OH GIVE ME A HOME
I grew up in an Irish Catholic town. We called ourselves the calvary as we galloped to the rescue of the wagon train.
In addition, I offer the following as archive for the historian of film. The first two times I went to the movies my mother took me. The first was to Bambi . It was a horrifying experience for me, as it was for many others of my generation. But I got over it, and, in fact, attribute my taste for venison to the experience -- provisionally, pending further analysis. The second time, my mother apparently couldn't get a baby sitter, for she took me to see Passage to Marseille . That too was an awesome experience. I was seven years old at the time. This time I'm not joking. Eat your heart out, Scorsese. My introduction to the noir was as good as it ever could be. I can still feel and smell that movie. Furthermore, in those days the movies ran continuously, and you could come in any time ("This is where I came in."). We came in at the battle scene on the ship. I'm the only person I know who can follow the entire plot of Passage in all its tunnelings through nested flashbacks, and make sense of the whole thing. The experience of youth recollected in maturity.
Beyond these two formative experiences, the family film outing for us was a trip to the big city on a Sunday, or a trip to the really big city any day it could be arranged. In the big city we saw the films of Red Skelton and Esther Williams. The Skelton films had a special importance for our family, for Billy DeWolfe, who always seemed to appear in them (as Mrs. Murgatroid, of course) had gone to school with my uncle. For about forty years that was my closest connection to the film industry.
We went to the really big city to see Bing Crosby.
We also went to one or the other, I can't remember which, to see John Ford's calvary movies. I saw all three on first release. I know that Shirley Temple was in Fort Apache , and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon was the one in color, but I still see Shirley in color in my mind's eye.
My mother was a bigot: second generation, to my knowledge, but I suspect the tradition had far deeper roots. She was certainly deeply dedicated. In the last years of her life, when she'd been popped into the crisper with a head full of spaghetti, the last coherent words she managed to produce were in filthy vituperation of the people who were trying to care for her. Before she lost her marbles she'd been much more discrete.
The caretakers were black, but the range of the bigotry was far more extensive than that. Among the most scorned were the Irish. The phrase of dismissal was "As Irish as Paddy's Pig," a stock expression. The face that went with it was the real message. But there were also real puzzles. There were Irish faces all over the social map. My father's family was full of them. I didn't get to see very many of them. My cousins, whom I dearly wanted to hang out with, headed for the hills at the first signs of my mother's approach. They were never home when I got there. But there was Uncle Jeff, as legitimately Irish as can be. He was in high favor. Everybody in the family loved him, without the least hint of the standard snubs and dismissals. He was the classiest guy, in the best senses of the word, I knew then, and among the classiest I've ever known.
But there it is, class. My mother and grandmother had a deep, if confused, sense of their own superiority. If it seemed that the world were being sorted by race, religion, or ethnic origin, that was because all these were prima facie marks of inferiority. If one demonstrated a rise above that inferiority (as did, in my grandmother's view, Senator Joe McCarthy) then one was accepted. Bigotry, snobbery, and self-congratulation all swim in the same waters.
Now, it's always tricky to introduce class when you're talking about the US. The myth is that we're classless, and the theorists tell us that there are no decisive ways to define class for us. Well, the myths are bullshit, and the theorists are right. Even the people most tuned to class couldn't define it to save their souls. There are reasons for that. Nonetheless, as long as people want to think of themselves in terms of class, there are classes, structuring patterns of behavior and association. No theoretical prohibitions are remotely relevant to the existence of classes. Generations of immigrants and imports from all over the world have installed a system of classes among us in the US. A lot of the time they've brought the sensibilities of class with them as they came here. For example, the distinction between lace curtain Irish and shanty Irish came over from the ould sod. More graphically, my grandmother spent many years doing piece work in the local shoe industry. At the next bench, doing exactly the same thing was a guy who became rather famous: Frank Sacco. I'd bet my entire patrimony (and matrimony, if that didn't mean something else) that she never so much as passed the time of day with him -- even before he had the misfortune to become famous.
John Ford knew all this. He knew about the system of exclusions and dismissals that structured the assimilation of the Irish in America. He spent a lot of time exploring that space. And of course in his hands the space became a mythic space, often the space of the west.
