Classic Ford: A John Ford Retrospective, Part I - Harvard Film Archive
February 6 - March 29
Classic Ford: A John Ford Retrospective, Part I
The towering figure of John Ford (1894-1973) casts a long  and irrefutable shadow across the history of the American cinema. Yet the  breadth and measure of Ford’s major contributions to the Golden Age of  Hollywood cinema, and to film language in general, remains somewhat difficult  to discern – obscured both by the sheer magnitude of his incredibly prolific  sixty year career and by the persistent image of Ford, fixed late in his  career, as an anachronous and often cantankerous artist clinging stubbornly to  the Western genre. Rarely recognized in full are Ford’s great achievements as a  consummate visual stylist and master storyteller. Crafted in close  collaboration with many of the greatest cinematographers of the studio era -  William Clothier, Bert Glennon and Gregg Toland among them - and channeling  European and especially American painterly traditions, Ford’s cinema is  aesthetically sophisticated and varied. Beginning with the moody Expressionism  of his late silent and thirties films, Ford’s oeuvre underwent a series of rich  stylistic transformations, giving way to the expressive realism of his forties  work that, in turn, gradually shifted to the stark classicism of his late films  in the 1950s and 1960s. Echoing the notable stylistic diversity of Ford’s  cinema is the equally impressive range of genres in which he successfully  worked, over and beyond the Westerns for which he is still best known. Between  the extraordinarily prolific years of 1926 to 1945, it must be noted, Ford  actually directed only one Western, Stagecoach (1939). Ford’s career is, in fact, distinguished by his singular, often quite  idiosyncratic, approaches to popular genres - the brisk adventure narratives of The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)  and Drums Along the Mohawk (1939),  the leisurely paced small-town comedies Steamboat  Round the Bend (1933) and The Sun  Shines Bright (1953), the erotically charged safari-romance Mogambo (1953), the deeply melancholy  films of war, like The Long Voyage Home (1940) and Rio Grande (1950) - more  concerned with the ritualized quotidian spaces between the battles than the  fighting itself. Ford’s interpretative approach to genre filmmaking informs his  eventual return to his earliest roots as a director of Westerns and the series  of ruminative and increasingly mournful Westerns that began with My Darling Clementine (1946) and led to  his dark masterpiece, The Searchers (1956).
Ford’s incredibly unflagging talents and rare ability to  harness the complex studio apparatus to make genuine works of art eventually  drew the attention of critics, historians and critics-turned-filmmakers Lindsay  Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich. Ford was, in fact, among the very first  Hollywood directors to be recognized as an auteur whose films shared a vivid  personal signature and concern for certain dominant themes. One of the most  important overriding themes of Ford’s cinema is American history and, more  specifically, the shaping forces and strong-willed individuals who have defined  the U.S. as a nation and an idea. Ford’s lifelong fascination with such legendary  figures from American history as Wyatt Earp and Abraham Lincoln drew his films  frequently back into the distant past to explore the myths and legends firmly  rooted in both the popular imagination and official history. Intermingled with  Ford’s concern for the myths of history - or perhaps, one could say, the  history of myths - is his deep and abiding love of the West as the cradle of  American civilization and as a potent quintessence of the American psyche.  Ford’s cinema offers one of the most important and sustained mediations on the  West in American popular culture. In such works as My Darling Clementine, Wagon  Master, Fort Apache and The Searchers, the distinct landscapes  and culture of the late 19th century West - including the Native Americans who  figure increasingly prominently in Ford’s late work - are given such vivid  shape that they remain among the most influential and lasting representations  of this absolutely formative period in our nation’s history.
This multi-part retrospective begins with an expanded  selection of Ford’s most enduring works, including a number of lesser known  major films - Mogambo, Prisoner of Shark Island, Wagon Master – and featuring visits from  distinguished experts on Ford’s cinema Tom Doherty and Tom Conley.
This John Ford  retrospective was made possible by a generous grant from the Sun Hill  Foundation. Special thanks:  Jennifer Combs, Sun Hill Foundation.
Double Feature - Followed by Directed by John Ford
Saturday February 6 at 7pm
The Searchers
With John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles
US 1956, 35mm, color, 119 min.
