This Day in Film History (Death of Ward Bond, Prolific Character Actor and Wayne Sidekick)

Nov. 5, 1960—Ward Bond, an actor with more than 200 credits on the big and small screen—including his starring role on the long-running TV western Wagon Train—died of a heart attack in Dallas.

Most likely, you have seen this busy character actor with the gruff voice and everyman persona in at least two films during the course of a year: on March 17, as a fishing- and boxing-loving priest in The Quiet Man; and, at Christmastime, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as James Stewart’s small-town cop friend Bert. 

In all, he appeared in 13 movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (though he himself was never cited).

It is doubtful that Bond, when he heeded a recruiting plea by USC football teammate John Wayne to serve as an extra in the 1928 John Ford film Salute, expected to enjoy a three-decade Hollywood career.

Bond made 23 movies with Wayne and at least that many with Ford, and offscreen the trio would form a boisterous friendship marked by hijinks and epic drinking bouts, often on the director’s yacht. Ford even had Bond play his alter ego (a director named "John Dodge") in the 1957 film Wings of Eagles.

Despite their friendship, the cantankerous Ford gave Bond (and Wayne) endless grief while filming. At one point, during location shooting of The Searchers, Bond had pulled the plug on a camera in order to use his electric razor, unaware that a scene was being filmed then. 

Knowing the director’s explosive temper and penchant to humiliate cast and crew members for an offense, the cameraman didn’t tell Ford what Bond had done till several years after the actor’s death.

Bond’s collegiate athletic career and continued burly build in adulthood encouraged the illusion of a vigorous physical health that he did not possess. He was disqualified from serving in World War II because of epilepsy and suffered from high blood pressure during the four seasons he spent on Wagon Train.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who questioned Bond’s professionalism or work ethic. But he was not universally beloved in the industry, particularly after he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. 

In the postwar period, this organization became one of the most virulent forces behind the blacklists maintained to stamp out communist or even merely progressive views in Hollywood.

This right-wing activism turned off many Hollywood liberals so that, ironically, Bond found himself underemployed in any films that did not involve Wayne and Ford. 

It wasn’t until he secured the role of western scout Major Seth Adams on Wagon Train that Bond could reach something like his former presence on the screen. But at that point, his presence loomed larger than ever in Hollywood, as the NBC series placed #2 in the Nielsen ratings from its second through fourth seasons.

It came as a surprise in the industry, then, when Bond had his fatal heart attack. Wayne delivered the eulogy for his longtime friend, and, he observed not long before he died, he would think of what roles his friend and extremely versatile character actor might have played had he lived longer.

Quote of the Day (Mary Astor, on What ‘Old Moviemakers’ Gave Audiences)

“Whatever we did—we old moviemakers—we gave people a lot of fun. Through depressions and wars and calamities, we gave them the sense of glory, of a future that would be braver than today.''—Oscar-winning American actress, novelist, and memoirist Mary Astor (1906-1987), A Life on Film (1971)

The image accompanying this post shows Mary Astor in Dodsworth, released in 1936. She played the luminous woman who gave the movie’s disillusioned title character “a future that would be braver than today.''

This Day in Film History (Scorsese’s ‘Age of Innocence’ Harks Back to Golden Age of Period Drama)

Sept. 17, 1993— The Age of Innocence, an adaptation of the 1920 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Edith Wharton, opened to general release in New York, on its way to disappointment both at the box office and at the Academy Awards.

But in the three decades since, this piercing examination of conscience and conformity versus the promise of freedom and self-fulfillment has become celebrated as an example of bravura cinema, as well as representing a high point in the careers of its three principal actors: Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Winona Ryder.

The 30^th anniversary of this plush period drama coincides with the release this fall of Killers of the Flower Moon, the latest entry in the half-century career of Innocence director Martin Scorsese, as well as Season 2 of The Gilded Age, the HBO series that occurs in the “Old New York” milieu that Wharton chronicled with such irony and insight.

All of this provides an opportunity to examine how The Age of Innocence relates to and departs from Scorsese’s larger work; why its initial reception fell short of expectations; and why it nevertheless repays repeated viewings.

Underappreciated at the time

Coming off the acclaimed Goodfellas, Scorsese had now turned to the costume drama genre that had long interested him. Friend Jay Cocks had been urging Scorsese to see this as next project for nearly a decade, but it was only after the controversy over the alleged “blasphemy” of The Last Temptation of Christ had died down that the director decided to collaborate with Cocks on the script.

But the choice puzzled and mystified fans that were awaiting another in his line of urban dramas often laced with violence and profanity, dating back to Mean Streets and Taxi Driver in the Seventies. (They would have to wait another two years to get what they wanted: Casino.)

