Why Was There A Feud Between Ford and Fonda?
What was the long-standing feud about between director John Ford and actor Henry Fonda during the making of this film - and why did it continue for years (possibly never resolved)?
shareFonda had done Mr.Roberts on stage for a number of years.He felt he knew the play inside & out,the characters,pacing,& so forth.When Ford came on board & began directing Fonda felt that Ford was not getting the timing of the scenes correctly,moving on to quickly from scenes that were funny,bringing a roughhouse humor to the project,stuff like that.He was upset & Ford knew it,so Ford called Fonda into his office to discuss the issues.Fonda praised Ford as one of the greatest film directors & how blessed he(Fonda)was to have worked with Ford on many films.However,Fonda told Ford that he wasn't really understanding Mister Roberts & making a number of mistakes with it compared to the play.At some point according to Fonda,Ford rose from his chair & hit Fonda. Fonda wasn't really hurt as much as he was shocked.Ford to his credit apologized to Fonda later on but their friendship was never the same again.
shareThank you!
shareThat's also the reason Ford walked off the picture. Ford was an alcoholic and his deteriorating relationship with Fonda and a widespread feeling he was mishandling the material caused an increase in his drinking and made him depressed and fed up about the film. Ford finally quit the production and Warners quickly substituted Mervyn LeRoy, a talented, veteran director who knew the material, could work well with the cast, and get the job done. WB put it out that Ford left because he was "ill", but everyone in Hollywood knew what was going on. But both men received directing credit, which was unusual at the time.
Elsewhere on this board there's some discussion about the Ford-Fonda feud and whether anyone can tell where Ford left off and LeRoy came in.
The break between Ford and LeRoy is pretty obvious when you know the men's styles: it's right after the scene where the men return from their drunken liberty. Prior to that, the crewmen had been depicted as a bunch of slack-jawed morons, with a lot of the childish, roughhouse horseplay that Ford substituted for humor, that marred this and most of his later films. Afterwards, things quiet down, the acting improves and the film becomes more like the play.
Ford and Fonda never worked together again after Mister Roberts. In later years, when people told Henry Fonda how much they liked MR, he'd ask whether they meant the movie or the play. Of course, the answer almost always was the movie, to which Fonda would reply, "Then you haven't seen Mister Roberts." The play was vastly better, subtler, gentler, more nuanced, and more respectful of its characters, particularly the men. But the movie was a big hit and most people still think it's great. It's good, but a real disappointment compared to what it was on stage and should have been on film. Ford should never have been brought in to direct it.
I love MISTER ROBERTS, but hobnob, you make some excellent points regarding Ford's depiction of some his characters, but I think that even marred some films prior to ROBERTS. Take FORT APACHE for instance, particularly with Victor McLaglen and his group. Of course McLaglen and Thomas Mitchell would win Oscars for their portrayals as drunks in Ford movies.
Ironically, it was Jack Lemmon who would win an Oscar for this film, but would later star in a serious movie about the destruction of alcoholism in THE DAYS OF WINE AND ROSES. I don't think that was a movie John Ford could ever tackle.
Yes, I think both Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and some other films before MR are undercut by this approach of Ford's, but as time went on he became increasingly lazy about things and allowed such stuff to expand in scope. He always liked this kind of oafish, horseplay humor but put far too much of it, and wholly inappropriately, in his later films.
The Searchers suffers significantly in my view from having this stuff injected into the narrative at regular intervals (scenes with Ward Bond or Ken Curtis in particular), and partly because of this I've never liked the film as much as most people seem to. (How it ever got on that once-a-decade list last year of the ten greatest movies ever made astounds me...as do most of the titles on that list.)
Anyway, just listening to the addled-brained, semi-moronic voices and dialogue of the crew members on board The Reluctant makes me angry at the way the men who actually served during the war were slighted by this movie, portrayed as little more than a bunch of slack-jawed dolts. It's pretty insulting.
Regarding THE SEARCHERS, it was Hank Worden as Mose Harper that particularly annoyed me. It was that fist fight between Ken Curtis and Jeff Hunter which I guess was added to inject some humor into the narrative, but for me, really felt forced (and all for the very unlikeable Vera Miles character). And then there was Ken Curtis’ accent. It sounds like Ford was going for a Tennessee Ernie Ford impersonation with poor Ken. Probably would have served the movie better if he had hired Ernie Ford!
Despite all of that, I still liked THE SEARCHERS (mostly because of its rich cinematography), though I certainly wouldn’t champion it like say Peter Bogdanovich or John Milius have. Heck, if I was going to choose a John Wayne-John Ford Western, I would take STAGECOACH instead.
