Tag: George Bancroft

Stagecoach (1939, John Ford)

Until the action-packed last thirty minutes, Stagecoach is a class drama. A group of strangers and acquaintances are in a stagecoach, traveling West, post-Civil War. It takes fifteen minutes at the start of the film to get them in the coach, with some of the time spent on establishing the characters (and why they’re traveling), but there’s also the danger setup. Infamous Apache leader Geronimo has escaped the reservation with a war party and all the settlers are worried.

Luckily for the stagecoach passengers, Army calvary lieutenant Tim Holt and his men will be escorting them part of the way, then another unit will take over their safety. Everything’s going to be fine, even if coach driver Andy Devine (in a wonderful comedic performance) is very worried about it.

Riding shotgun with Devine is marshal George Bancroft. He’s got to find John Wayne—who also escaped and is on the run, him from a penitentiary—before John Wayne goes off to try and revenge kill Tom Tyler because Tom Tyler is a bigger badass. Just wait until you see Tyler’s hat. Bancroft knew Wayne’s dad and he’s sympathetic to Wayne’s plight but the law’s the law. And Tyler’s the bigger badass.

The passengers are an appropriately mixed bunch and where the class drama is going to arise. Claire Trevor and Thomas Mitchell are both being run out of town by the temperance league. Trevor for being a woman of ill-repute and Mitchell for being a drunkard of a town doctor. Trevor and Mitchell’s friendship is one of Stagecoach’s bedrocks; they’re great together. We also get the initial hints at Mitchell’s potential through his empathy towards Trevor.

Then there’s fidgety, obnoxious banker Berton Churchill (who’s got an amazing “why businessmen should be president” rant no different or more intelligent than modern ones), whiskey salesman Donald Meek, soldier’s wife Louise Platt, and professional gambler John Carradine. Platt’s going to meet her husband and Carradine’s along as her escort; he’s a Southern traitor who served under her father. There’s a great argument between Carradine and Mitchell over how to talk about the war.

All of the class differences are going to flare up once the stagecoach comes across Wayne, who’s looking for a ride, not knowing Bancroft would be riding shotgun. See, Wayne takes an immediate liking to Trevor, who Churchill, Platt, and Carradine have been treating like shit and Churchill and Carradine are terrified of Wayne so they can’t really be mean to her anymore. It leaves Platt in a lurch too, but she’s just following the societal norms and is a little naive about the world.

Of course, Trevor and Mitchell just assume Wayne’s naive about the world too and doesn’t really understand Trevor’s circumstances. But Wayne’s a simple guy; he’s going to kill the guys who wronged him and his family and go down to his ranch across the border… and he daydreams about Trevor joining him.

As much as he can daydream as things start going bad to worse for the cast; they can never find the right soldiers and it seems like the war party is ahead of them, burning down settlements.

They have an extended stopover at Chris-Pin Martin’s stagecoach stopover place, where everyone’s kind of got to get over themselves in a crisis—the war party’s close, very drunk Mitchell’s got to play doctor, and Wayne’s got to decide if he’s going to escape a distracted Bancroft.

Pretty much every performance is great, particularly Mitchell and Bancroft, but Carradine’s also got some excellent moments—with some intense character reveals—ditto Meek, who starts displaying a lot of depth fairly early on and it gradually increases quite well. Devine’s scene stealer funny (to the point you almost wonder if director Ford told anyone else he’d be interrupting them to take over); Trevor and Wayne’s arc is lovely and where Ford expends the most effort outside the action. He spends a lot of time getting the performances right (Wayne’s got one delivery where you wonder who came up with it because it’s so perfect and so unlike his subsequent work, even with Ford). And Trevor’s bigger arc, which requires her to stay quiet and react more than anything else, is quite good. The romance arc makes Wayne’s character and performance work; Trevor would’ve been fine on her own, but the romance just adds to it. Bert Glennon’s photography of that very gentle romance is, like Ford’s direction, only beat by the exceptional action sequences.

Platt and Churchill are both fine. They just don’t have the arcs the other characters get so there’s only so much they’re going to be able to do.