The reception might have been different if, as planned, the movie had debuted in the fall of 1992, when its principal competition at the Academy Awards would have been Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.

But it was held back by over a year to allow Scorsese more time to edit, so that what would have been prestige Oscar bait would now enter awards season facing Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List.

In an interview for a Criterion Collection DVD from2018, Scorsese said that Vincent Canby’s negative review in The New York Times “killed” The Age of Innocence. That is probably overstating matters.

Variety reviewer Todd McCarthy was closer to the mark in predicting, “For sophisticated viewers with a taste for literary adaptations and visits to the past, there is a great deal here to savor…But it is difficult to picture general audiences warming up to these representatives of the old ruling class.”

Even the opening scene brings audiences face to face with this situation: a sequence from Gounod’s opera Faust that segues into a sweeping reaction shot of the audience.

It sets up that the upper-crust spectators are less interested in the onstage spectacle than the drama in the seats: the presence of Countess Ellen Olenska, a scandal-shadowed member of the socially prominent Mingott family. It also foreshadows the doomed relationship that will eventually develop between Ellen and lawyer Newland Archer.

Yet casual viewers, unfamiliar with the Faust source material, are unlikely to grasp the symbolism. Moreover, as the scene lingers for a couple of minutes without subtitles, it tests viewer attention and patience from the start.

Moreover, Wharton’s characters speak in code—approaching sensitive subjects but using silences and facial expressions fill in the gaps left by words they dare not utter.

The similarities between Gilded Age aristocrats and Mafia gangsters

Viewers taking in this atmosphere of physical opulence and verbal repression, then, are likely to be astonished by Scorsese’s claim that this was “the most violent film I ever made.” What could he possibly mean by this?

The best answer might come in one of the film’s best-remembered set pieces: a dinner at which Archer, moving toward breaking away from his affectionate but passionless marriage to the judgmental, unimaginative conformist May, finds his path blocked by the entire mass of aristocratic New York.

Like Goodfellas’ Tommy DeVito finding too late that his initiation as a Mafia “made man” will not in fact transpire, Archer discovers a cadre that will punish him for defying its code, with the camera sweeping past the guests and their sumptuous even as narrator Joanne Woodward intones Wharton’s words:

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings. As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb conspirators, and himself and the pale woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to "foreign" vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by means as yet unknown to him, the separation between himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.

The images, in combination with the foregoing description, eliminate the need to include onscreen this Wharton passage that may have capped the resemblance between the genteel aristocrats and the crude gangsters of Goodfellas:

It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage, and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

A cinematic feast

This dinner scene is an example of how Scorsese sought visual and aural counterparts to Wharton’s verbal splendor. The aural component was supplied by Woodward’s voiceover narration and a memorable, Brahms-influenced soundtrack by Elmer Bernstein, while the visuals came through Gabriella Pescucci’s Oscar-winning costume design and Dante Ferretti’s production design.

In focusing on the themes of money and marriage in Victorian Age, Scorsese had one obvious antecedent: William Wyler’s The Heiress. In a February 1994 interview with Ian Christie of Sight and Sound Magazine, Scorsese acknowledged that the 1949 adaptation of the Broadway play of the same name and its source material, Henry James’ Washington Square, “made a strong impression on me as a child.”

Yet, though he admitted that it still “holds up well,” he criticized it for being “theatrical,” with a “three-act” structure—and “no narration, no montages, no flashbacks or flashes forward and no visual interpolations such as letters”—all devices he employed in The Age of Innocence.

These were not the only methods that helped make this one of Scorsese’s most controlled movies: Vibrant colors, dissolves, transitions, and similar visual motifs echo and reinforce each other, or subtly reinforce characterizations:

*Fireplace scenes building slowly in intensity parallel the growing emotional intimacy of Archer and Ellen;

*Archer bangs a pen violently at one point to force the ink out—encapsulating his frustration with bottled-up social norms;

*Demure young May is dressed early on in virginal white, while her more unconventional, passionate older cousin Ellen is dressed in red;

*And one scene that Scorsese made sure to carry over from the book depicted May as skilled at archery—a sly representation of how she will hit her target, Archer himself.

Unlike The Gilded Age, which in its first season leaned heavily on New York stage actors, Scorsese relied heavily on British actors.

Scorsese and Cocks have explained that such casting made sense, as New York aristocrats of the Victorian Era still retained strong verbal influences from their English ancestors. I think the choice also might derive from a belief that British actors came with appreciation for texts and a verbal dexterity springing from their intensive stage training.