I thought Ford used Lee Marvin brilliantly in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, but absolutely hated how he was utilized in DONOVAN’S REEF. DR is probably my least favorite of all of Ford’s films (he would make a nice comeback in CHEYENNE AUTUMN, but I would have done without the James Stewart as Wyatt Earp segment in the middle and just have the intermission).
Getting back to MISTER ROBERTS, I never saw the stage play, but I did see a T.V. version of it back in the 1980s with Robert Hays and Charles Durning. But because it was a long time ago that I saw it, I can’t recall the specificities on how it was different or the same as in the movie.
The core story of The Searchers is excellent and if Ford had kept it straight without his idiot humor trashing the narrative it would have been a much better film. You hit the nail on the head when you said the Hunter-Curtis fight was forced (I'd add artificial), but I think that applies to all the "humor" Ford insisted on injecting into the film -- all to no purpose.
All this makes it even harder for me to understand why many critics swoon over this film, to the point of naming it one of the ten best films ever made in all history, which I think borders on the insane. Besides, both Ford and Wayne (together and separately) did much better work. Yes, Stagecoach would have been a far better choice; or, for a Wayne-only film, Howard Hawks's Red River, or, perhaps, Rio Bravo. I always thought Hawks respected Wayne's talent and extracted better performances from him than did Ford.
Interesting you mentioned Liberty Valance, because that film was sloughed off by critics at the time yet has deservedly risen in esteem over the years. To me, it's vastly better and full of more insights into the Old West than anything in The Searchers, whose very story is rather artificial. Ford had some of his raucus humor in that film too but in this case the humor was part and parcel of the plot; it came naturally, it wasn't forced, and it wasn't overdone -- Ford held it in check. It didn't jar the proceedings the way it does in The Searchers and to some extent in Mister Roberts, among several others. (Look at Ford's The Wings of Eagles, which switches constantly between buffoonish humor and serious drama and consequently fails at both.)
I think the primary differences between the stage play and the film version of Mister Roberts lay in their treatment of the characters, and approach to and regard for the point of the plot. The play is subtler, its humor gentle and sophisticated; it's a study of men at war whose humor flows naturally from that concept, not a contrived "No Time For Sergeants" slapstick comedy. Bits of this peek through in the film, and come more to the fore in the second half of the movie, after Mervyn LeRoy took over. The play didn't depict the crewmen as morons, and of course lacked such elements as the heavy-handed music used in the movie to underscore (with an anvil) the lurid gaping at the nurses showering, and similar scenes. Obviously, there would have been differences between the play and film given the inherent nature of each medium, but if the more adult tone of the second half of the film had prevailed throughout, it would have been much closer to the spirit of the play than the actual result.
I am going to sound sacrilegious, but I think RED RIVER trumps any of the Ford-Wayne Westerns, with the exception being LIBERTY VALENCE. I also think Hawks did bring out the better in Duke, although to be fair, the beginning of HATARI does have the scene where Wayne and his comrades are drunk and buffoonish, which smacked too much of Ford.
The one humor bit that has annoyed me most on MR was that scene of the nurses and Ward Bond doing his horse song routine right behind them. Bond did the very same thing with Linda Darnell in MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, only to have Darnell throw water at him afterwards (I think I applauded that!). The Jack Lemmon bit with him drinking the dirty dish water thinking it was soup, doesn’t bother me so much. I am not sure if that was in the originally in the stage play, but Ford used that very same scene earlier in THEY WERE EXPENDABLE. To be honest, I think Lemmon executed it better!
I don't think you're being sacreligious. Personally I prefer Red River and Rio Bravo to any Ford western -- not because Ford's westerns were bad (obviously not), but because I prefer the style, tempo and plots of Hawks to Ford. Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence are my favorite Ford westerns.
Have you heard what Ford said to Hawks about Wayne after seeing him in Red River? Shaking his head in disbelief, the director muttered, "I never knew the big son of a bitch could act!" Ford also always held a slight grudge against Wayne for his failure to enlist in the war, while even Ford and others older than Wayne did so. This didn't seem to trouble Hawks.
I was never a fan of Hatari. However, while I never thought of it, in certain ways it does smack more of Ford than Hawks.
That horse-laugh of Bond (and his doing it in MDC as well) is discussed somewhere on this board, maybe on this thread. I never got it, let alone found it funny. (Incidentally, it looked to me like Linda Darnell threw a pitcher of milk over Bond's head, which is even ickier and, consequently, more deserved.) As far as this and the other slapstick touches in MR, rest assured that these were put in by Ford, not the play. Again, note the near-absence of these things in the film's second half.
