9.16.2012

John Ford: Just Pals


The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors and the films for which they are most remembered. The four selected are: John Ford (The Searchers), John Huston (The Maltese Falcon), Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. In this post LR Simon reviews Just Pals.

Just Pals (1920), an early John Ford film, tells the story of a town bum, Bim (Buck Jones), and a runaway kid (Georgie Stone), both despised by the townsfolk, but who become each other’s salvation. Both the bum and the kid have character flaws that allow the audience to understand why the rest of the town would prefer to have nothing to do with them, but they also have enough redeeming qualities that the audience will follow them on their convoluted journey.

This silent feature shows how the silent era informed John Ford’s style of filmmaking. Not all of the dialogue is shown to the audience—people don’t go to the movies to read, after all. While there is more dialogue in Ford’s sound films, it’s still as minimal as possible.

The way Ford used the camera had been firmly established by the time of Just Pals. The camera rarely, if ever, moves, and there are few close-ups. The cinematography feels more pedestrian than that of Ford’s better-known films, but there are still some beautifully framed shots.

Unfortunately, the story invites comparison to Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, which is far and away the better film of the two. Ford's film is less sentimental, but because of hints at a possible romance between Bim and Mary Bruce (Helen Ferguson) and plot developments that jeopardize her life and reputation, the story is much more complicated, perhaps more so than it needs to be.


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