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Rating: Last night I was genuinely taken aback. At the Palazzo Delle Esposizioni located on Via Nazionale in Rome, they showed (in a restored film print) Straight Shooting, the first feature film by the master John Ford, a silent film from 1917. The film was presented by Guy Borlée (coordinator of the festival "Il Cinema Ritrovato"). Live piano accompaniment was provided by Maestro Antonio Coppola, considered one of the leading specialists in musical improvisation and the execution and creation of soundtracks for silent cinema. The hall was packed, free admission upon reservation, you could reserve online starting at 9:00 AM on Monday. By 9:30, the 300 seats were sold out. However, my theory that many are "capiscioni" (those who pretend to be cultured and sophisticated) and few are "capish", those who really know, was confirmed. A good 80% yesterday were "capiscioni", so fake "capish", pretending to know a lot but were, at best, little more than sterile scholars.
When Orson Welles was asked to name three important film directors, he replied: John Ford, John Ford, John Ford.
John Ford (1894-1973), the thirteenth of fourteen children, was born in Portland, Maine, to Irish immigrant parents who baptized him with the Gaelic name Sean Aloysius O’Fearna (O’Fienne or O’Finney in the American pronunciation of the anglicized transcription). The first to change his name to Ford was his older brother Francis, the first of the two to make a name in the film industry, where he worked as an actor, screenwriter, and director. John joined him later, but without much conviction. When in 1917, barely in his twenties, he made his first feature film for Universal, John Ford (still credited as Jack, and he would be until 1923), he had already served his apprenticeship as a jack-of-all-trades, stuntman, actor, assistant director (for his brother Francis, Allan Dwan, and others), and finally as a screenwriter and director of a handful of short films, all westerns and all released that same year: The Tornado and The Scrapper, in which he himself played the lead role; and then The Soul Herder and Cheyenne’s Pal, with Harry Carey. Three years earlier, he appeared as a horse-riding member of the Ku Klux Klan in the film that would permanently change American cinema, The Birth of a Nation (Nascita di una nazione, 1915), about which he recounted: «I rode with one hand, and with the other I held up the hood to see, because that damned thing kept slipping over my glasses». During that scene, he was injured by hitting a branch and spent the following days watching Griffith direct, learning all there was to learn.
One way or another, at the age of 23, our man found himself directing his first (silent) film. He would make around sixty (silent) films, but today only about twenty are still available, the others were lost due to a fire at the Universal studios in 1922.
Straight Shooting, 68 minutes. A gang of overbearing cattlemen harasses the poor settlers, denying them food and water. To eliminate the Sims for good, a family of settlers made up of the old man and his two young children, a boy and a girl, they hire a wanted man, Cheyenne Harry, played by Harry Carey. Now it's fitting to pause for a couple of minutes to talk about this actor. I was more than amazed to have noticed the naturalness of the (silent) acting of this formidable artist. In front of such a performance, one might say modern, contemporary, but then I realize that saying so means nothing. So another adjective comes to mind: classic, in the sense of timeless, in the sense of a point of reference. Cheyenne embodies the villain with a conscience, the troubled hero, he will have his evolution and revolution. Cynical, overbearing, a drunkard, resolute, unscrupulous but with his own code "I never shoot in the back". This character will become a point of reference for future western actors, above all John Wayne, who inherited the legacy. Yet this ease, this flair, is something I have seen very few times in an actor, and yes, I have seen many films. While (almost) all others act "by the book", that is with that exaggerated emphasis and theatricality in gestures and facial expressions, ours appears extremely relaxed, plastic, centered. It's hard to convey the concept in words, it should be seen, obviously, but the adjective that comes to my aid is "natural". Carey's naturalness and ease is astounding, with all due respect to the Stanislavski method which can go to hell. After all, when one day Anna Magnani was asked how she managed to be so natural, spontaneous, and real, she replied: "I pretend!".
But so what about this film? It's the second time (the first was "Joan of Arc" by Dreyer) that I go to see a silent film accompanied on the piano by maestro Coppola, and both times (before viewing) I said to myself "but where the hell are you going? But you know what a drag? A silent movie with the guy playing the piano? But why bother going??" Both times though, after viewing, I had to change my mind drastically. First of all, because the films were extraordinary and then because Coppola accompanies divinely. Never intrusive, never excessive, but eclectic, with pleasant and constant variations on a basic theme that follows the course of the film. Oh well, explaining music in words is even harder than explaining acting but that's that. In short, the combination of a silent masterpiece film from the past and a great pianist accompanying by improvisation was exceptional, magnificent, superb.
The film we were talking about. Straightforward story without frills, intertitles with dialogues every 5 minutes at best, dialogues bluntly cut: "To kill killers, you need other killers. I'll go fetch Black Eye and his gang from Devil's Valley!". Over-the-top acting, but let's admit they were extraordinary actors, people of the craft, not like many today sons_of or what's so hard about it?. The cinematography often jumped, carelessly shifting from classic black and white to sepia or bluish tints for nighttime scenes but that's part of the "film from ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT years ago" package. However, the discourse changes drastically when we move on to the directing techniques, the editing, the shot composition, the innovations young Ford brought to the table, from low or high angle shots to shot and reverse shot, all the way to the direction of action scenes, truly formidable, with crazy stuntmen falling off horses as they're shot, leaping from horse to horse to attack the enemy, and then the inevitable duel, with rifles not pistols, set up in a completely different way from what we know, i.e., not with the two scrutinizing each other from afar, but with the two approaching each other waiting for a misstep to make the winning move.
Now you can spin it however you want, starting from that overused and to me much-disliked adjective: "dated". It may be, but if you want to make cinema, even just a little, you have to go through here, otherwise, you risk putting cream in the carbonara only to say later, but it's creamy!
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