When 20th Century Fox bought the rights for a new anamorphic lens technology in 1952, whose origins dated back to a 1926 process called Anamorphoscope, it did so in the midst of an industrial existential crisis. Television’s rapid ubiquity and the tepid success of other widescreen shooting and projection processes like Cinerama combined to pressure studio executives into finding ways to enhance the theatrical viewing experience without ballooning costs (a large portion of which were no longer guaranteed in a post-Paramount decree Hollywood). Fox’s new camera lens technology, called CinemaScope, was a way to make the movies big again, something worth the journey to the theater and the price of admission, a strategy that drove up the costs of productions, but also (in theory) guaranteed bigger box office returns. Sound familiar?
In 1955, John Ford hadn’t yet hopped on the CinemaScope bandwagon. In fact, he hadn’t even made a film since Mogambo, which came out in October of 1953, only a month after the very first CinemaScope film, The Robe, premiered. Ford simply hadn’t had time. That changed when he directed The Long Gray Line (1955), an adaptation of Bringing up the Brass, the autobiography of Marty Maher, an Irish immigrant who lived and worked at West Point Military Academy for over 50 years.
The early days of CinemaScope were plagued by fealty (whether deliberate or accidental) to lateral visual thinking. Orson Welles said the only things CinemaScope could film well were snakes and funerals, a sentiment he shared in a 1958 article he wrote for the French magazine Arts, though it is often attributed to Lang, thanks to Godard’s Le Mepris. Ford managed to avoid these visual restrictions. His frame is dynamic, and possessed with a depth of field generally out of step with other CinemaScope features of the time. From the very beginning, when the story of Maher’s life begins in earnest as a young immigrant in turn-of-the-century America, Ford emphasizes the frame’s Z-axis rather than its X- or Y-. The result is a film of remarkable vanishing points that serve it as more than just visual dressing, but allow it to express, not just tell, a story about life’s vanishing points.
The Long Gray Line has a mix of looseness and rigor, a typically Fordian quality that’s bolstered by an emphasis on human decency and a candid permissiveness for its characters’ foibles and idiosyncrasies. This philosophy is present in everything Ford made, to varying degrees, from his Will Rogers comedies of the mid-1930s to his cavalry trilogy in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The military academy milieu, with its clash of discipline and youthful rebellion, is perfect for this kind of tonal synthesis.
The temporal scope of the film couldn’t be simpler. Told in flashback by Maher himself, played ably (in his only film for Ford) by Tyrone Power, The Long Gray Line is the story of his military career, from the first day to the last. Covering 50 years in one film is usually the death of a biopic, where nuance and detail are needed to overcome the formula’s tendency for generalization. Ford, however, evades these pitfalls by adopting an episodic structure that foregrounds the world around Maher as much as Maher himself; the result of which is an unusually detailed character study that still allowed Ford to mold his hero into the perfect avatar for his own love of the military.
That being said, to call The Long Gray Line episodic is to limit it. The coming and going of characters around Maher, whose legend in the film and in real life is defined by his near-interchangeability with West Point itself, instead creates a cyclical narrative structure. Characters arrive and depart on diagonal planes that appear from, and vanish into, the distance, creating a sense of impermanence totally incongruous to Maher.
This sense of disconnect is all the more crucial when you consider just how passive Maher is in his own life. Upon arrival at West Point he’s whisked around by a young officer (Peter Graves), observing along the way one of the film’s great vanishing points as all the cadets line up at attention in a courtyard before breakfast; and placed under the rule of a flustered but compassionate boss in the school’s dining hall where he waits tables. Later, Maher is appointed under Captain Keeler (Ward Bond), the Master of the Sword. Keeler liked Maher because he witnessed a fight between him and the aforementioned young officer (contested over what Maher saw as a grave, personal injustice against a group of cadets during a co-ed ball) and liked his right hook. Keeler eventually makes Maher the swimming instructor (despite him not knowing how to swim, a fact demonstrated in a comically metaphorical scene that has Keeler dangling Maher like a puppet over the swimming pool); and plays matchmaker, along with his wife, for Maher and their new cook, Mary (Maureen O’Hara), fresh off the boat from Ireland. Mary’s arrival scene is a delicate blend of screwball comedy and pure, lovestruck sentiment. She arrives from the back of shot, a crucial twist on the film’s traditional vanishing points, and is slowly integrated into the scene as she observes Maher’s showboating in front of his boxing students. Maher doesn’t even have a hand in bringing his father and brother over to America from Ireland; Mary, now Maher’s wife, managed that all behind his back for the chance to see his dumbfounded face as they’re all eating at the dinner table when he gets home one day. Maher’s passivity is tested by the tragedies that eventually start to infiltrate the utopia around him; the only thing he really does for himself throughout the film is engage in a cycle of reenlistments when he inevitably realizes his love for West Point outweighs these heartbreaks.
John Ford loved an institution, though his career is defined in large part by a savvy awareness, and even occasional ambivalence, about what those institutions do to the people who make them. His critique of the military in particular is all the more pointed for his love. Two films he made just after WWII, They Were Expendable (1945) and Fort Apache (1948), epitomize this ambivalence; their literal proximity to the end of the war lends a palpable frustration towards a soldier’s life of passivity and smallness; in the case of Expendable, it’s national and global power struggles, and in Fort Apache the whim of an obstinate and egotistical leader.
The Long Gray Line takes a melancholic approach to expressing a soldier’s helplessness. When Kitty Carter (Betsy Palmer), a friend of Marty and Mary’s, vents her anger after the death of her husband Red (William Leslie) in WWI, before he could ever meet his son, Marty, devoted where Kitty is skeptical, assures her there is honor in Red’s work, in being trained, essentially, to die. However, we know Marty has his own doubts. Earlier in the film, Marty and Mary help send Red and his fellow cadets off to war. The master shot is representative of one of Ford’s great skills as a director: a conjurer of hubbub. The freewheeling clump of departing cadets, those staying behind, and a few civilians has its own invigorating energy, thrown into sharp relief against the stoicism of the station platform roof and the train itself, their long lines jutting, and vanishing, into the distance. When all their goodbyes are said, Marty and Mary watch the train depart, ashen expressions on their faces, as if they were looking at death directly. Marty’s premature departure from the sending off is its own foreshadowing of the series of painful departures yet to come.
In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ford compared a filmmaker’s use of the CinemaScope frame to that of painters using tennis court-shaped canvases — they didn’t. Besides the fact that the technology dropped out of fashion by the early 1960s (there were also difficulties convincing theaters to outfit themselves with the necessary sound equipment, and increasingly better rivals), along with other short-lived innovations such as 3-D and VistaVision (though the director would master this method, too, in 1956, with The Searchers), Ford never personally liked it. Great closeups were hard to achieve, and it required the viewers’ eyes to dart back and forth to see everything in the frame. So, he never made another film in Cinemascope again. But one gets the sense that after The Long Gray Line there was very little else for Ford to accomplish with the trendy technology. Without trial and error or any sense of hesitation, he understood completely just how to exploit the unconventional frame for compositional depth, and tell a story whose themes are themselves expressed in those very compositions.
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