Print from Warner Bros.
This  classic tale of one man’s obsessive quest to find a young girl taken by the  Comanche is a surprising mixture of new and old, intimate and epic. Considered  Ford’s greatest film, its unsettling ambiguity results in a more modern feel  than many of Ford’s 1930s and 1940s classics, which were characterized largely  by their sincerity and their central focus on family and community. The Searchers, in contrast, derives its  startling force from its exploration of loneliness and racism as family and  community’s darkest counterparts. Ford often evokes the deep human necessity  for community and its attendant pleasures, while just as often viewing the  world from the perspective of an outsider never able to join. The greatness of The Searchers is its ability to do both.
Live Piano Accompaniment by Rob Humphreville
Special Event Tickets $12
Sunday February 7 at 7pm
The Iron Horse
With George O’Brien, Madge Bellamy, Fred Kohler
US 1924, 35mm, b/w, silent, 120 min.
Print from Fox
The success of James Cruze’s epic Western The Covered Wagon (1923) inspired William  Fox’s ambition to top it by sending John Ford to Nevada to film the story of  the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad. The first of Ford’s  American history films, The Iron Horse unfurls its historical tapestry as backdrop to a driving melodrama of a tense  love triangle and a son avenging his father’s murder. The film’s gripping  action sequences display Ford’s strong command of kinetic cinema with intensely  rhythmic sequences of laying the railroad tracks and dramatic battles with  “Indians.” While the Native Americans exist as near caricatures in the film,  Ford is nevertheless careful to acknowledge the importance of immigrant labor  in the completion of the railroad.
Friday February 12  at 7pm
The Long Voyage Home
With John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter
US 1940, 35mm, b/w, 105 min.
Print from the Harvard Film Archive Collection
On the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II, Ford  offered a stark and brooding maritime fable that counts among the most powerful  evocations of male longing and loneliness in American cinema. Ford’s rare  talent as an ensemble director reached a new height in this tale of an English  freighter carrying dangerous secret cargo through a perilous war zone and in  the unusually sensitive and heartrending performances of Ian Hunter, Ward Bond  and especially Thomas Mitchell. The Long  Voyage Home’s astonishing black and white cinematography marked an  important high point in the career of legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland,  whose experimentation with depth-of-focus and tonally expressive shadows  anticipates his milestone work in Citizen  Kane the next year. 
Friday February 12 at 9pm
Sunday February 14 at 7pm
Mogambo
With Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly
US 1953, 35mm, color, 116 min.
Print courtesy of the George Eastman House
The important role of women in Ford’s cinema is typically  overlooked and misunderstood, in part because later major works such as Mogambo - and the criminally disregarded Seven Women - are rarely discussed or  screened. An ambitious remake of Red Dust,  the racy Pre-Code romance starring Clark Gable and Jean Harlow, Mogambo is a beautifully crafted tale of  a safari adventure gone astray, overturned by the strange love triangle that  briefly unites a chorus girl, an anthropologist’s wife and a hunter - an encore  role that revived Gable’s late career - in the dark heart of the African  jungle. In the case of the women, Ford’s sensitive direction resulted in two  alluring revelations, with Ava Gardner displaying an unexpectedly earthy  innocence as the city girl strangely at ease in the remote wilderness and a  young Grace Kelly, in her first major screen role, unlocking a dark and  beguiling eroticism. As in Hawks’ Hatari!,  the safari stands in as a vibrant metaphor for the always simmering battle  between the sexes.
Saturday February 13 at 7pm
Fort Apache
With John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Shirley Temple
US 1948, 35mm, b/w, 127 min.
Print courtesy of the Library of Congress
The first and darkest entry in Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy,” Fort Apache paints a stark and  mesmerizing portrait of an isolated military outpost on the furthest edge of  the Western frontier in the years just after the Civil War. Ford’s own  extensive firsthand experience in WWII informs both the film’s detailed  rendering of the customs and contradictions of everyday life in the lonely fort  as well as its ultimately ambiguous attitude towards the hierarchical (il)logic  of the military community. While Henry Fonda brilliantly embodies the callous,  deadly arrogance of a Custer-like colonel fixed upon ruthless battle with the  Indians, Pedro Armendáriz,  John Wayne and a radiant teenage Shirley Temple together define a warm human counterpoint.  Considered by many to be the first genuinely sympathetic and realistic  portrayal of Native Americans in a major Hollywood feature, Fort Apache points towards the important  revisionist tendencies in Ford’s later work. Preserved by the Library of Congress.