Even so, to be fair, it’s hard to argue with what Lewis, Richard E. Grant, Alec McCowen, Michael Gough, Geraldine Chaplin, Stuart Wilson, Siân Phillips, and Miriam Margolyes did with their dialogue.

I think that The Age of Innocence is one of Scorsese’s overlooked masterpieces. Far more than most movies, it yields new insights each time viewed to go with scenes that will never fade from the memory.

Only the third time around, for instance, did I notice that a portrait of a woman bearing a striking resemblance to Woodward hangs on the wall in one scene. And only on this latest viewing did I pick up on how the camera, having focused for several minutes on the dogs climbing over Miriam Margolyes as Mrs. Mingott, mocks her further by moving towards other objects in the room: paintings, drawings, and sculptures featuring even more dogs.

At the same time, fans like me recall how Archer’s unbuttoning of Ellen’s glove in a horsedrawn carriage leads to a passionate encounter, or how the nimbus of light in which he beholds Ellen from a distance as he waits for a sailboat to pass a lighthouse at sunset.

Enhancing appreciation of Wharton

I am also grateful that Scorsese’s adaptation has fostered renewed appreciation of Wharton, one of my favorite writers, after an extended period of popular neglect.

In the 1920s and 1930s she had enjoyed significant attention, not only in sales but also in royalties from theatrical and cinematic adaptations. The Age of Innocence itself became a 1928 Broadway vehicle for Katherine Cornell, as well as a 1924 silent film (now lost) and a 1934 talkie starring John Boles as Archer, Julia Haydon as May and the incomparable Irene Dunne as Ellen.

Given the reverence accorded Scorsese and his greater faithfulness to the source material (approximately an hour longer than the Dunne version), this adaptation was not only more high-profile than these earlier efforts, but more successful than Hollywood’s other attempts to explore Wharton in the 1990s.

The Children (1990), with Kim Novak and Ben Kingsley, took on one of the novelist’s bestselling but less critically acclaimed works of the 1920s, and Ethan Frome (1993) featured Liam Neeson and Patricia Arquette in Wharton’s tale of thwarted romance in the Berkshires. The decade closed with Gillian Anderson movingly depicting doomed Gilded Age beauty Lily Bart in The House of Mirth (2000).

In November, Apple TV+ will begin a series based on Wharton’s The Buccaneers, a novel completed several decades after her death in 1937 by Marion Mainwaring. Although Sofia Coppola’s attempt to develop another Wharton novel, The Custom of the Country, has temporarily hit a roadblock, there is always the hope that this biting satire will also find its audience.

Nevertheless, it would be difficult for any of these past, present, or future adaptations to match the art, depth of feeling, and appreciation for the source material shown by Scorsese’s Age of Innocence.

Flashback, December 1945: ‘They Were Expendable,’ Ford Tribute to Naval Courage, Premieres

They Were Expendable, MGM’s somber, stirring tribute to the American PT-boat sailors who first battled skeptical military brass about their craft, then Japanese invaders in the Philippines in the first desperate days of WWII, opened at Loew’s Capitol Theater in Washington, DC, in December 1945, with an audience including many in the military it honored, such as Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

Navy personnel also helped create the film, including screenwriter Frank Wead, a retired WWI pilot; director John Ford, a captain in the Navy Photographic Field Unit; and one of the two male leads, Robert Montgomery, a real-life PT skipper in the recently concluded war.

One key cast and crew member, however, was not involved in the war: the second male lead, John Wayne, who nevertheless used the movie to recast his image successfully as a towering American hero.

Ford and Wayne made 20 films over 35 years, but in certain ways this may have been the most pivotal. It certainly was the one that tested the most the boundaries of their working relationship and friendship.

Ford, who had enlisted in the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, had spent much of the prior four years in a documentary crew filming battles, including Midway (where he continued shooting even after being wounded, earning a Purple Heart for his gallantry). Throughout that time, he had been after Wayne to “get into” the fight.

But Wayne—34 and able-bodied at the outbreak of hostilities at Pearl Harbor—kept finding one reason after another not to join up. He had suffered an injury during college that continually hampered his function (though it hadn’t bothered him much while performing his own stunts several years before). He was the sole support of his family (though that status would change, as he was about to enter divorce proceedings). He couldn’t get out of a contract with Republic Pictures without triggering a lawsuit (though he didn’t test to see whether Republic head Herbert J. Yates was bluffing). He wrote Ford about joining his photographic unit but kept postponing joining until after his next picture.

In the end, Wayne was exempted from service due to his age and family status. That didn’t sit well with, for instance, Pacific Theater vets who, upon encountering Wayne on a USO tour, booed him raucously (an incident recalled in William Manchester’s WWII memoir, Goodbye, Darkness).

