“Close-ups, affectionate or noble, are held at leisure; long shots are sustained long after their narrative role has been performed. A marginal figure is suddenly dwelt on, lovingly enlarged to fill the center of the screen. Informed with heightened emotion, a single shot, unexpectedly interposed — a ragged line of men marching into nowhere, one of them playing a bugle-call on his harmonica — assumes a deeper significance than is given by its function in the story. This is one of the properties of poetry. They Were Expendable is a heroic poem.” — Lindsay Anderson
The wondrous shots about which Mr. Anderson writes were masterminded by John Ford, but they were brought to life on film by Joseph H. August (1890-1947), one of the great cinematographers of the age. It was August who memorably crafted the hauntingly beautiful images of night-fog and shadows for Ford’s The Informer (1935), which won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. He also lensed now-classic movies like Gunga Din and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (both 1939), and during the war served as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves.
Joe August was a twenty-one-year-old wayward cowpuncher from Colorado when he migrated west to work as a ranch hand at Inceville, the vast silent-era movie studio created by film pioneer Thomas Ince on what is now modern-day Santa Monica. But it wasn’t long before he drifted away from horses and lariats and lost himself in the shiny, futuristic world of cameras, lenses, and light. August’s cinematographic mentor was the director Ray Smallwood (1887-1964), who not only taught him the intricacies of camerawork but impressed upon him the need to become an instinctive artist, one capable of using light and chemicals and film emulsion to emotionally transform a film composition the same way a symphonic conductor can transform a well-known piece of music with different orchestrations and the wave of a baton.
Even something as innocuous and seemingly necessary as a light meter (a handheld instrument that allows you to measure the intensity of light at various points in a composition, so that you can be sure you are not over- or under-exposing — and hence potentially ruining — a shot) was verboten on a Smallwood set. Decades later, and now a veteran cinematographer in his own right, Joe August had not forgotten the hard lessons of his apprenticeship. “I am not against meters by any means,” he said in a 1939 interview. “They just don’t fit into my plan of taking pictures. The meters I lean on are my eyes. When I first started in this business twenty-eight years ago, I had a preceptor I then thought sort of tough because he was insistent on my learning what could be accomplished by a pair of eyes, and a man with scant patience for any devices that aimed to make those organs secondary to any human intervention.”
This sort of approach to cinematography often results in images that are, by strict measurable standards, too dark, too light, too grainy, too blurry — in a word, not perfect in the way we’ve come to expect from Hollywood fare. But in August’s determination, rigid standards of slick perfection were beside the point. He felt that the emotional spectrum of a cinematographer’s image counted as much as the physical, just as a painter hardly feels the need to portray everything with strict photographic realism. “Frequently,” he said, “I choose to make an exposure that — well, we will call it an unorthodox exposure, one aimed to produce a certain effect that may be desirable. For instance, the negative might be overexposed and underdeveloped — or the procedure might be reversed.”
The video I posted above is filled with examples of these “unorthodox exposures”: haggard faces swathed in shadow and smoke, men and planes reduced to silhouettes against dim panoramas of swaying palms and setting suns, two figures dancing together in an almost total darkness which serves to enhance the intimacy of the moment. There were no video screens back then to give guys like August instant feedback on their lighting setups. With every shot they guessed, they experimented, they checked the camera’s film gate for stray hairs. And if they were very skilled and a bit lucky, a few days later the film would come back from the lab with something magical burned into it.
There are two recurring visual motifs in They Were Expendable: the long-shot goodbye and the luminous close-up. Throughout the film we see faces swathed in shadow, almost lovingly, with only their eyes aglow in the gloom, like feral ghosts. The quality of light mirrors the content of their souls, flickering and guttering like fragile candles amidst the harsh winds of war. Water, too, is used to great effect. Fearsome waves and bomb-created geysers batter men as they struggle to keep afloat, their tattered battle flag fluttering madly. At one point, the destruction of John Wayne’s beloved boat casts up a mournful veil of artificial rain that falls down upon him like heavenly tears.
August was in his mid-fifties when he shot Expendable, but he frequently pushed himself to the limits of endurance in his efforts to capture the shots Ford wanted:
When Ford and I did They Were Expendable for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the United States Navy, the keynote of the picture was realism. We used regular PT Boats manned by Navy crews off the Florida Coast. Equipped with a handheld 35mm Mitchell camera that weighed fourteen pounds, I reverted to old-time photographic technique, shooting the scenes myself. I was cushioned against a slack service belt attached to a boat by two lines as the craft hit speeds of 42 knots, sometimes taking drops of five feet while speeding across the water. For other action shots, I lay on the bow of a PT Boat shooting backward into the vessel. As in Ford’s The Battle of Midway, the camera often shook while photographing real explosions.
