Wagon Master

            This week we have the last of our eight films directed by John Ford—Wagon Master. It’s a Western from 1950, and for many of Ford’s most devoted admirers it’s possibly his best film. It tells the story of a pair of young horse traders who agree to guide a Mormon wagon train across unmapped and inhospitable wilderness to a new settlement. Just as you’d expect, they encounter various adventures along the way, including a stranded medicine show troupe, a band of outlaws, and a party of Navajo Indians.

            There’s nothing special about this general idea, which has a long history going back in movies at least as far as The Covered Wagon, a famous Western epic from the silent era. What’s unusual about Wagon Master is that it does without so much of the superstructure of a big Western. As we’ve seen in previous weeks, many of Ford’s postwar Westerns have been a lot less interested in story than in atmosphere and detail, and Wagon Master’s a kind of ultimate example of this. The journey provides the only main storyline, and all the “plot” as such is relegated to the margins or to isolated scenes. So the outlaws, who certainly represent a strong plot interest, don’t even arrive until the movie’s half over; and the theatrical troupe just kind of fades in and out of consciousness as the film proceeds. There are romantic and other subplots, too, but again they never really occupy the centre of the film. It’s true that this kind of picaresque storyline, consisting of a set of adventures strung along an epic journey, has an important history in world literature going back to Homer’s Odyssey and beyond; but it was a relatively rare animal during the Hollywood studio era, when movies usually had to be tightly structured and driven forward relentlessly by plot development.

            An advantage of Wagon Master’s kind of loosely organized storyline is that the movie always has time to stop and smell the flowers, so to speak. For example, the behavioural niceties of the theatrical troupe, with their urban culture incongruously stranded in the desert, are extensively observed; and so are the Mormon Elder’s continual temptations to strong language, and the outlaw patriarch’s chilling combination of politeness and brutality, and a dozen other little parts of the film. The charms of the movie, therefore, often reside in little moments like the spectacle of Ward Bond as the Mormon elder apologizing to a horse, or of the top-hatted actor played by Alan Mowbray blithely filling his basin to shave in the midst of a water-starved desert trek, or the brutal outlaw-chief Uncle Shiloh quoting scripture to the Mormons.

            All these moments are sprinkled into the basic material of the journey itself. Wagons, horses and people slowly, doggedly making their way across an immense open wilderness, or fording rivers, or painfully pulling themselves across impossible mountainous rocky terrain—the sheer physical fact of all this is what really occupies the centre of the movie. It’s the simple pioneer struggle to overcome nature and distance that Wagon Master is celebrating, and like all Ford’s celebrations it’s presented with a combination of down-to-earthness and poetic idealism. The placement of the train in the landscape is always unselfconsciously expressive—expressive of the ordinary heroism of these people and the historic nature of their quest.

            The unique thing about Wagon Master amongst Ford’s later Westerns is the fact that there are no stars in this movie. No John Wayne or Henry Fonda at the centre of things—nobody even close to that kind of fame. Only Joanne Dru as the insolently sexy medicine-troupe girl could be thought of as a leading player, and she was a newcomer. Instead, all the loveable supporting players whom we’ve seen in a dozen Ford movies step to the front of the stage. There are Ward Bond and Russell Simpson as the two Mormon Elders, Jane Darwell as a horn-blowing pioneer woman, Alan Mowbray as the ceremonious British actor, Hank Worden as a half-witted homicidal outlaw, and so on and on all the way down to Ford’s own brother Francis—a prominent actor and director himself during silent days—pounding the drum for the medicine troupe. The two young guides are played by Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr. As we saw last week, both of them appeared in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Johnson as the hard-riding ex-Confederate troop scout and Carey as the junior officer who doesn’t get the girl. Harry Carey Jr., was the son of Ford’s old cowboy star of silent days, a man whom Ford had admired and respected tremendously, and it was just like Ford to use his son on every production he could. Johnson is a simply tremendous presence who has a wonderful physical grace and ease of vocal delivey. As for his skill as a rider, one admiring critic said he looked like he’d been born on a horse—which is no small virtue in a movie like Wagon Master. Why Johnson never became a star remains a mystery: he certainly had all the attributes. But in a career that eventually lasted forty years, he stayed almost always in supporting roles. The fact that Wagon Master actually does contain a star performance from Johnson is just another reason to treasure it.