RED RIVER, I thought brought out the Duke’s most interesting and complex character, much more so than THE SEARCHERS. Plus, it is refreshing not to see some of the Ford stock company in play here, like Ward Bond or Jack Pennick. Yes, Harry Carey Sr. & Jr. are there, but they are not together with the usual suspects, and instead we were treated with the likes of Montgomery Cliff, Noah Berry Jr. and one of my favorites, John Ireland (and yes, he was in MY DARLINE CLEMENTIME, but I would not consider him a Ford company player).
And yes, I think that was milk that Linda Darnell threw out Ward Bond. Good for her character! The nurses in MR, unfortunately and probably couldn’t do anything about their situation. And that is too bad. It looks like the Betsy Palmer character was probably not afraid to slug him, but with her being an officer, it wasn’t in the best interest.
Hawks kept his films on a steadier course than Ford normally did, at least in his last 20 years. There wasn't this incessant veering between stupid comedy and action. It's funny that Ford loved his dumbed-down boys-will-be-boys humor because it was Hawks who gravitated towards stories of a limited, isolated group of men (sometimes with one or two tough women) working together in a crisis, yet he avoided the trap Ford fell into of resorting to such low-brow intervals.
Ford seemed to have a brief thing for Betsy Palmer, whom I always found thoroughly off-putting, boring and unattractive. He also cast her in The Long Gray Line (also 1955), to no positive effect there either. I wouldn't have minded seeing her tossed overboard, maybe as an unanticipated consequence of her pushing lecherous Ensign Pulver into the drink too. That bit of horseplay I would have appreciated!
Better be careful hobnob. Betsy Palmer is Jason Voorhees mother from FRIDAY THE 13TH (as I recall). Watch out for any characters you meet in a hockey goalie mask!
shareYeah, but unlike Jason, mom didn't survive the first installment. Her murder there was retribution by the last of the campers, who had been forced to watch a showing of Mister Roberts on the night of Thursday the 12th.
shareOuch! Poor Betsy!
For me, the one actress in a Ford movie that I didn't much care for was Elizabeth Allen, although I blame more so Ford than her. She was just put in no-win situation roles in DONOVAN'S REEF and the Wyatt Earp segment in CHEYENNE AUTUMN (in order to inject humor which felt wildly out of place in that film. Probably it would have been better to do it as short movie, and show it before the main feature).
With all said and done about MISTER ROBERTS, I still love the feature and hope a Blu-ray comes out soon (got a high-def flat screen last year, and the MR DVD does not look so good on it).
Yes, Elizabeth Allen never had much of a career. She was pretty but just didn't have the personality or talent to really make an impact. (Everyone seems to agree that the Wyatt Earp segment in CA was a mistake, pointless and jarring to the main story, and a perfect example of Ford's dopey humor...which sticks out like a sore thumb here more than elsewhere, mainly because the entire scene looks like something simply spliced into another picture. That was the consensus even in 1964.)
Mister Roberts is one that's fallen more and more in my opinion over the years as its shortcomings become ever more glaring. I never liked it as much as most people, because of the silliness (or stupidity) Ford injected into it. Even as a kid I never found it all that good. The gentler or more discreet humor that does come through appealed to me much more even at a young age than did the lunk-headed characterizations of the crew and low-brow "comedy" Ford screwed the film up with. (And I'm a fan of Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello and the like, so broad comedy certainly isn't anathema to me. But it has its place, and just doesn't work in MR. In fact it irredeemably mars the picture.)
Unless there's an exceptional reason to get a Blu-ray I generally don't bother, and with Mister Roberts, I'm not bothering...whenever it shows up.
I wonder whether anyone considered re-shooting some of Ford's worst scenes after Mervyn Leroy came aboard. Doubt it. But they should have. The film made tons of money and could have easily absorbed the extra cost. By the way, according to the Trivia section here Ford sucker-punched Fonda at a meeting called to ease the tensions between the two. Good way to get off to a reconciliation. No wonder they forced Ford off the picture.
I like it because it has four great leads, and while Fonda is the star, and he is quite good, it is Cagney, Powell and Lemmon that steal the show. Plus, it was the premise that boredom and tedium, and not some blood-soaked battle, is what became the obstacle, the true villain in this narrative.
And I believe that has been discussed before, but I do recall that scene when Roberts throws the palm tree overboard, he walks away quietly. I do remember that! But in the VHS version and subsequent DVD, all of a sudden he is signing very annoyingly (and it doesn't even sound like Fonda and more so like Nick Adams!). If there is a Blu-ray release, I am hoping that they remove that and show it the way I remember that scene – Roberts just coolly walking away.