Saturday February 13 at 9:30pm
Steamboat Round the Bend
With Will Rogers, Anne Shirley, Eugene Pallette
US 1935, 35mm, b/w, 80 min.
Print from Fox
A delightfully lighthearted yet insightful tour of the  Deep South led by the comic Will Rogers – at the time one of the most popular  actors in America – as an artful elixir peddler turned Mississippi river  boatman. One of Ford’s few successful comedies, Steamboat Round the Bend is enlivened by Rogers’ inimitable  homespun humor as well as by the film’s frequently outlandish plot twists -  including a thrilling boat race - and strange, at times almost surrealist,  imagery. Bolstered by a wonderful cast of character actors (although  contemporary audiences cannot help but wince at Stepin Fetchit’s notoriously  dimwitted manservant), including Anna Lee and Eugene Pallette, The Steamboat Round the Bend wonderfully  captures Rogers’ cracker-barrel political innuendo and Ford’s affection for the  American landscape and vernacular. The film would be Rogers’ last, finished  just weeks before his tragically premature death in a plane crash.
Please note: We regret that this screening has been postponed. We will screen Mogambo in its place. Check back soon for the rescheduled Rio Grande date.
Sunday February 14 at 7pm
Rio Grande
With John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Ben Johnson
US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 105 min.
The final entry in Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy” is one of his  few films to reveal darker tensions at work within a family unit, here the  dysfunctional marriage of John Wayne’s battle weary Colonel Yorke and his  estranged wife Maureen O’Hara - only a few years before their dynamic union in The Quiet Man. The simmering familial  tensions - brought to boil by the arrival of the Colonel’s wayward son - are  mirrored in the deep distrust and racist violence that pits the Cavalry against  the Indians. One of the more important “Cold War Westerns,” Rio Grande provides a fascinating  counterpoint to the more pluralistic vision of the West seen in the earlier Fort Apache. For Rio Grande’s dramatic locations, Ford returned once more to his  favorite location, Monument Valley, while also exploring other striking  landscapes in remotest Utah.
Introduction by Tom Conley
Monday February 15 at 7pm
Young Mr. Lincoln
With Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver
US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 100 min.
Print from the Harvard Film Archive Collection
Weaving together history and myth, Young Mr. Lincoln has intrigued commentators from Sergei Eisenstein  to the Cahiers critics and Andrew  Sarris. This biopic presents not the agonized Civil War President but the  gangly, even awkward, backwoods lawyer in Illinois whose pursuit of justice  hints at greatness to come. The film’s genius and appeal come from this simple  device: everything we see and hear gains an extra dimension of poignancy and  significance from our knowledge of Lincoln’s future. Many of Henry Fonda’s  roles for Ford exemplify this pattern, in which the hero must always move on;  driven by fate, he can never settle down, even if he would like to.  Nevertheless, far from being a forbidding figure, Ford’s Lincoln is both a man  for the ages and a man of the people. As Joseph McBride puts it, “For Ford,  Lincoln is the archetypal figure of justice, a man who dispenses legal wisdom  with a priestlike humor, charity and tolerance.”
Sunday March 7 at 7pm
The Informer
With Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster
US 1935, 35mm, b/w, 91 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
Ford’s rising star in the mid-1930s - due largely to the  success of his films starring Will Rogers - allowed him to convince RKO that he  should adapt Liam O’Flaherty’s novel of the moral and social cost of the  1922-23 Irish Civil War, allegorized by an impoverished Dubliner’s cruel  betrayal of his best friend. RKO gave Ford a medium-sized budget and a relative  freedom hitherto unknown to him. The studio’s initial dismay at the  unconventional results was calmed when the critics began to universally praise  the film for its serious subject matter and stylistic audacity. The apotheosis  of Ford’s expressionist style, The  Informer has become a controversial point among Ford scholars and fans -  while some miss the relaxed lyricism of later Ford and find the Huit clos universe of the film overly  mechanistic, many admire the film’s uncompromising look at a fallen world where  only compromise and defeat are possible.