            All these faces have a special appeal for Ford-lovers not just because of their talents, but simply because of their familiarity from so many other Ford films, and as a tangible indication of Ford’s sense of the community that endures. And the fact they carry the whole show in Wagon Master is one of the reasons this film is so specially cherished by those who love the filmmaker.

            There are problems with Wagon Master, I think, especially for today’s viewers. The hearty singing of the Sons of the Pioneers, for example, which seems to be roaring out of the soundtrack every time you look around, is a feature of the tastes of the time which doesn’t age very well. But I believe that the basic simplicity and heartfeltness of the movie are still available to spectators today. Well, you tell me.

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            Wagon Master is full of repetitions from earlier Ford movies—in fact, almost all of Ford’s later movies are full of repetitions from his other films. Before the movie I was talking about how the persistence across films of many of Ford’s supporting players was part of the pleasure of watching them. But you could take that idea farther. For example, Uncle Shiloh and his demented boys are almost a straight repetition of the murderous all-male Clanton family from My Darling Clementine, even down the the father’s savage use of a whip on his sons. (And incidentally, you could notice how the primitive brutality of these types is possible in Ford only in the absence of a civilizing woman in the family.) The formality of invitations to dance is a feature of all of Ford’s frontier films, as is the fact of dances themselves. Even a detail like the dance on a plank-floor in the middle of the wilderness carries a clear echo of the plank-floor church dance in My Darling Clementine. A little thing like the yapping of dogs alongside the horse-train is carried over from the cavalry films. And so on and on and on. The more you examine Ford’s world, the more its details and attributes seem constant despite the changes of locale and plot and character.

            Maybe my favourite single moment in Wagon Master is the film’s very last image, the shot that appears after the end-title has disappeared from the screen, of a little colt struggling up the bank after fording the river. It seems to sum up the whole movie, and a whole central current in Ford’s Westerns, in a single image. What’s so appealing about it is not simply the touching spectacle of a fresh, young animal succeeding in a task, but its function as a metaphor. If you’ve seen the movie as many times as I have you’ll recognize this shot as one that’s already appeared in the film, during the first big river-crossing. In fact the whole end-title sequence is taken from that earlier scene. What we’re seeing, then, is not the final entry of the wagon train into the promised land—which is what we might expect to see at this culminating point—but an earlier stage of the journey recapitulated. It comes from outside the story, in other words, from the past—and it comes directly to us from the filmmaker himself.

            Why would Ford want to give us this kind of scene from nowhere, a scene that can’t be taking place in the sequence of the story? Because this scene is a symbol, a metaphor, and Ford is sufficiently confident in his powers to present us with a nakedly poetic, a non-realist, image here as a badge of his film’s essentially poetic ambitions. What matters in this movie is not the realization of a goal but the striving after it—not the destination but the journey. And the purpose for which the striving and the journey are taking place is not for the tangible present but for the future, for an ideal. The colt is an expression of that belief in the future—a baby animal struggling gamely and successfully towards a goal, just as the Mormon pioneers are a baby community, and the whole frontier a baby United States. And this idea is a continuation of ideas we’ve seen Ford expressing in Young Mr Lincoln, and in the postwar Westerns we’ve seen—the idea that the nascent, awkward, coltish strivings of a young community have an authenticity and an emotional appeal which can never really be felt in the long-settled society that these pioneers have left back east, or in fact anywhere at all in 20th-century America. America must discover the emotional sources of its own idealism in the past—or more accurately in the idea of the future that these past pioneers had. Ford’s ideal is never in the here-and-now, it’s always somewhere else: in the idealized past or the future which will at last bring forth the fine and decent community for which these sacrifices are made.

            And yet Ford’s metaphors, like this little horse, are almost never trumpeting and grandiose. In fact a lot of the time they go unnoticed by viewers who aren’t looking for them—because their resonance and evocative power sits inside an everyday ordinariness and down-to-earthness. In this case the river-crossing is only one of many tasks the settler-party needs to perform, the horse only one of many. It’s their placement in a context of a mission whose greater purpose is evident to Ford that elevates them to poetic status—that and, most often, Ford’s subtly heroicizing camera. Wow, all this from one little colt? Well, yes, if you can see the whole background of that image, and if you’re sensitive to Ford’s art.