Annals of Cinema (DVD Version)

Screw politics, & the horse it rode in on. Seriously, we've had enough. We're lightening up. It's Kultur Time. Take a look at Debbie Reynolds' gams, & mellow out.From The New York Times' DVD column, a review of How The West Was Won, w/ some serious fawning over the John Ford section, "The Civil War." Dig this (Links from The NYT):

“The Civil War” is an exquisite miniature (unfortunately padded out by some battle sequences lifted from “Raintree County,” an earlier MGM Civil War film) that consists of only three scenes: a mother (Ms. Baker) sends a son (Peppard) off to war; the son has a horrible experience as night falls on the battlefield of Shiloh; the son returns and finds that his mother has died. The structure has a musical alternation: day, night, day; exterior, interior, exterior; stillness, movement, stillness. In the first and last scenes the famous Fordian horizon line extends the entire length of the extra-wide Cinerama frame. In the aftermath of the battle the horizon line disappears in darkened studio sets. The sense of the sequence is profoundly antiwar — Generals Sherman and Grant, played by John Wayne and Henry Morgan, briefly appear as a couple of disheveled, self-pitying drunks — and it gradually becomes apparent that the elderly Ford is revisiting one of his early important works, the 1928 drama “Four Sons.” The expressionistic middle sequence, with its studio-built swamp, refers to F. W. Murnau, whose “Sunrise” was one of the great influences on the young Ford, while the open-air sequences that bracket it, with their unmoving camera, long-shot compositions and rootedness in the rural landscape, recall the work of the American pioneer D. W. Griffith. When, in the final panel of Ford’s triptych, a gust of wind tousles Peppard’s hair in the foreground and then continues across to the forest in the middle distance and on to the stand of trees in the most distant background, it seems like a true miracle of the movies: a breath of life, moving over the face of the earth. No less formidable a filmmaker than Jean-Marie Straub has called “The Civil War” John Ford’s masterpiece; for the first time, thanks to this magnificent new edition, I think I know what he’s talking about. Birth, death, rebirth.

Damn. Of course, we've not seen HTWWW ("Won," that's almost amusing.) on the really big screen since 1963 (we've caught it a couple of times on TCM) but if we ever live anywhere again we'll definitely be renting & re-examining it. And for the straight ladies & gay guys in the crowd, here's Jimmy Stewart saying "How" to a redskin. Any one offended yet?