April 24th 2013. Pick Of the Day.

Film Forum's weeklong exultation of Jean-Pierre Melville's UN FLIC spends its last two days at the cinematic temple on West Houston. Alain Delon hunts down the mastermind behind a criminal ring that may or may not be nightclub owner and best pal Richard Crenna. Catherine Deneuve is the woman that comes between them. I never get tired of awful puns. Alas, I pass this up as today's Pick. Without tears, bien sur.

The Mid-Manhattan Library's Three Auteurs of World Cinema series fully revs its Fellini gear with tonight's screening of LA STRADA. Recent birthday boy Anthony Quinn portrays the circus strongman who purchases street waif Giulietta Masina, or Missus Fellini, and treats her to a view of the world only a travelling carnival might provide. The film that marked the crossover point between the master's neo-realist and Italian new wave periods. I'd love to pick it but the library doesn't screen prints, and some mighty efforts are being shown in their intended formats this evening. Keep readin'.

Over at MOMA their informative and insanely entertaining series The Weimar Touch, a tribute to the immediate influence the era of German expressionism had on Hollywood filmmaking, breaks out a pair of big guns tonight. First up is Ernst Lubitsch's unequivocal masterpiece TO BE OR NOT TO BE, the man's best effort amongst many in SPITE of the casting of box-office pill Jack Benny, who aside from this classic never quite solved the leap from radio to the big screen. At least Benny got his one 2 hour moment to strut his genius the way it was meant to be cinematically strut. Along with Chaplin no other director who'd enjoyed virtual autonomy and employed a more adult, or European, style post-Hays code dared apply these same gifts in the service of attacking the Third Reich, and Herr Hitler himself, so directly. Chaplin would be met with great acclaim and success. Lubitsch, not so much, although time has proved the greater judge and the Lubitsch, Benny and Carole Lombard effort is now justly regarded as a classic, every bit the product of the famous Lubitsch Touch. I'd take it today but I already took it Monday, so I have to pass, and think I would regardless in favor of a filmmaker even dearer to my heart, and one of the most heartbreaking tales he was ever hired to tell.

I say hired, yes he was. Although he remains every bit the Autuer he was in life, and in direct contrast to his own working definitions, John Ford worked as often for hire as on a personal project. He would always refer to any film he was overseeing as "a job of work". This was the humility expressed by a bull headed Irish-American who could equally force a studio head to finance a vanity project, even going so far as to become that studio head postwar with his own Argosy Picures. To John Ford being a working director was perhaps more important than being a successful director critically or commercially, although those two yardsticks were important indeed. To wit he rarely said no to work, just to salries unbecoming or shooting skeds that interrupted a grand bender. A free agent, he followed his own business instincts, whether they be muse or wallet driven. One studio, however, might claim his loyalty above all others, and has practically done so with their monumental FORD AT FOX collection.

William Fox gave the young Ford his first epic assignment, THE IRON HORSE, the tale of the building of the intercontinental railroad, which resulted in gargantuan box office and cemented the status of the director, already the veteran of dozens of film assignments. Ford would enjoy the liberty of both contract and free agent status during his years at Fox, even once Darryl Zanuck merged his Twentieth Century films with the near bankrupt company. Zanuck dreaded having to work with the notoriously irascable Ford, who ignored studio notes, barred execs from the sets and mostly edited in camera, meaning he'd cut the film in his head before selecting camera setups, which infuriated studio higher ups to no end. When asked once why he wouldn't shoot extra coverage he famously replied, "Why? They'll just use it."

To a Thalberg clone like Zanuck such a man was anathema to his tastes and agenda, and yet routinely when directors departed or projects encountered delay, Ford was a man Zanuck turned to to save the day. Imagine the sheer creative paucity one must have endured by having John Ford as your back-up plan? In the wake of the great success of David O. Selznick's GONE WITH THE WIND Zanuck groomed a pet project, an immensely popular novel set during the Welsh mining strikes of the 20's. Attempting to replicate the nostalgia that made WIND a money printer just a year before he committed a generous budget, planned to shoot in Technicolor with the best production design the industry would allow, and signed one William Wyler to oversee the lush Wales location shoot. Zanuck's visions of toppling his competitor Selznick danced in his head.

Inconveniently WWII broke out properly, and a Wales shoot was scrapped. As the production scrambled to regain its footing it also lost its director, who decided not to wait and took on directing chores of THE LITTLE FOXES instead. Zanuck asked Ford to step in, and suddenly the budget was reduced, Technicolor became gorgeous B&W, and the still-dream project THE QUIET MAN found instead a voice transplated from Ireland to Wales while it waited to bloom fully on its own. It may not have originated with the director, but as markers go it remains quite the signpost, a culmination of themes he'd been exploring for the second great period of his career, and would carry with him to close it out. I'm sorry if I've gushed on, but we're talking about John Ford and one of his greatest works, one that Oscar favored over THE MALTESE FALCON, SUSPICION, and a little movie called CITIZEN KANE, whose director once remarked, "I watch the old masters. And by that I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."

John Ford's HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY screens at 8pm tonight as part of MOMA's Weimar Touch series. A better double bill betwen this and the Lubitsch I dare you to find. G'wan, I'll give ya thirty seconds. Tick tock...

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