Class of 1948
Fort Apache is a brutally bitter movie. Even one of Ford's most beautiful uses of Monument Valley contributes, by its very beauty, to the overall ugliness of the whole. The ugliness is deliberate and studied: not a movie-making fault, but a thoroughly worked out narrative choice. What Ford wanted to show wasn't pretty, however common and important. So he insisted on the ugliness.
Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) and his daughter Philadelphia (a post-pubic Shirley Temple) are in a stagecoach on the way to Fort Apache where he's to take over command. For Thursday, the assignment is an exile, and a dashing of his hopes for military glory. In terms of technical psychological theory, he's an egocentric prick, and this is established in about three seconds of screen time. The main theme of the movie runs along two connected ironies. First, the assignment will indeed establish Thursday's glory, and even make him a legend. Second, legend and glory will be undeserved, a fraudulent and willful misrepresentation of stubborn stupidity and egocentric prickishness. How could such a thing be possible?
Well, first we have to understand the Army. An army is first of all a bureaucracy, and second of all a fighting force. Otherwise it couldn't do its job. That's well understood. Officers are, in general, the major bureaucrats. The key imperative is military discipline. Everything must be built around it. Thursday is a world class bureaucrat: a strict letter-of-the-law Army man in every detail. Not only must a good army have that discipline, it must also have the reputation for that discipline so it will factor into an enemies calculation of strength. An army wants to be feared.
By itself, those simple well known facts about armies are enough to account for Thursday's fate and legend. They constitute a sort of familiar musical instrument on which Ford can play his several themes. The themes don't have anything intrinsically to do with the army. The chief theme is bigotry.
As a hateful unsympathetic character, hateful beyond anything military discipline demands, Thursday can be made even more hateful by his vicious and haughty disrespect for Indians and others. As the commanding officer, on the other hand, he's perfectly positioned to show how the bigotry generated by ego can be implemented, sanctified, and protected by bureaucratic institutions. For instance, he despises Meacham the Indian agent. He knows that Cochise is telling him the straight story as he details the effect that the venal self-serving Indian agent had on men women and children alike in their life on the reservation. But Meacham is a government "official," so Thursday can fall back on his official duty to sneer at Cochise and brutally dismiss him.
The Army offers a particularly convenient context for exhibiting this behavior, but any bureaucracy allowing the invocation of duty will do the trick. Hell, you can get the same treatment with the same self-sanctimonious certainty at the help desk at computer services. The cold bureaucratic presence is everywhere, and everywhere ready and able to be mustered to the service of bigotry. Some of my academic colleagues are really good at it. Ford is really good at showing it to us.
Of course Thursday is set up all over the place. He has a marriageable daughter, so it's very easy to show the complex interaction of snobbery and fatherly duty in rejecting her choice of a mate. Ford leaves no stone unturned. The choice of a mate is Lieutenant O'Rourke, fresh from West Point. You'd think he'd be just what Dad would be looking for. 'Fraid not. The class and race system has its dividing lines among the officers as well. This one is really extreme. Lieutenant Rourke's father turns out, lo and behold, to be the Sergeant-major of Fort Apache, a super-dedicated career soldier. In a wonderful exchange between him and Thursday we find that O'Rourke's son the Lieutenant got his shot at the USMA on a Presidential appointment. "Oh," says Thursday, I thought they only went to sons of officers." "Yes sir," says Sergeant-major O'Rourke. "But," says Thursday, I thought that they were only given to officers who had received the Congressional Medal of Honor." "Yes sir," says Sergeant-major O'Rourke. Those testamonials aren't good enough for Colonel Thursday. After his death they're plenty good enough for daughter Philadelphia.
Why in the world is her name "Philadelphia?" This is played out as one of the famed long winded jokes Ford loved. The short answer to the question is "Because she's not Boston." Ford was incredibly interested (for personal and family reasons) in the question of Irish assimilation in Boston and the surrounding New England area. We have to see the situation in a little more depth. For this we have to travel further west, to the South Seas islands.
As a gentle reminder, I was born and raised about 20 miles south of Boston, Ford about 100 miles north of Boston. For such as we, Boston was the really big city. Its ethos dominated. It took me a lifetime move to, um, Philadelphia and a couple of years in Rome to give me real perspective on my growing up. Ford, got his perspective partly through his command of mythic displacement. When he wanted to explore the issues of race, class and the Irish in Boston, he moved them to Haleakaloha. We need the bare bones of Donovan's Reef .
