Rayon Vert wrote: ↑Sun Jan 21, 2018 3:27 pm
The Long Gray Line (Ford 1955). The story of Martin Maher, an Irish immigrant who wound up having a 50-year career at the West Point academy. There are resemblances with
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp; in both cases a military man’s life against the backdrop of a half-century’s wars, a redhead as his love interest, and with a tone of comedy giving way progressively to one of more gravity, revealing the film at end to be meditation on the passage of time and a life’s journey. The shifts between the comic and dramatic tones are even sharper in Ford’s film, which can be seen also to portray the feelings appropriate to the spring and autumn of a human life. The film isn’t anything like
Blimp’s equal, but there is a certain thematic poetry in the terms described if you try to be sensitive to that aspect, and which gets manifested in a moving moment at the film’s end.
I finally got around to watching
The Long Gray Line and remembered nothing about it so this might as well have been a first viewing. I absolutely loved it, and as it stands may be amongst my favorite Fords (I know it's sacrilege to say, but I liked it more than
The Quiet Man, which I still love). RV's writeup here sums up my feelings almost exactly. Scanning various thoughts here, the seasonal shifts in tone felt a lot more fluid and consistent to me than others, and although I agree that the polarized extremes (especially the comedic) are more drastic here than in other Fords, the movement between moods actually struck me as more organic as the film developed, the way making light of a situation is sandwiched in pathos, and vice versa. It may be a strange comparison, but I was reminded of
Mood Indigo's narrative structure in how the wacky theatrics of blind love and bachelor antics transform into something more raw, grounded, and real. Though here the pattern mimics how our memory functions in recollecting our experiences, or eras of life, in a skewed-to-purified one-note feeling of fondness when the stakes were low, and more complexly unresolved when life became challenging and we were forced to hold multiple significant truths of contrasting emotions more consistently for the long haul.
It's a beautiful looking film and a beautiful thematic film that redefines the meaning of family to sublimate loss with the potency of reciprocal love from and towards important, supportive people in our lives. Like the aforementioned
Blimp, the balance of surrendering to an attitude of humility and exercising empowerment of the self to promote one's own wisdom publicly, is depicted with gentle validation. Ford's characters are so dignified and caring, especially in a late scene during the parade between Martin and his wife, that as far as I can remember it's the most tender dramatic scene I've seen in a Ford film. The fact that this film also had some of his funniest and most clever just two hours earlier makes this a remarkable feat, even for the man who can seamlessly blend these diverse sentiments across his work. But I'm clearly the odd man out in believing this to be not only an even-handed progression, but a rhythm completely in step with the film's thematic purpose as expressed in its narrative design and eclectic vibes evoking cumulative wisdom- which Ford knows includes seasoned emotional intelligence and experience more than anything.