While not a draft dodger, Wayne had not pressed his case as vigorously as other stars had done. That rankled Ford, who before long was ridiculing him repeatedly in front of the entire crew.

The baiting was in keeping with the longtime on-set behavior of Ford, an alcoholic bully who would often pick one person on each film to abuse. The director had, in prior movies, taken Wayne to task for, among other things, “walking like a pansy.” 

Now, almost as soon as shooting began on Ford’s birthday in February—with co-star Montgomery serving inadvertently as a model of doing one’s military duty—Wayne found himself subjected to abuse on a subject that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the not-so-subtle imputation that he was a "shirker."

Ford may have reached his zenith in sadism when he asked why Wayne couldn’t even salute properly. Watching his co-star reduced to what another actor in the production called “a quivering pulp,” Montgomery had had enough. If Ford was subjecting Wayne to this treatment on his behalf, the director should stop the treatment right now, Montgomery said.

Ford eased up—but only on this movie. More than a decade and a half later, while shooting The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford asked James Stewart, a decorated pilot, what he had done in the war. Then he turned to Wayne to ask what he had done.

One has to ask why Wayne continued to endure this abuse—particularly by the early 1960s, the time of production on Liberty Valance, when he was a box-office institution. Gratitude to Ford for rescuing him from “B” Westerns with Stagecoach can only account for some of his forbearance.

True, there was also the possibility that Ford would offer Wayne the chance to play increasingly psychologically complex variations on the ideal of American manhood. But I think something else was involved, the same dynamic behind Montgomery’s work on this movie: the chance to learn from a master of movie-making.

By the mid-1940s, Montgomery—more famous these days, as I indicated in a prior post, as the father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery—was a highly regarded actor with his eye now trained on behind-the-camera work. A year later, he would finally have the chance to direct his first film, an unusual adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Lady in the Lake.  

But as he was playing the lead in They Were Expendable, Lt. John Brickley (based on the real-life war hero Lt. John Bulkeley), the actor—a bit nervous about not being in front of the camera for three years during the war—was thinking about the next turn in his career. He didn’t protest when Ford, after filming a scene according to his suggestion, then told him to take the reel home with him, as they wouldn’t be using it.

Weeks later, after Ford suffered an injury while on location in Florida, he had Montgomery film action sequences while he was recuperating. In what must have thrilled the actor, Ford later claimed that he couldn’t tell the differences between these scenes and those he had filmed.

As for Wayne: Playing Brickley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant "Rusty" Ryan, was not only a chance for a high-profile role in something besides a western, or even for making sizable elements of the public forget his less-than-glorious part in the war, but also an opportunity to learn lessons in directing from the universally acknowledged master of the art.

By this time, a project of his own was germinating in Wayne’s mind: making a film about the Alamo. Over the next 15 years, he would hire researchers and put much of his own money behind this account of the legendary last-ditch stand against Santa Ana. Even now, he was absorbing by osmosis how to frame shots and other aspects of film.

The Alamo was similar to They Were Expendable as a study of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. But, if film could be likened to song, Wayne had learned the words but not the music that would make the experience indelible.

Over the course of his long career, Ford assembled a de facto stock company of actors who, for better or worse, were willing to endure his on-set dictatorship. He knew their talents and fit roles to them, and had learned to work even more smoothly with screenwriters such as Wead and Frank Nugent (a former movie critic who would write the script for The Searchers and other classic Ford westerns).

Wayne could not count on the same assets in making The Alamo. He could not secure actors he had hoped for principal roles (Clark Gable, Charlton Heston), so he had to hope that the ones he did secure (Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey) would mesh well with each other under his direction—a hope unfulfilled in the final product. 

More fatally, for all his interest in recreating the Alamo with almost documentary exactness, Wayne lacked Ford’s intense psychological identification with his material. From Midway to D-Day, Ford had not just filmed men under fire but also, as one himself shooting amid the roar of battle, he had imbibed their attitude toward war as a matter of stoic grace under pressure rather than an exercise in jingoism.

Some of the best moments in They Were Expendable are of men suddenly facing awesome odds with silent, grim but certain resolution: being told, one by one, at a social gathering that Pearl Harbor has been attacked, or, through a fluke of fate, losing one’s place on the plane taking select sailors to the comparative safety of Australia. The Alamo exhibits none of this fatalistic attitude. It is more committed to waving the flag than in honoring the qualities that led men to carry it in the face of death.

The result: while They Were Expendable did not lure a war-weary public to the box office, it has increasingly won critical acclaim as one of the best WWII movies, while The Alamo is a long epic that, for all its admirable intentions, lacks the psychological insight, pacing or extraction of actors' best talents so characteristic of Ford classics.