Three WWII vets of the Pacific campaigns have remained attached to the beautiful island on which they fought. Guns Donovan (John Wayne) runs the saloon "Donovan's Reef." Dr. William Dedham (Jack Warden) has not only set up a hospital on the island, but is also the doctor for neighboring islands, where he makes house calls. The third friend, Boats Gilhooley (Lee Marvin), roams the world, but always manages to get back to the island on his "birthday," December 7. As the movie opens he is in the complicated process of arriving.
Meanwhile, back in the Hub, Dedham's grown up daughter Amelia (Elizabeth Allen) is in the boardroom of the ancestral family shipping business, fighting for control. Dr. Dedham is in line to inherit, but he's been AWOL so long that the native Bostonians on the board are getting restless. Amelia's mother is long dead, and Amelia has grown up to be a very capable and savvy young business woman. Circumstances of the fight for control dictate a trip for her to Haleakaloha.
Circumstances in the Haleakaloha branch of the Dedham family, meanwhile, have become complicated since the war. The widower Dedham has taken the Polynesian queen of the island to wife. From this union have emerged three children: half-sisters and half-brother to Amelia. None of this has reached the ears of the Boston branch of the family. The doctor has been busy, and so on, and never gotten around to letting them know.
Now (to step all over the narrative rhythms of a beautifully made little movie) all the characters in the play of race and class are in place. Any ancillary personnel are on call on site: Chinese, French, and you name it are there to be plucked for the poly-ethnic parade. Colors classes and ethnicities are carefully drawn. Each character is made to display characteristic, one might even say stereotypical behavior. Gilhooley is a brawling lower class Mick from Fall River, but might as well be from South Boston. He's the Sergeant Quincannon or Mulcahy normally played by Victor McLaglan. Amelia is a classic patrician snob from Beacon Hill or environs. She has the same easy certainty of her superiority Thursday had. Most importantly, she firmly believes in her right to insult those who don't have the decency to be as she would like them to be. Don't forget. Boston began as the seat of a Puritan theocracy. The habits of mind outlived the institutions. Gilhooley and Amelia are one set of stereotypical opposites. She thinks him beneath contempt; Ford makes him one of the Three Kings: the King of America.
Amelia and her eldest half-sister Lelani, heir to the Polynesian throne and the cultural commitments that go with it have their oppositions too: an aggressive monotheism on one side, a loving tolerant polytarianism on the other, for example. But they're also very much alike, so the oppositions can never be expressed any more deeply than the casual paternalism of Amelia.
Donovan, and Dedham are complex characters, the first potentially another Gilhooley, the second a potential Amelia , but neither would be happy with the stereotype, and both have broken from their potential niches.
Let the reconciliations begin.
Reconciliation there will be. This is a comedy, and even a fairy tale; not the near classic tragedy of Fort Apache . There are two keys to the reconciliation. One is the overcoming of Amelia's bigotry through Donovan and Dedham, the two mediators. The other is family.
Unlike the others, who are all caught one way or another in the tangle of bigotry class and snobbery, Donovan and Dedham are already pretty well out of the tangle. Of course if Dedham were really all the way out he'd have taken his three youngest kids back to Boston for a visit. But, then, as he says, he is too sick and tired of Boston to have anything to do with it. And if Donovan were all the way out the back of his neck wouldn't get so red when the snobs dis him. He's keenly aware of his place and attempts of others to put him in it. On the other hand, he's "man enough" to be able to compete with Amelia (in swimming, for example) and lose gracefully.
So Donovan and Dedham both have enough pride in themselves -- ego strength, in today's jargon, to have their head up out of the mud. They're both successes, in their own terms and the terms of the other. Both are proud of their war record. This is their bond with Gilhooley. Beyond that, Dedham's success, and pride in success is the most obvious. He has the hospital and the love and respect of his flock (more common for doctors when they made house calls). Furthermore he has a beautiful new loving family. (The fact that he's too good to be true serves to remind us we're dealing with a fairy tale.) He easily gains Amelia's deep respect, and this virtually forces her to broaden that respect to the others.
