|
Sound comes to John Ford, and he gives a full opera. "A wee bit of war" in 1914, not Flanders where the Scottish regiment marches off to but Peshawar on the verge of upheaval, the captain (Victor McLaglen) is on a secret mission. "A dirty job, at the best." The military hall has bagpipes and clinking glasses, the officer taking his time departing reflects the director's leisurely delectation of image and sound, the opposite space with its own rituals is the colonial city during prayer. (In between, the remarkable sequence of soldiers at the train station amid steam and disembodied voices.) At the root of the conflict is "a woman inflamed with power... a native Joan of Arc," Myrna Loy behind veils, trembling as she watches the undercover galoot wrestling atop a flaming cauldron. A caravan on Khyber Pass for the ringing of the temple bell, into the Cave of the Echoes for a fulminating Piranesi composition. "In these hills, much will be revealed to thee." The tessitura of songs ("Bonnie Laddie," "Home Sweet Home," "Loch Lomond") yields to cawing crows and reverberating screams, a glimpse into a crystal ball frees Ford's camera in a prodigious scan of the battleground. The weight of duty, toujours, strangling romance and answering destruction with destruction. (The contractions are sent up in Mitchell Lewis' courtly-scabrous "gentleman" major, who invokes divine forgiveness while serenely wiping blood off his saber.) "So we're to lose an empire for a woman's desire." Slaughter is literally a blind order, "Auld Lang Syne" cannot quite conceal the scars. The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Gunga Din, The Man Who Would Be King... With David Torrence, Lumsden Hare, David Rollins, Cyril Chadwick, Roy D'Arcy, Claude King, and Francis Ford. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |