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C H A P T E R N I N E NATANI NEZ There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. THE NARRATOR (IRVING PICHEL) IN How GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941) ORD'S ANNUS MIRABILIS of 1939 saw the release of Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along theMohawk, the director s informal "Americana trilogy." By immersing himself in the American past and bringing it so stirringly alive in those three films, Ford reached his full-blown maturity as an artist, triumphantly finding the themes and motifs that would involve him for the remainder of his career. At a time when the world stood at the brink of war and America s role asa world power was being challenged by the demands of isolationists and interventionists alike, Ford used his 1939 excursions into the American past as a means of urgently reexamining national values. Focusing on the formative years of the republic and its western expansion, he acknowledged some of the darker elements of the early American story while glossing over others that he preferred, at this point, not to examine too closely. If the patriotic messages sent forth from these films were somewhat ambivalent, since they were couched in terms of nostalgia for a brighter and now vanished past, Fords look back into American history at this turning point in his career nevertheless was suffused with optimism about the future of his country and its democratic way of life. Its only a slight exaggeration to say that 1939 was the year John Ford discovered America. INot coincidentally, the end of the thirties also marked the high point of Ford's Popular Front period. Hollywood liberals and leftists joined forces in those years, concerned about the rise of fascism in Europe and Japan, as well F 2 7 0 S E A R C H I N G F O R J O H N F O R D as about the continuing economic problems of the Great Depression. At a time when isolationism was still rampant and served to inhibit President Roosevelt 's foreign policy, Ford was well ahead of most other Americans in his concern about the probability of war between the democracies and the fascist powers. That concern was reflected not only in his filmmaking but also in his service in the navy reserve and his involvement in Hollywood political organizations . American leftists during the Popular Front period emphasized patriotic rhetoric as a way of finding common ground with liberals in defense of basic democratic principles. That urgent patriotic groundswell no doubt influenced Ford's cinematic focus in his 1939 trilogy about western pioneers, Abraham Lincoln, and the Revolutionary War, aswell as his decision to film John Steinbeck 's controversial 1939 protest novel about the mistreatment of migrant workers, The Grapes of Wrath. Ford's heartfelt patriotism was expressed in symbolic, almost pop-art terms in Drums Along the Mohawk, whose ending offers one of the director's most joyously optimistic, if somewhat nai've, affirmations of American national unity. At the end of the Revolutionary War, when the first American flag arrives at a fort in New York's Mohawk Valley, Ward Bond runs it up the flagpole in a burst of patriotic frenzy to the tune of "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." The pioneer couple Gil and Lana Martin, played by Henry Fonda (in a tricornered hat) and Claudette Colbert (wearing a red bonnet and a blue-andwhite dress), pridefully watch the flag-raising along with a beaming black servant (Beulah Hall Jones) and a Christian Indian who salutes the flag (Chief Big Tree). All are symbolically gathered in multiracial harmony to celebrate the birth of the nation. For Ford, the fact that the new nation was "conceived in liberty" is enough for the African-American and the Native American to celebrate, even though their own personal liberty has yet to be won. Perhaps this flaw in the fabric of American democracy is obliquely acknowledged in the film's final lines when Gil says, "Well, I reckon we better be gettin' back to work. It's gonna be a heap to do from now on." Ford's militancy on behalf of the Screen Directors Guild helped ease him into publicly supporting more controversial political causes that reached beyond Hollywood in the late thirties. Although he was a Catholic and the Church supported the Fascist revolt of...

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