What about the saloon keeper, though? If ever there were a symbol of the inferior classes, the saloon is it. In this age of the poshy jet-setty bar it's hard to believe, but when I was a kid there were two kinds of people, my friend: those who drank in bars, and those who drank at home; and those who drank in bars were the ignorant lower classes. That's what Amelia thinks and to all intents and purposes says. In the eventual happy ending, the final element of her reconciliation with Donovan is that he's given his bar to Gilhooley. It's now Gilhooley's Reef . Of course this scenario was played out ad tedium in All in the Family . Cheers was more in the modern mode.
Donovan, however, is not just a saloon keeper. He owns boats, and, as he says to Amelia, is in fact a competitor of Dedham Shipping, on a modest scale. That does two things for her: it bumps him up a class or two, and, given her competitive streak, it's sexually exciting as well. Donovan also enters the circle of respect. He's not a bigot. He shares Dedham's world in Dedham's ecumenical terms. He's "Uncle Guns" to the children, who love him dearly, and to others as tolerant as we would expect a saloon keeper to be. So he's already a deeply entrenched part of Amelia's family even before he meets her. His uncly age and understanding is part of his attraction for her.
And this brings us to the core of Ford's more than optimistic fable. It's in and through family that reconciliations take place. The island community is an extended family with healing powers.
Married to the Army
There are families at Fort Apache too. At the fort it takes tragedy and the change of generations to get the reconciliation job done. At Fort Apache life is led in the ritualized and regulated bigotry of the Army. It could hardly be otherwise. Families have to be very lucky to confine their problems of reconciliation to a scope small enough and circumstances congenial enough to fit the compass of their healing powers. The mind boggling heterogeneity of America is far beyond that scope.
Armies aren't families, and could never be. Not only are they too big, but the conditions of allegiance aren't right. The army can be a substitute in some ways for a family, but that's a different matter. One of the tricks a family is traditionally supposed to perform is to enable growth and the development of independence in kids without making it necessary for them to get out of the family. Never mind how infrequent or difficult this is. Never mind the traditional language of adolescent rebellion. They just point up the real job. The family is a sort of an end in itself -- worth caring for and preserving, and also a means, enabling its members to develop and grow. The image of a family and its traditions remaining rigidly the same over time has to be replaced by an image where the family as a temporal unity can itself grow while nurturing the growth of its members by its stability. Well, at least that's the ideal. Ford gives us exactly that ideal in the O'Rourke family. Their success in these terms is absolutely exemplary: a son fresh out of West Point to follow in his father's illustrious footsteps, and move beyond. In fact, a good marriage with Philadelphia will further enable that growth and development; and the implication is that it eventually does, with Lieutenant O'Rourke and Philadelphia united in two traditions of military honor. However, that can't go smoothly. The bigotry of Thursday stands in the way. We know that the course of love never runs smooth, but a sacrifice of both fathers to the gods of war seems a little harsh.
So we have a courtship tangled in family and army. Ford pursues this in the other cavalry westerns as well. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon , Olivia (Joanne Dru) is courted by two lieutenants, Flint Cohill (John Agar) and Pennell (Harry Carey Jr.). Pennell is of the upper crust, and wants out of the army as soon as possible; Cohill is a down to earth career man. Olivia is ill suited to army life, and this is the major plot motivater. Capt. Nathan Brittles (John Wayne) leads an ill fated mission that fails because of his need to protect Olivia as they try to send her safely back where she belongs. In the outcome, both Olivia and Pennell become "Army," and Cohill gets the girl. I wish it didn't have to sound so pat.
The courtship in Rio Grande is much more interesting -- or, could be if Ford weren't in such a hurry to get on to other projects. Wayne's cavalry captain in this one is Kirby Yorke. (Notice the "e." If this is the Kirby York (sic) of Fort Apache, he has a terrible case of amnesia.) His son, fresh from flunking out of West Point has arrived on the frontier as a mere trooper. Hot on his heels is his mom Kathleen, determined to buy his way out and take him home. The parents both court and clash (a tradition we'll get to when we talk about the Irish). To complicate matters, Yorke was in command of the Yankees who burned down Kathleen's family plantation. The courtship is not an easy one. It does, on the other hand, spread out all the tensions between family and army for all to see.