Monday March 8 at 7pm
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Directed by John Ford.
With John Wayne, Joanne Dru, John Agar
US 1949, 35mm, color, 103 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
Films from every period of Ford’s career testify to his  abiding fascination with the military as a way of life and as a model of community.  Ford fused his engagement with the military to the Western genre in his trilogy  of films about U.S. Cavalry units assigned to policing indigenous tribes. The  middle film of the trilogy, She Wore a  Yellow Ribbon is packed with plot (a clash with the Arapaho and a love triangle  involving a young woman and two rival cavalrymen), but still places its  emphasis on the structures of daily life at the cavalry post and the rites of  social interaction. If Ford’s pre-war Westerns create the mythology of the  West, his postwar Westerns present The West as myth. Now working in glorious Technicolor, the alternately expressionist and realist  black and white of previous Westerns gives way to richer-than-life colors that  evoke vivid reds and browns of the Frederic Remington’s paintings that Ford  acknowledged as an important inspiration. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.
Introduction by Thomas Doherty
Friday March 12 at 7pm
My Darling Clementine
With Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature
US 1946, 35mm, b/w, 97 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
Western narrative of the rule of law inexorably taming  the frontier against the violence of the primal horde. The brawling brood of  brothers presided over by their rabid patriarch - played with vicious  authenticity by Walter Brennan - is contrasted with the virile but peaceable  Earps, lead by brother Wyatt, as they bring order to Tombstone. Somewhere  between these two camps is the melancholy Doc Holliday, a Romantic figure who soulfully  quotes Shakespeare and seems fated to an early death from tuberculosis. Fonda’s  Wyatt Earp, by contrast, embodies a new modernity for the West, taciturn and  efficient. Placing the greater good against individual satisfaction, he suborns  his feelings to duty instead of wearing his heart on his sleeve. At the literal  and figurative heart of the film is a classic Fordian sequence – a dance that  brings the fledgling community together to raise funds to build a church. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.
Friday March 12 at 9pm
The Prisoner of Shark Island
Directed by John Ford.
With Warner Baxter, Gloria Stuart, Claude Gillingwater
US 1936, 35mm, b/w, 95 min.
Print courtesy of the Academy Film Archive
Ford’s prints the legend, rather than the fact, in his  rousing film about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was jailed for his purported role in  the assassination of President Lincoln after tending John Wilkes Booth’s broken  leg. Although Mudd and Booth knew each other prior to the murder, it is unclear  to this day whether Mudd knew or was part of Booth’s plan. Ford offers his  interpretation of the events by presenting Mudd as an innocent figure whose  unjust imprisonment is met with saintly forbearance. Despite several moments of  racial caricature, The Prisoner of Shark  Island is both nightmarish and ultimately quite moving, redeemed by the  film’s chronicling of the relationship between Mudd and one of his former  slaves, whose devotion to each to the other is tested by hardship.
Saturday March 13 at 7pm
Wagon Master
With Ben Johnson, Harry Carey, Jr., Joanne Dru
US 1950, 35mm, b/w, 86 min.
One of Ford’s unsung masterpieces, Wagon Master at first seems a
variation of Stagecoach, with another motley assortment of character types  embarking on a perilous journey through the Wild West. Wagon Master takes on a Fellinian picaresque quality in the almost  musical combination, separation and recombination of the various groups formed  when two young cowboys cross paths with a Mormon wagon train, a traveling  theater troupe and a gang of outlaws. Wagon  Master exhibits that lyrical sense of the everyday so often encountered in  postwar filmmaking and usually labeled “neorealist” not only in its episodic  narrative but also in the relaxed framing of its images. One of Ford’s  favorites, Wagon Master can be seen  as the beginnings of the revisionist Western in its espousal of the idea that  the West was always multicultural and a haven for outcasts, individualists and  the oppressed. Preserved by the Library of Congress.
