movie world

John Ford is a filmmaker so well known for a handful of genuine classics, most of them westerns, that the fact that he made over 140 films in a wide range of genres over the course of his 60-year career as a director is too rarely acknowledged. Many were made in the silent era, some were documentaries, a few were short films, and the vast majority will probably never be seen by any but the most devoted of Ford fans (even then, many of his silent films have since been lost).

Hoping to remind us of some of these anomalies in Ford’s career, Indicator are releasing a set of largely forgotten gems from the legendary director. The set, dubbed ‘John Ford at Columbia, 1935-1958’, includes the films The Whole Town’s Talking, The Long Gray Line, Gideon’s Day and The Last Hurrah.

The four films in this collection were all directed by Ford during his time working for Columbia Studios, and none of them are westerns – The Whole Town's Talking is a mistaken identity comedy-crime movie; The Long Gray Line is a large scale life story biopic; Gideon's Day is a British character study dressed up as a police procedural; and The Last Hurrah is a drama about an old-school town mayor's final campaign. All are fascinating for varying reasons and all are absolutely worth seeing, and while some will enthusiastically embrace all four, others will find themselves preferring one or two titles over the others.

4xBD50 | 1080p AVC | 440 min | 154 Gb + 3% rec
Language: English
Subtitles: English
Genre: Biography, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Sport, Thriller

In The Whole Town's Talking, timid and down-trodden office-worker Arthur Ferguson Jones (Edward G. Robinson) leads a regular life, always hard-working and punctual, but one day, everything changes. He’s mistaken for the dangerous criminal Mannion (also played by Robinson of course) and is arrested. The resemblance is so striking, it takes the police a while to be convinced he’s not the culprit and they give him a special passport to avoid a similar mistake. Due to all the publicity regarding the case, the real Mannion hears of this passport and pays Jones a visit, strong-arming him into letting him use the passport in the evening and his house in the daytime. Meanwhile, the situation leads Jones closer to his dream woman, his colleague Cymbeline (Jean Arthur).

Extras:
• "Cymbaline: John Ford, The Whole Town's Talking" 2020 video essay by Tag Gallagher, author of John Ford: The Man and His Films (6:15)
• "Film Historian Leonard Maltin on The Whole Town's Talking" 2014 featurette (6:03)
• "A Trip Outside Ford Country: Sheldon Hall on The Whole Town's Talking" 2020 featurette (22:26)
• "No Rules But Her Own: Pamela Hutchinson on Jean Arthur" 2020 featurette (17:56)
• "Lux Radio Theatre: The Whole Town's Talking" radio adaptation originally broadcast on 24 February 1941 (52:30)
• The Whole Town's Talking Image Gallery: Original Promotional Material (19 images)

The Long Gray Line tells the true story of the life of Martin Maher (Tyrone Power). He’s an Irish immigrant who shows up at the United States Military Academy at West Point when he’s in his twenties, looking for work. He starts in the kitchen, where he makes a fool of himself, but is eventually promoted to non-commissioned officer and athletic instructor. Over the 50 years he spends living and working at West Point, he meets his wife, Mary (Maureen O’Hara), and the pair, who are unable to have their own children after a tragic miscarriage, treat the waves of fresh recruits as their family. The cadets reciprocate this love and treat this regular fixture at the academy as a father.

Extras:
• Audio commentary with Diana Drumm, Glen Kenny and Farran Smith Nehme
• "Living and Dead: The Long Gray Line" 2020 video essay by Tag Gallagher, author of John Ford: The Man and His Films (16:48)
• "Film Historian Leonard Maltin on The Long Gray Line" 2014 featurette (5:43)
• "The Red, White and Blue Line" 1955 promotional short (10:01)
• Theatrical trailer (4:27)
• The Long Gray Line Image Gallery: Original promotional material (17 images)

Gideon's Day (a.k.a. Gideon of Scotland Yard) portrays a day-in-the-life of Scotland Yard Chief Inspector George Gideon (Jack Hawkins). It’s a particularly busy day too. On top of family commitments (buying some salmon on the way home for unwanted dinner guests and attending his daughter’s music concert), Gideon has to deal with a multitude of cases, both big and small. To name a few, he discovers one of his detectives is accepting bribes, said detective ends up dead, an escaped mental patient murders a young girl, a daring payroll robbery takes place and a bank safe-depository is broken into. To make Gideon’s day worse, he’s given a traffic-offence ticket by a young, over-efficient PC (Andrew Ray).

Extras:
• Two presentations of the film: Gideon’s Day, with the original UK title sequence, and Gideon of Scotland Yard, with the alternative US titles
• Audio commentary with historian Curtis Barr
• "The British Entertainment History Project (BEHP) Interview with Freddie Young: Excerpts conducted by Roy Fowler and Alan Lawson on 1 April 1987 and 14 Aug 1987" plays as an alternate audio track over the film (90:56)
• "Milk & Sugar: John Ford, Gideon's Day" 2020 video essay by Tag Gallagher, author of John Ford: The Man and His Films (9:11)
• "Meet the Wife: Continuity Supervisor Elaine Shreyeck on Gideon's Day" 2020 featurette (5:33)
• "Film Historian Leonard Maltin on Gideon's Day" 2014 featurette (3:28)
• "A Day to Remember: Adrian Wootton on Gideon's Day" 2020 featurette (28:16)
• "John Ford and Lindsay Anderson at the NFT" 1957 silent footage (4:29)
• "Gideon's London: The Locations of Gideon's Day" 2020 featurette (3:33)
• UK theatrical trailer (2:29)
• Gideon's Day Image Gallery: Original Promotional Material (17 images)

The Last Hurrah sees a veteran mayor, Frank Skeffington (Spencer Tracy), preparing for his final election campaign in an unnamed New England city. The campaign for mayor proves to be a particularly difficult one for Frank this time around, as his rivals, the newspaper mogul Amos Force (John Carradine) and banker Norman Cass (Basil Rathbone), are backing a ‘blank-slate’ candidate, Kevin McCluskey (Charles B. Fitzsimons). McCluskey is inexperienced and a little empty-between-the-ears but young and clean-cut. Perhaps most importantly to Force, Cass and their elite friends though, McCluskey is ‘all-American’ and not Irish-Catholic like Frank.

Extras:
• "True Blue: John Ford, The Last Hurrah" 2020 video essay by Tag Gallagher, author of John Ford: The Man and His Films (7:13)
• "Film Historian Leonard Maltin on The Last Hurrah" 2014 featurette (4:56)
• Super 8 version (19:53)
• Theatrical trailer (3:05)
• The Last Hurrah Image Gallery: Original promotional material (23 images)