You know, when you remember that nearly every American courtship from the '20's on through the '40's was carried out between couples sitting (at least when the usher came around) in the movie house or the drive-in, it's no surprise that courtships show up all the time in films. This also accounts for the rap "hollywood" takes for "happy endings." Think of it this way. Courting couples (in a much more chaste time than the present) had a stake in the emotional impact of a film far greater than any intellectual or artistic consideration. If you were a guy, what mood would you want your woman to be in when you escorted her back home? Sometimes a nice sentimental teary ending might set a mood, but more generally you'd like her to be feeling all romantic and happy. On the other side, if you were a woman, then you wouldn't mind thoughts of happy companionship and marriage to be bobbing around on the surface of your swain's libido. Consider the following anecdote John Ford recounts about his The Plough and the Stars (1937). ""After I'd finished the picture, another studio head said, 'Why make a picture where a man and woman are married? The main thing about pictures is love or sex. Here you've got a man and woman married at the start -- who's interested in that?'" Actually, the answer to that question is "John Ford and a lot of other married people.", but they were likely to be busy with the family at home. Courting couples were big at the box office, but marriage is in part a long sequence of reconciliations, so the courtship of Kirby Yorke and Kathleen surely struck a note for the married folk.
You also have to remember the timing. All through the late '40's men were returning from the war. The courtship rate was high. War had delayed the rhythms of courtship for a lot of people, as had the depression a decade before. Courting to the tune of a cavalry western? How many women had photos of their man in uniform still sitting on their dressers? Around her neck she wore a yellow ribbon. She wore it for her lover who was in the cavalry.
But there's another way to look at the picture. I think what happened was that the sensitivities to bigotry, race, class, snobbery, and so on that were part of Ford from the beginning got stirred, not shaken, by his experiences in WWII. It wasn't really clear that the myths of patriotism were going to produce the reality of community in the post-war world. The witch hunts of the late forties and early fifties certainly tended to show the opposite. By 1948 it was clear that some turf had to be found where this problem could be explored. So there's an answer to why the Ford western from Fort Apache on moves from the authentic west Ford was earlier trying to capture to the mythic space. As I never tire of saying, blacks had high hopes that the comradery and faithful service in the war would be the opening they needed for fair entry into the American mainstream. Their hopes were both shaken and stirred, and their experience became an important source of the civil rights movement. The situation was all the more worrying for Ford since his own patriotism was so very deep.
Patriotism and war have one certain consequence, and a lot of uncertain ones. The certain consequence is that when the war ends (if it ever does) deep hostility will remain to be reconciled. I'm driving along the interstate across Virginia one day: in the right hand lane; 60 miles an hour in a long line of cars in the right hand lane going 60 miles an hour; cars passing in the left lane. I look in my rearview mirror and there's lights flashing. I pull over and get officially notified that I've been driving five miles an hour over the speed limit. I end up standing outside the car stretching while I get written up, and thinking to myself what an idiot I am for using an enemy number plate in a war zone.
For all the historians' ink spilled on the War between the States, it's still not certain what it was all about, and what it accomplished. Oh yes. It did end slavery in its previously instituted form. The subsequent history of racism and bigotry all over the US is a good indicator of how deep that went. My thirty dollar war wound is a frivolous but telling indicator of the residual hostility. Ford tried in the cavalry films, to the point of the absurd, to urge the reconciliation of those hostilities. For this the army has a different role than it had in the regulation and ritualization of bigotry.
While armies are first about bureacracy and second about war, the system of mutual respect among the warriors has to put the fighting first. This is underlined in Fort Apache in the course of developing our view of Thursday's bigotry. Thursday is an afficionado of strategy and tactics. He rolls Alexander the Great and Napoleon around on his tongue just as he does his cigars. He refuses even to consider Cochise as a stategist; dismisses him out of hand. Of course this leads directly to his death, and indirectly to his glory.