Of course, later on Fonda was involved in a couple of documentaries on Ford in the early 1970s and was there during his AFI salute shortly before he died in 1973. Not sure if they eventually made up.
I think they eventually made up, but not to the point where they'd ever work together again. Had they never had this run-in, I can imagine Fonda showing up in some later Ford films such as our friend Cheyenne Autumn and maybe one or two others, but even in that case their collaboration had hit its high point before 1955. (Technically, Ford and Fonda did work on one other film together -- How the West Was Won -- but Fonda didn't appear in the Civil War section of that film, the one Ford directed.)
Funny you mention that scene where Roberts throws the palm tree overboard, because yesterday when I was writing my prior post I thought about that scene being changed back for a Blu-ray. (If that did happen, I'd get the Blu.) The music was completely different (and better: "Stars and Stripes Forever" doesn't fit that scene as well as the alternate martial music, especially when Fonda walks up the steps in perfect time to the latter music), but you reminded me of the other, bigger problem -- that bit with Fonda singing the tune. To begin with it's poorly looped in (as is the case with lots of dialogue and other sounds all throughout the film, such as Pulver's whistling). But like the moronic voices the crew is forced to use, even Fonda is compelled to sing in an inane voice -- like a drunken, slap-happy boob: "La-la-la-la-LAAAHH-la-la-LAAH-la". It's completely un-Roberts-like, makes him sound like an idiot, and as you so rightly say, the silence in the alternate version is much more fitting than having him sing like a jackass. (It's so badly done that at first you don't even realize it's Roberts singing...and if you listen closely it is Fonda's voice.)
I agree with you that the leads -- Fonda, Cagney, Powell and Lemmon -- are terrific, but their parts aren't adversely affected by Ford's direction. Most of what they do transcends the nonsense Ford injected into much of the first half of the movie. Their roles allow for the quieter, more introspective humor (and drama) that suffused the play. Luckily, there wasn't too much that even Ford could do to yuk things up in their exchanges, although he manages some of that in some of Lemmon's scenes, as with the nurses. But the character of Pulver lends itself much more to Ford's horseplay humor than do the others.
Well, if it ever comes out on Blu-ray (or should I say, when it comes out), I will write a review. And I think that because my review will be SO good, I think hobnob, that you will drop everything and rush out to your local Barnes & Noble or Bestbuy and grab a copy!
shareYour review may be good -- but what makes you assume the disc you review will be? Or do I catch you on a point of grammar?
Presumably a Blu-ray will have sharper picture and sound quality, but otherwise it will likely be exactly the same as the DVD -- including the bad version of the palm-tree-overboard scene we just discussed. This is not progress.
No, I expect your review will be very good, and honest, Big G. But unless you bring me some good news on content, I'm afraid my dis-content won't permit me to rush into anything!
Well, we shall see when that time comes! (and I checked http://www.blu-ray.com/movies and no release date as of this moment).
shareIf it's the same content as the DVD, and no other changes except for somewhat improved quality, it's a flat-out guarantee I won't be a customer. What for? But if something's really different, that's another thing. But no word on any Blu yet. You'd think WB would produce one, given the film's popularity. But then, we'd figure that about a lot of films and their studios, wouldn't we?
shareHeck, I'm still waiting for some films to have a DVD release! (WONDERFUL WORLD OF THE BROTHERS GRIMM, CRY DANGER, etc).
The 1984 T.V. version of MISTER ROBERTS with Robert Hays, Charles Durning & Kevin Beacon is available on DVD. May check it out one of these days and see the difference (if this was based more so on the stage play rather than the movie).
Cry Danger is supposedly slated for a DVD release at some point, perhaps later this year. Grimm would seem a likely candidate for Warner Archives, but nothing there yet.
shareBear in mind that these were products of their time, and things like cigarette smoking and sexist humor that is viewed through the modern lens often looks bizarre and offensive to people with modern sensibilities. I can tell you that 30 or 40 years ago, people even strapped their pets on the roof of their cars in crates, smoked while they breastfed, and called their secretaries " honey" a lot too! If you are under 50, you may not completely understand!
I'd like to know where these posters obtained their information (Ford striking Fonda, Ford drinking excessively, and becoming depressed,etc).
shareElsewhere. Google it.
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http://viverdecinema.blogspot.com.br/
Your comments about the difference in directorial style between Ford and LeRoy indicate that the film was shot in sequence (Ford doing the first part and LeRoy the rest). That is not how most films are shot.
share