It’s interesting that he stresses realism. M-G-M tried forcing Ford to film a silly ending that would have shown MacArthur’s 1945 invasion force triumphantly returning to the Philippines, topped by Wayne’s character finding Donna Reed in a guerrilla hospital and giving her a glorious Hollywood kiss! To Ford’s everlasting credit, he doggedly fought for his original bittersweet denouement until the studio capitulated. The filmmakers were also hampered by the harsh dictates of the Breen Office, which strictly regulated what could and could not be displayed on screen. “In all of the scenes of wounded men and of men taking machine gun slugs,” one December 1944 letter from Breen warned, “restraint should be exercised to avoid any excessive gruesomeness, which might not be acceptable in the finished picture.” Numerous instances of words like “damn,” “hell,” and even “nuts” were ruthlessly excised from the script again and again, despite Ford’s multiple attempts to sneak them past the censors. We must allow for this artistic meddling before thoughtlessly damning our forefathers for the crime of papering over the true horrors of war.
Today we regularly are treated to heads exploding, blood splattering across the lens, and glistening intestines strewn in full color across the widescreen frame, all accompanied by explosions and screams delivered in ear-splitting surround sound. And yet realism is not the be-all, end-all of art, and oftentimes loses more than it gains. Contrary to popular belief, modern audiences needn’t be subjected to raw butchery and carnage for a war movie to have an impact, any more than they demand pornographic portrayals of sex scenes in romantic films. The relatively sanitary images created by Golden Age Hollywood are no different than a Shakespearean stage actor gamely taking a sword-thrust under the armpit and stiffening up in over-dramatic death-throes capable of being seen by the schlubs in the cheap seats. It’s a simplistic, unimaginative mind that routinely sanctifies realism at the expense of poetic impressionism. The next time you are watching an old movie and find yourself snickering at men reacting painfully to non-existent bullets, consider the possibility that it’s a blessing that your nervous system isn’t being overwhelmed with gore, that you are left with enough emotional distance to think and feel, not just recoil.
Like all of Ford’s best films, Expendable is filled to the brim not with visual horror but with what he called his “grace notes” — shots of spare simplicity and honest emotion that, while not absolutely necessary to the plot, served to powerfully convey his deepest feelings and themes. The cutaway we saw in the opening clip of this series — of a boy toasting his elder with a glass of milk — is a Fordian grace note. In the video above, the shot of the two young seamen praying at their friends’ graves is one, too. I would suggest to you that such images, then and now, are far more important to a movie than seeing yet another man’s guts spilling out.
If I had to pick a favorite grace note among the embarrassment of riches to be found in Expendable, I would chose the one that appears toward the very end. It ranks as perhaps the most subtle in Ford’s entire canon, one that comes and goes so fast you sense it more than see it. Throughout the film, Wayne’s impulsive character has been openly seething at having to retreat rather than take the fight to the enemy. Only now, at the end, does he realize that this brashness and anger has been a luxury denied to his commander, who is ever forced to stoically suppress his own agony so that others can draw strength from his leadership. In most modern films (and, to be sure, many older ones as well), Wayne would have had a good cry and made a pretentious speech about how he’s “changed” and “grown” as a human being. Ford, by contrast, has the Duke convey an entire universe of feeling with a single gesture, one so quiet and understated that most viewers miss it entirely:
One look, one touch. Says It All. Pure visual poetry. That was the genius of men like John Ford and Joseph August. Modern-day Hollywood could learn a lot from their legacy.
Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we delve into the controversial war years of John Wayne, examine the foundations of his irreplaceable acting talent, and learn of the history and significance of a special song featured in They Were Expendable.
Previous posts in the series “John Ford, John Wayne, and They Were Expendable“:
FURTHER READING AND VIEWING
“The Founding Fathers” by Robert S. Birchard: A fine article on the fifteen cameramen who started the American Society of Cinematographers, including They Were Expendable‘s Joe August. Includes a picture of August taken during the very early years of Hollywood silents.
Big Hollywood’s own Schizoid Man wrote a great post a few months back about another movie lensed by cinematographer Joe August, Gunga Din (1939). If you missed it the first time, click here to check it out.
About John Ford by Lindsay Anderson: In an earlier post I mentioned that Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford is the bible among Ford fans. Well, About John Ford is the bible for Ford critics — simply the best book about Ford’s artistry ever written, or likely to be written. Anderson was a British magazine critic in the 1950s when he first met Ford, and later became a revered director in his own right (it was he who jump-started the career of actor Malcolm McDowell, who credits Anderson with much of his growth as an actor). But I feel Anderson deserves to be primarily remembered for this wonderful volume, wherein he absolutely nails the essentials of John Ford’s genius, his patriotism, and his love of family and country. In the key chapter, “Ford and His Critics: Auteur or Poet?”, he thoroughly dismantles the gaggle of clueless academics and pretentious critics that ever hover around Fordian cinema missing the forest for the trees. In the process, the ostensibly liberal Anderson also mounts the most convincing defense of classical (read: conservative) cinematic styles against post-modernism that I’ve ever read. Anderson’s sole blind spot was The Searchers (he found it a stylistically forced and emotionally bitter film, one at odds with Ford at his best), but even there his arguments are fascinating to ponder.
Illustrated with dozens of rare photographs and screenshots, and including interviews and correspondence with key people who worked with Ford (including They Were Expendable‘s Robert Montgomery), About John Ford is all tied together with a relaxed erudition that is sheer poetry to read, an emotionally evocative mirroring of Ford’s films themselves. The praise he heaps on the great director — “such smiles, such tears, such restorative energy” — could just as easily apply to his own marvelous book. I can’t recommend it highly enough to conservatives — a masterwork.