Saturday March 13 at 9pm
The Fugitive
With Henry Fonda, Dolores Del Rio, Pedro Armendariz
US 1947, 35mm, b/w, 104 min.
Among Ford’s least known yet deeply memorable major works  is his beautifully stylized adaptation of Graham Greene’s celebrated 1940 novel The Power and the Glory - a gripping  allegory about religious faith and the State which follows the final desperate  days of the last priest in an unnamed Latin American country where religion has  been declared illegal. Shot entirely in Mexico by the preeminent Mexican  cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, The  Fugitive accents and adds nuance to its stark tale of guilt and difficult  retribution by returning to the Expressionist lighting and shadows favored by  Ford earlier in his career. Henry Fonda brings an unusual pathos and humanity  to his portrayal of the whiskey priest struggling to understand the moral and  spiritual turpitude of his country and religion.
Sunday March 14 at 7pm
The Grapes of Wrath
With Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine
US 1940, 35mm, b/w, 129 min.
Print courtesy of the ConstellationCenter and the Academy Film Archive
Ford’s riveting adaptation of Steinbeck’s classic novel  of “Okie” farmers made destitute by the Depression and the Dust Bowl is  considered one of the very few politically radical works of studio-era  Hollywood. Although Ford envisioned the film as a character study - a portrait  of a struggling family - rather than an open attack on capitalism, his  adaptation faithfully retains the book’s hard-eyed look at the exploitation of  the rural poor. Like so much of his thirties work, The Grapes of Wrath reveals Ford’s then-ardent Leftist populism.  The suffering of the Joad family as it marches slowly toward California is  given iconic status by Ford’s monumental compositions, by the remarkable  performances from a talented cast and by pioneering cinematographer Gregg  Toland’s successful fusion of Ford’s expressionist aesthetic and  photojournalist realism.
Monday March 15 at 7pm
The Quiet Man
With John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald
US 1952, 35mm, color, 129 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
One of the biggest commercial successes of his career, The Quiet Man remains among Ford’s – and  John Wayne’s – most beloved works today. The tale of an American escaping from  his country, and from a dark past, to make a new home in his ancestral Ireland  was an intensely personal project for Ford, nurtured by the director since the  late 1930s. Ford’s fascination with small town community and his own Irish  heritage animates the film’s almost anthropological attention to the smallest  details of domestic space, rural and religious customs and vernacular language.  A wonderfully expressive color film, The  Quiet Man uses its vivid Technicolor palette to lend a radiant, dreamlike  quality to the lushly verdant Irish landscapes captured within it. The film’s predominantly  nostalgic tone has led many to overlook its darker and subtly critical  undertones - especially with regard to its depiction of the Church - and its  innovative, unusual use of voiceover narration.
Friday March 19 at 7pm
Stagecoach
With John Wayne, Claire Trevor, John Carradine
US 1939, 35mm, b/w, 97 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
Set at the frontier between civilization and wilderness, Stagecoach realizes the Platonic ideal  of the classic Western, with a cast comprised of exemplary stock types—the heroic  cowboy, the villainous outlaw, the fallen woman with a heart of gold, the brave  but fragile wife—and a climax that hangs on a nick-of-time rescue by the  cavalry. Stagecoach’s thrilling cinema  is born from the alchemy that combines all these elements into a story that  provides both variety and closure while assuring a seamless narrative drive. Most  surprising are the striking visual touches – the iconic travelling shot that  introduces John Wayne’s Ringo, and Ford’s expressionistic use of light.
Friday March 19 at 9pm
3 Godfathers
With John Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, Harry Carey, Jr.
US 1949, 35mm, color, 106 min.
Ford’s offbeat Biblical allegory reimagines the three  Magi as a trio of slightly befuddled bank robbers, “badmen” notably out of  place in an increasingly civilized West. John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and newcomer Harry  Carey, Jr. share a wonderfully naturalistic repartee as the not-so-wise men who  unexpectedly become fathers to an infant son at the seemingly worst possible  time. Despite its comic touches, 3  Godfathers is tinged with a mournful tone that anticipates a major theme of  1960s and 1970s revisionist Westerns - the inexorable death of the frontier.  Filmed largely in Death Valley, 3  Godfathers renders the torturous heat-warped landscape of the unforgiving  desert into scorching Technicolor.
