And my 10,000th film on Letterboxd (!!!? What the front barn door, really) is..... John Ford's WAGON MASTER ! I am, as of now, a Master of my Wagon... of Cinema!! WAAHHHOOO... ok I'll be quiet now and watch the thing..... (85 minutes later) Wow. What a *great* choice I happened on here!
Wagon Master is one of the most complex Westerns of its or any era of American film - and sublime in its complexity because of its simplicity. I came to this film, directed by John Ford (and co-written by his son Patrick with Ford mainstay Frank Nugent), much later than I did many of his hollowed and repeatedly canonized works.
I am actually glad I came to this as a slightly older (frankly almost middle aged) movie watcher, as I think after seeing much of his work (and many others in the genre), it seems to me a surprisingly sophisticated in what Ford chooses to show and not shoe, and how he uses the frame and compositions for maximum impact. One can say the vista's and locations look gorgeous, but you can get that with a postcard.
What he does is give you so much in the faces and actions of the people in what they do, from a woman putting on shoes offered by Ben Johnson to the wagon trail converging on that body of water to get their much needed sustenance. I'm not saying I wouldn't have appreciated the scope or performances as a younger watcher, but there's this total confidence and, of course, a rousing sense of humor to balance out the more harrowing parts of the story, that is wholly rewarding.
What amazes me too is how economical he and the script-writers are with the storytelling, giving us just what we need to get things moving, and yet there is a very large swath of what is in the iconography and visual grammar of the West: the wagons, the heroes who give their time and energy to bring g the horses, the pioneer spirit, the Native American tribespeople (who don't give much fuss once they find out its Mormons, who they call lesser thieves than average white men), the swing-yer-partner dancing, and then the dark side of the West with the Clegg family gang, appearing as they do at around the 40 minute mark, this after their appearance in the exciting and impactful prolonged, looking weathered and bearded and just mean. But they almost don't have to say anything; if this were a silent film, we'd get the message right away that this is *bad news* and things are about to get worse before it gets better.
Everything that Ford is showing us is part of the mastery of his control as a storyteller, and he and his screenwriting duo still don't forget the wonderful pleasures that come from what is in the best traditions of what one hopes to see in a great story; to put it another way, the part early on where Ben Johnson, or was it Harry Carey Jr, does that whistle as soon as the man gets on the horse and it goes buck wild... that will come back around at a crucial moment much later, I'd never say when but when it happens you'll have that recognition of "Oooh!" It never gets old.
At the same time, for all of the terror that comes into the story with this Clegg family, he and the writers still give this monstrous bunch layers of humanity and nuance, like when the one Clegg son asks the Doctor what it says on his wagon (because he "can't read too good," says a bit to me), or how one can almost, for a moment, think that they might be okay and not be as rotten as they appeared in the prologue... until they become the proverbial snakes that Johnson's Travis Blue describes.
Moreover, this drama is balanced out by the great warmth and humor of the first half of the film, where we really get immersed into this group of wagon travelers - the Mormon part is slightly tempered to not have the more, shall we say, controversial aspects of Mormonism at the time, though I may have forgotten on a first viewing whether this was set visa vi Mormon reformation - that we get such rich, natural moments of behavior and characterization for seemingly minor characters (a little fight breaks out that is classic Ford macho commentary), and then there's everything between Travis and Joanne Dru's Denver, where their dialog and back and forth is this congenial yet salty give and take (the part where she has used up a lot of the water and he has a talk with her is just about a perfect scene, especially how she is set on the wagon looking down on him partially covered).
It's classic Western entertainment, but there is rugged and emotional poetry to how Ford uses visual language. Sometimes a "poetic" style can still fit into a populist form, and this is a strong and potent example; when he has those shots of the travelers walking along on fooy, rather slowly yet not without some purpose, as the sing-song goes along, there's something that feels Elemental to what not just a Western is about but what the people who traveled went through. It doesn't need to be spoken and doesn't have to be, it's there in their body language and their placement in the frame - similar to those basic but fundamental shots of Johnson and Carey, in medium profile, as they decide to lead the Wagon trail and sing a little of their song, as if they've known it most of their lives.
This is the kind of riveting cinema that communicates a version of events, in this case the Old West, where there is Good and their is Evil, and yet within those broad strokes of how the Good are just out to find their plot of land to settle to live under God's grace and the Evil are just scoundrels out to get whats theirs via the power of physical violence, there's delicate strokes within those broad ones if that makes sense, all made up of one of Ford's best ensembles (you can almost forget what a pos Ward Bond was in real life with his portrayal of a fundamentally decent man, on the flipside Charles Kemper as Uncle Shiloh is as vivid as any villain in 1950s cinema). I'll be one of those to say it: I know The Searchers is the more 'important' and influential Western of Ford's, but I personally like this more for its inspiring depiction of humanity.
