter. In other words, the West deserves real journey, witness, walking, riding, living, and being there, patient enough to see through the first spectacle. It also requires a study of its culture: what it has meant to, say, the Navajo, the Hopi, Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Edward Curtis. Ford’s eye refused to contemplate history or responsibility. That leads on to Ford’s notorious belief—spanning the years from Fort Apache to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—that “No sir! This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” There have been defenders of Ford—notably Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington—who have tried to claim irony and historical sophistication in this. But they fail to recall that Ford’s art was always that of a mythmaker, a wishful thinker, a man without stamina for reality—a moviemaker? In an age of diminishing historical sense in America, but of regular crises that dramatize our need to ask what happened (with Watergate, Vietnam, Iran-Contra, etc.), I marvel that Ford’s heady obscurantism has such defenders. But to take Ford properly to task may be to begin to be dissatisfied with cinema. Adherence to legend at the expense of facts will ruin America—the work is well under way. And lovers of the movies should consider how far film has helped the undermining. Ford is not the only culprit: Clint Eastwood’s overpraised return to the West, Unforgiven, begins as an attempt to see things fresh, but at last its rigor collapses and it becomes not the West but just another Western. Still, Ford is the pioneer of this vision, and that is what I railed against in 1975. The Searchers is still a riveting, tragic, and complex experience, a movie in which Ford gives up many of his false certainties, and a story filled with disturbing, half-buried thoughts of race and failure. In recent years, valuable books by Scott Eyman and Joseph McBride have shown how troubled and troubling a man he was, just as they have allowed the chance that we can’t like (or stomach) all of his films. Thomson, David. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Sixth Edition (Kindle Locations 15847-15853). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

ENGL 3483 Irish Film I

http://YouTube Outline;

Lecture One Gangs of NY

Lecture 3 Part 2 Leo McCarey;

Bells of St. Mary's

Magdalene Sisters Lecture

Magdalene Sisters Lecture2

http://YouTube Outline ;