Thursday is willing, though, to discuss an important paper on strategy written by a young West Pointer by the name of Lee. He gives it a pretty good grade, but insists on referring to the author as Colonel Lee, not as General [Robert E.] Lee. In this as in all other issues of bigotry he stands alone. So issues of respect are issues of military ability, and you can't have military ability (except on paper) unless you have wars. But wars aren't chess games, or even one-on-one on the playground. In wars people die, lives are irreplaceably altered, hopes are blown away, hatreds are kindled and fanned. So, except over a long long expanse of time, respect and reconciliation aren't going happen -- except in romantic dream or aristocratic ritual. So Ford, of course, gives us the romantic dream, and, because we loathe Thursday, we may bite. He gives us the aristocratic ritual as well. Renoir thought those days were over, or more accurately, that they had never existed.
By 1948 everybody who wanted to know knew about the holocaust, the stalags and the gulags. They had a pretty accurate idea about how many people died in the defense of Stalingrad. For goodness' sake, Capra had made his finest documentary about that. Everybody knew how many had died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The age of thermonuclear weapons and the arms race were well along. So the issue of the genocidal capacity of modern warfare was in the air. When we kids weren't playing cowboys and Indians or the sport of the season we played civil defense. Klaatu Barada Nikto. These times, like Thursday, spoke with forked tongue. I grew up with the words "peace" and "war" hopelessly tangled together. They still are.
As I said, I grew up in an Irish Catholic town. It took me years to figure out what an inconvenience my mother's attitudes had been for my social assimilation: so many inexplicable exclusions; unexpected blindsidings. But as we'll see, the situation was complex. In fact, given the situation, I ended up being treated pretty well by nice people. I eventually had to get out, though.
See, for example, C Dyke, "Bourdieuean Dynamics: The American Middle Class Self-Constructs" in Richard Shusterman, ed. Bourdieu: A Critical Reader ; Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1999. Pp 192-213; and Chuck Dyke and Carl Dyke, "Identities: The Dynamical Dimensions of Diversity" in Philip Alperson, ed. Diversity and Community: An Interdisciplinary Reader; Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2002. Pp 65-87.
The "issues" to be brought out all have deep connections to Ford himself. There are so many good sources of biographical material on Ford that it doesn't make any sense for me to dwell on the autobiographical aspects. Similarly, as usual, I won't dwell on technique. The technical analysis of Ford's film making constitutes an apparently never-ending literature in its own right.
Of all the books on Ford's movies I took a look at, I decided to work seriously with three: The John Ford Movie Mystery by Andrew Sarris (Bloomington, Indiana University Press 1975); John Ford by Peter Bogdanovich (Berkeley, University of California Press 1978); and John Ford: the man and his films by Tag Gallagher (Berkeley, University of California Press 1986). I decided on the Sarris because he himself is an important part of the history of the movies; on Bogdanovich because his was the butt everybody seemed to be bussing; and Gallagher because it showed up for cheap in a sale catalogue. I liked the Gallagher the best, and learned the most from it. The others are also good books in their different ways. Bogdanovich has the famous interviews. I suspect that a lot of the really good stuff on Ford is scattered through the journals, a search of which is heroism far beyond the deserts of what I'm doing here.
Lawyers are the other major bureaucrats, and Ford sets up the same situation with Ransom Stoddard in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance . That film and Fort Apache are even more parallel than the commentators have noticed. The themes played off the set-up are different.
In addition to the pun, Dedham is a fairly well-to-do bedroom suburb of Boston.
For those of you who are too young, "house calls" were visits to the houses of the sick by the local GP. He carried a little black bag and administered to you in your own bed while your mother hovered around anxiously. Measles was about four visits; chicken pox two; and so forth.
We had no real inkling that there was a third place: the club. The stodgy traditional club is probably one of the models for the poshy yuppy bar.
Some critics insist he is. They weren't paying attention. He mocks the bigotry of others, winces at the bigotry of those who want to move the children, and does it reluctantly for entirely other reasons -- respect for Dedham among them, and otherwise seems out of place in the world of richly varied bigotry around him.
Philosophers will start crooning Hegelian mantras about here. We don't do that sort of thing.
And in The Horse Soldiers where the potential courtship of Colonel Marlowe (John Wayne) and Hannah Hunter (Constance Towers) is made impossible by the war.
Caesar's words as he crossed the Rubicon: Alea jacta est , "the die is cast." The title of this section can be loosely translated "We screw everybody just the way we screwed the Indians."