Technically, Stagecoach’s stunning. Ford’s direction, Glennon’s photography, Otho Lovering and Dorothy Spencer’s editing, which nimbly scales from silent resentment reaction shots to the stunt-heavy, grandiose action. The film’s frequently breathtaking, full of these wonderful gradual, patient sequences from Ford where he lets the action unfold for the camera instead of moving the camera until it finds the action.

Stagecoach is exquisite.

Thunderbolt (1929, Josef von Sternberg)

Thunderbolt has some excellent use of sound. It’s a very early talky and I’m hesitant to say any of its uses were innovative, because the word suggests others picked up on the techniques and developed them. Most of Thunderbolt‘s singular sound designs didn’t show up again in Hollywood cinema for over twenty years. The way von Sternberg uses on camera singers, showcasing them as a performance for the characters to watch, not for the audience to see, doesn’t resemble any of the ostensibly similar scenes in the 1930s. The overall sound design–the street scenes, the edits–resembles German film a lot more than American; there’s a particular lack of flash to von Sternberg’s tone.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot of flash in the screenplay. In terms of plotting, Thunderbolt is exquisite. The first half of the film operates without a protagonist. All of the films scenes are long, but those first forty-five minutes play even longer due to the passage of time (a couple months). There’s the initial setup, with Fay Wray and Richard Arlen as young lovers who get picked up by the police. It seems Wray’s got an infamous paramour, played by George Bancroft (as the titular Thunderbolt, a moniker describing his lethal right). There’s some stuff with Wray and Bancroft, then a very pre-code scene with Wray staying with Arlen and mother Eugenie Besserer, and finally the development into the second half of the film.

During the first half, Besserer and Arlen are good together, Wray is mediocre (she has some effective scenes, but the dialogue’s clunky for most of her performance) and Bancroft is overblown. There are some noisy police detectives too.

The second half of the film, with Bancroft on death row, is where Thunderbolt starts to pick up. The character–going into the second half–is already supposed to be somewhat endearing, because he cared for a stray instead of promptly murdering Arlen (and, presumably, Besserer). The second half doesn’t try to rehabilitate him. Instead, it’s a goofy prison movie with Bancroft as the gangster (who we never actually see commit any crimes in the running time). There’s some decent stuff, a few good scenes here and there; really, it’s about Bancroft all of a sudden becoming the film’s lead. His performance is occasionally shaky, but it doesn’t matter. He commands the screen.

The melodrama soon kicks in (Bancroft, from prison, frames Arlen and Arlen ends up on death row and there’s conflict) and the film can’t narratively recover from it. There are still some decent scenes, some excellent shots from von Sternberg, and Bancroft maintains. Arlen, on the other hand, is silly and awful. It’s a bit of a surprise too, because he was fine during the first half.

There’s also Tully Marshall as the absurd prison warden. It’s a movie about an innocent man on death row and there’s this goofy prison warden running around, aping for laughs. Bancroft’s got some funny observations too, but Marshall’s something else entirely. He belongs in a different picture.

Thunderbolt foolishly tries to rehabilitate its protagonist (and inevitably, I suppose). It just goes about it in the worse way possible. It removes the agency from the character, making his salvation a passive event. Instead of being interesting, it’s de facto.

The film gets long during its lengthy scenes, especially after the more interesting technical methods cease. It’s decent instead of interesting.

1/4★

CREDITS

Directed by Josef von Sternberg; screenplay by Jules Furthman and Herman J. Mankiewicz, based on a story by Charles Furthman and Jules Furthman; director of photography, Henry W. Gerrard; edited by Helen Lewis; produced by B.P. Fineman; released by Paramount Pictures.

Starring George Bancroft (Jim Lang), Fay Wray (Mary), Richard Arlen (Bob Morgan), Tully Marshall (Warden), Eugenie Besserer (Mrs. Morgan), James Spottswood (‘Snapper’ O’Shea), Fred Kohler (‘Bad Al’ Friedberg), Robert Elliott (Prison chaplain), E.H. Calvert (Dist. Atty. McKay), George Irving (Mr. Corwin) and Mike Donlin (Kentucky Sampson).

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