Saturday March 20 at 7pm
Drums Along the Mohawk
With Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, Edna May Oliver
US 1939, 35mm, color, 104 min.
A kind of pre-Western, Drums Along the Mohawk shifts the location of the frontier between  civilization and wilderness from the Southwest to the Northeast—upstate New  York during the Revolutionary War, to be precise. In gorgeous Technicolor, Ford  presents the story of a young couple trying to make a home in New York’s Mohawk  Valley in 1776. Lindsay Anderson notes that the years of 1939 and 1940  constitute Ford’s rediscovery of America, with Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk and The Grapes of Wrath coming in the wake  of a number of films set abroad, and especially a rediscovery of the American  past. Others have pointed out that Drums should be understood in the context of the American present of 1939. Drums Along the Mohawk reveals a  snapshot of American anxiety about the possibility of war on the eve of  conflict in Europe. The British are not the primary villains; the Mohawk are.  Despite Claudette Colbert being perhaps too glamorous to be a pioneer’s wife,  the film abounds with moments that emphasize the important role such women had.  (Andrew Sarris identifies Drums as  the first panel in a matriarchal trilogy, followed by How Green Was My Valley and Seven  Women.)
Saturday March 20 at 9pm
The Sun Shines Bright
With Charles Winninger, Arleen Whelan, Stepin Fetchit
US 1953, 16mm, b/w, 90 min.
One of Ford’s personal favorites, this rarely screened  late work offers a fascinating vision of Americana that captures the quaint -  and often outright bizarre - charms and disturbing contradictions of small town  Kentucky at the end of the 19th century. Returning once more to the  figure of Judge Priest, famously played by Will Rogers in two Ford films of the  1930s, The Sun Shine Bright centers  its complex cross-section of the town’s many splintered factions - white and  African-American, male and female - around the figure of the level-headed and  temperate lawman. Punctuated by the lyrical passage of the steamboat, the film  interweaves multiple storylines into a polyphonic and choral portrait of a  provincial community reluctantly harboring the seeds of inevitable change.
Sunday March 21 at 7pm
How Green Was My Valley
Directed by John Ford.
With Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp
US 1941, 35mm, b/w, 118 min.
Print courtesy of the UCLA Film and Television Archive
It would be no exaggeration to call Ford’s multiple-Oscar  winning saga of a struggling Welsh mining family one of the most emotionally  resonant and genuinely moving films of the studio era. Like The Grapes of Wrath the year before, How Green Was My Valley is a triumph of  expressive realism that gives emotional depth and dignity to those suffering social  injustice, rendering vivid and authentic the difficult lives and plain  pleasures of the coal miners and their families. In his first starring role,  child actor Roddy MacDowell poignantly captures the awkward, fragile innocence  of youth in his portrayal of a wide-eyed, precocious romantic pulled abruptly  into adulthood. Originally assigned to William Wyler, Ford was – incredibly -  only appointed at the very last minute to what would become one of his best-known  works. Preservation funded by The Film Foundation.
Monday March 29   at 7pm
Air Mail
With Ralph Bellamy, Gloria Stuart, Pat O’Brien
US 1932, 35mm, b/w, 84 min.
A rousing tale of the bonds and rituals within a  community of risk-taking pilots, Air Mail anticipates Howard Hawks’ iconic films of daring fliers, Ceiling Zero and Only Angels  Have Wings. Ford’s film, in contrast, is steeped in a sober atmosphere of  menace and gloom, darker than the devil-may-care nobility embodied by Hawks’  pilot heroes. Air Mail’s dramatic  heart lies in the feisty pilots’ oscillation between alpha-male competition  amongst themselves and bonding in the face of the stark dangers of their job.  Pre-Code immorality is radiantly emblazoned on the film - when, for example,  the widow of one pilot immediately takes up with another. But Air Mail is perhaps most notable as the  one time that Ford, so influenced and enamored by German expressionism and F.W.  Murnau, worked with Karl Freund, the great expressionist cinematographer who  shot several of Murnau’s masterpieces. Preserved by the Library of Congress.
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