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about the writer Ronald Bergan (Ph.D. English Lit.), film historian, critic and lecturer, is a regular contributor to The Guardian. He is a former vice-president of FIPRESCI, for which he has been president of the jury at numerous film festivals and has chaired and participated in many conferences on cinema all over the world. He lives in France and has lectured on literature, theatre and film at the Sorbonne, the British Institute in Paris and the University of Lille. He has held a Chair at the Florida International University in Miami where he taught Film History and Theory. Among the many books he has written are: Sergei Eisenstein: A Life in Conflict; Jean Renoir: Projections of Paradise; The Coen Brothers; Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life; Francis Coppola: The Making of His Movies; The Bloomsbury Foreign Film Guide; The United Artists Story; The Eyewitness Guide To Film (published in 8 languages) and François Truffaut Interviews, which he edited. |
The Last Hurrah
By Ronald Bergan
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The Last Hurrah (1958) is a poignant farewell to a certain kind of cinema. Made on the eve of the French Nouvelle Vague and the emergence of independent American filmmaking, it is the cinematic equivalent of an Irish wake.
It was not John Ford's valedictory film. He was to make seven more features in the following eight years. Though all of them were indisputably auteuristic, The Last Hurrah, among the late works, seems the most personal. Principally, it is one of the few of Ford's films in which the hero can be deemed to be the director's surrogate. Certainly, there are aspects of Ford in many characters throughout his career, but Spencer Tracy as politician Frank Skeffington comes nearest. Tracy, a close drinking buddy of Ford's, had not worked with the director since Ford gave him his first feature film role as the lead in the prison comedy Up The River, 28 years earlier.
In The Last Hurrah, Ford was trying to recapture the spirit of his three films with Will Rogers: Doctor Bull (1933), Judge Priest (1934) and Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), the director's special favourites. Humorous, home-spun and sentimental entertainments, set in a small community, with Rogers, down-to-earth, quickwitted, and more than willing to go against social norms to do what's "right," descriptions that can be applied to The Last Hurrah and Tracy's persona.
Although the screenplay by Frank Nugent, who wrote among the best of Ford's movies (eleven in all), is adapted from Edwin O'Connor's novel about the final campaign of a mayor of an unnamed Eastern city, dominated by Irish-Americans, The Last Hurrah is full of Fordian moments, not least the scenes where Skeffington places a fresh flower in front of his late wife's portrait and converses with her.
The Last Hurrah is an affectionate tribute to old-style political campaigning, foreseeing the power of television to change (and corrupt?) the process. Ford was certainly alienated from and disillusioned by modern life, which explains why he hadn't tackled a contemporary urban American subject since The Whole Town's Talking (1935). Skeffington refuses to change his well-tried campaigning methods. "You wouldn't want me to break with tradition, would you?", he says to one of his old side-kicks. "Remember the day we took office. Frank Skeffington was available to every man and woman in this state." But unlike Judge Priest, Skeffington loses to a younger man. Was 64-year-old Ford looking over his shoulder at younger up-and-coming directors?
The Last Hurrah is also a homage to the studio system (then in a moribund state) which had tons of sterling supporting actors on contract, one of the great lost pleasures in the post-studio era. For the film, Ford surrounded himself with friends who echo his four decades as a director. The Last Hurrah is probably the last film to display such an array of Hollywood stalwarts, and is one of its strengths.
There are Pat O'Brien (whose last film for Ford was Airmail [1932]) and Frank McHugh from Warner Bros. glory days; Ed Brophy, in his final film, as lovably brainless as ever; Donald Crisp (How Green Was My Valley [1941]), as a Catholic cardinal; James Gleason (this being his penultimate film, reunited with Ford after What Price Glory [1953]); O. Z. Whitehead (his first Ford film since The Grapes of Wrath [1940]); Ricardo Cortez (reunion after Flesh [1932]); and Jeffrey Hunter, in the second of his three Ford movies. Plus members of the John Ford repertory company: John Carradine, Willis Bouchey, Wallace Ford (no relation), Anna Lee, Jane Darwell and Mae Marsh. Basil Rathbone, as the baddie, is one of the few of the leads never to have worked with Ford. Only missing were Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Andy Devine, Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr.
All of them parade before the dying Tracy in the apotheosis of the Fordian death scene. It is a glorious swan song, a Liebestod, an Abschied, moving enough to make an Ulsterman weep. In the final shot, the characters' shadows are seen on the wall while mounting the staircase to bid farewell to their hero, a scene reminiscent of the Walpurgisnacht sequence in Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, another film about change and the collapse of a social system. The difference is that Renoir was ambivalent about its passing, the more conservative Ford regrets it.
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issue #5 (5.2009)
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