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Bucking Broadway (1917)
Topic Started: Jun 6 2010, 10:09 AM (337 Views)
Laughing Gravy
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John Ford's 5-reel feature is included - in a beautifully restored, tinted HD version - as a bonus on the Criterion Stagecoach Blu-ray release.

Harry Carey is Cheyenne Harry, ranch hand, a tough but sweet guy who adores the boss's daughter, Molly Malone. She promises her love to Cheyenne, but while he's away buyin' a nice suit she gets swept off her feet by an oily stock speculator, and is train-bound for The Big Ci-hi-it-ty. She realizes the error of her silly ways, contacts her TRUE love, and Cheyenne is on his way to the rescue.

Delightful comedy western; beautiful Fordian touches (does he ALWAYS frame his stars in a doorway?) with some touching close ups and entertaining comedy, too. Loved the sequence in which Carey thinks a hissing radiator is a rattlesnake in his hotel room. And the free-for-all that ends the picture (following a horse race down Broadway, Carey's ranch buddies and the New York swells engage in fisticuffs in a hotel-rooftop restaurant) would make Mel Brooks proud. A beautiful, stellar, lovely HD picture too. Great fun.

"I'm glad that this question came up, because there are so many ways to answer it that one of them is bound to be right." - Robert Benchley
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Frank Hale
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I thought the old timer who played the father, L. M. Wells, might be the oldest guy I’d seen on film, but turns out he was a mere youth (b. 1862).

Frederick Kerr (b. 1858) from Frankenstein is still the champ.
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panzer the great & terrible
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Mouth Breather
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To sweeten the deal on their Blu-Ray of Stagecoach, because that film doesn't come from pristine elements and thus isn't much better in the fancier format, Criterion includes a French restoration of an early John Ford -- Harry Carey western, Bucking Broadway. It's a pre-Monument Valley item, but Ford's genius for landscapes is already in place, and there's an interesting pre-echo of Tom Doniphon's house in Liberty Valance -- but still, alas, the film is a sick puppy. The plot takes us from Ford Country to the Big City (El Lay standing in for New York), the movie loses its stride and never quite recovers.

Carey's in love with the rich rancher's daughter. He carves her a little heart and says if she should ever need him, send it back. Then he proposes and she accepts in one of Ford's most realistic love scenes ever. But then a city guy comes and dangles his money and sophistication before her eyes, she buys the pitch and runs off with him. You don't believe it for a second. The guy's no deeper than a snake in a wagon track, so a reel later she changes her mind and mails our Harry the heart, he hops a train to New York (a clumsily-faked non-stunt) and before you know it there's a big brouhaha, and that brings up problem number two. The concluding fight takes place on a big set with dozens of actors (who are they supposed to be?) popping up from behind pieces of scenery, then sinking back out of sight. It's plain childish, the way it's staged. I guess Ford was trying to be expressionistic or something, but as a climax it's a total wash.

The photography, tinted and, in the New York sequences, toned, is spectacularly good and well-rendered in Blu. I begin to understand Gravy's comment about the format being good for silents. It sure is better than DVD if there's a decent print to start with. Carey is a natural in his part, and the girl is dang cute. Ignore the ending and it's a diverting hour. Three stars on the Panzometer. Not bad but not really good either.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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Frank Hale
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Agree on all counts. Of historical interest, and a pretty good print (especially considering it was "lost"), but on the lame side.
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JazzGuyy
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The thing that struck me about this movie was the lack of camera movement. The camera moves in and out so there are close-ups but there is essentially no tracking of action as it moves from right to left or vice versa. I know this movie is fairly early but that lack of movement really surprised me. Tracking was already part of the film vocabulary by the time of this movie, wasn't it?
TANSTAAFL!
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panzer the great & terrible
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Mouth Breather
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No, not much camera movement in 1917 -- it was the montage era. There were shots taken from moving cars as running inserts, as in The Birth of a Nation, and Griffith used a huge Rube Goldberg gizmo for the Belshazzar's Feast sequence in INTOLERANCE, but tracking was first used intelligently in Germany, and came into style here when Murnau's pictures and Dupont's Variety got shown in the mid-Twenties. The Last Laugh was influential on everybody, especially John Ford and Frank Borzage, and they hastened to learn from him when he got hired a couple of years later by Fox, their home studio at the time. But then, alas, sound came in and the camera got tied down in a big box for a while.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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Frank Hale
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I suspect you guys are talking about two different things.

I would agree that elaborate tracking shots on dollies or rails didn’t come into their own until the mid to late 20’s but Dr Jazz may be referring to simple side-to-side panning.

Have no idea when the latter caught on, and I don’t recall being especially struck by Bucking Broadway’s static camera, but it’s clear that many films of the teens were photographed like simple stage plays from the stalls.
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riddlerider
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Two observations:

1) Ford never relied on moving camera as much as his contemporaries.

2) Tracking shots were more common in the Teens than is generally thought. I would refer the curious especially to THE SECOND IN COMMAND, a 1915 Francis X. Bushman vehicle directed by William Bowman and produced by Fred Balshofer, who was instrumental in designing the movable platform from which the tracking shots were taken. The camera seems to glide effortlessly; the tracking work is remarkably smooth.
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panzer the great & terrible
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Mouth Breather
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Two observations: 1.) Never is a big word. Ford flirted with moving camera and then went back to the old way, just as Hawks did.

2.) Of course there were tracking shots before Murnau. The French Kean has many uses of that and indeed just about every movie technique (and is rumored to be heading for an American release). The shots weren't widely used though, as they are today. Just the same shell game as "Griffith invented the close-up." The point is not when was the technique first used, but when did it become part of the common working vocabulary?

Pans were used almost from the very first, but they were eschewed by good directors because the mechanics were so lame. Bitzer made some excellent pans, as in the Biograph short "The Country Doctor," but most cameramen couldn't pan without undue jerkiness. As for Jazzy talking about a pan as a moving camera shot, I seriously doubt he meant that. Let's let him have the last word on what he meant.
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, May 7 2011, 06:53 AM.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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panzer the great & terrible
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Again!
Edited by panzer the great & terrible, May 7 2011, 06:49 AM.
Life is just a bowl of cherries, it's too mysterious, don't take it serious...
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JazzGuyy
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I should have said "panning" not "tracking". Sometimes I get the technical lingo mixed up.
TANSTAAFL!
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