When Willie Comes Marching Home
By Gregg Rickman

John Ford is consistently underrated as a comic filmmaker; comedies like Steamboat Round the Bend (1935), Tobacco Road (1941) and Donovan's Reef (1963) are often seen as releases for Ford from the rigor of the major artistic efforts that preceded them (The Informer [1935], The Grapes of Wrath [1940] and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [1962], respectively) but have real merit in their own right. They sketch out in their different ways utopian other worlds as counterparts to the tragic realms of Ford's more seriously intended works. While the brawls in his cavalry films, The Searchers (1956), or The Quiet Man (1952) are again often seen as tasteless comedy relief from the drama that surrounds them, they are integral to those works as well, just as the controversial "Look" subplot parallels the racial drama of The Searchers' main story. They are part of Ford's architecture, themes in his symphonies.

All of these points have been made before. When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950) to me exemplifies a third, lesser-known form of Fordian humor. It's something he inherited from the silent cinema he began his career in, and which was in the air he breathed in as a contract director at Universal and Fox. That would be silent comedy.

I've often thought it was both regrettable and a blessing that Buster Keaton did not become a member of the Ford stock company. A blessing, as I wouldn't have wanted him to be lashed by Ford's tongue, but unfortunate, for Ford was more than comfortable with the stylized physical humor Keaton exemplified. Directors Keaton and Ford developed along similar lines in the 1920s, paladins of classical filmmaking style. We know that Keaton was aware of Ford, and borrowed from him. The 1925 Roscoe Arbuckle-directed Al St. John short The Iron Mule, in which Keaton cameos, is a parody of Ford's The Iron Horse from the previous year, and the railway-track shootout in Keaton's Go West (1925) seems drawn from the similar shootout in that film. The surviving fragment of Ford's The Village Blacksmith (1922) has a very similar look-and-feel to the dramatic prologue of Our Hospitality (1923), with their harsh black-and-white contrasts. Both The General and Ford's epic masterpiece 3 Bad Men (both 1926) have a similar sweep and storytelling verve — Ford's film came out some months earlier. Repaying the compliment, Steamboat Round the Bend has a comic kinship with Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928). The scene in that film where Francis Ford swings from a rope as he paints parallels Keaton's similar antics in Spite Marriage (1929). And to reference our topic film, in both The General and When Willie Comes Marching Home the film's hero is literally first in line to sign up for military duty the day war commences. Like train engineer Johnny Gray in Keaton's masterpiece, sharp shooter Willie is too valuable to his country to actually be sent to war — much to his shame.

Keaton — a fellow Irishman — could have provided grace notes of visual wit as a trooper, Indian scout, or sidekick to John Wayne in any number of Ford films. Instead we find Dan Dailey, a lanky dancer with physical skills, walking into doors and performing pratfalls in When Willie Comes Marching Home. Transitional figures for Ford from silent to sound films — from the Age of Keaton to that of Dan Dailey — include brother Francis in any number of films, and ex-silent comic Slim Summerville, who enjoys marvelous patches of skittering about the airfield in Airmail (1932), or aboard the sub as "Cookie" in Submarine Patrol (1938).

Most of these passages of physical humor take place on boats, subs, airfields, or, to expand our scope of Fordian humor to the aforementioned comic-relief brawls, in stockades and in barracks. The setting, then, is a military or quasi-military one, humor providing a humanizing element to set against the Big Technology of boat, sub, or airfield. (In Willie, Dailey travels by boat and by air, as well as bicycle and wagon, en route to his various destinies.) Dailey's parallel casting in two other military-set films, What Price Glory (1952) and The Wings of Eagles (1957), is also relevant, but what makes When Willie Comes Marching Home really stand out is its being built around the comedian for a change. It's a star vehicle for Dailey and his comic virtuosity. It piles as many humiliations on him as possible while setting us up for his ultimate success, like similar showcases for Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Red Skelton or Bob Hope. The usual point of comparison — Preston Sturges's small town war comedies The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1944) and Hail the Conquering Hero (1945) — merely proves this point, as so far as audiences were concerned they were primarily vehicles for the comic stylings of Eddie Bracken.

What makes Willie a different film than Sturges's marvelous diptych of small-town life? The similarities are obvious, down to William Demarest's presence, cast here as Dailey's short-fused dad. By 1950 Ford had made many films (Just Pals [1920], Pilgrimage, Doctor Bull [both 1933]) playing up the "hell is other people" aspects of the place where everyone knows your name. The Punxatawney, West Virginia, of When Willie Comes Marching Home is a pinched, vicious place next to the overflowing villages of Sturges. Sturges's frames pulsate with life and character, anticipating in their busy-ness Harvey Kurtzman's Mad Magazine satires by over a decade. When Willie Comes Marching Home has a wistful air right from the start, with Willie's small town band playing what would have been already, in 1941, antiquated music. If Ford provides no intoxicating comic highs like the finale of Morgan's Creek ("Six! All boys!"), Sturges is incapable of the moments of cinematic beauty Ford offers, as for example his shots of Corinne Calvet on the shore as Dailey begins his boat trip away from her and across the Channel. And despite the lovingly detailed eccentricities of Sturges's characters, only Ford dares to suggest his hero's destination might be a straitjacket in a psychiatric ward.

A better comparison might be Capra: at the heart of many of that director's films (The Miracle Woman, American Madness, the Deeds-Smith-Doe trilogy, It's a Wonderful Life, State of the Union) is the accusation that the hero is a fake and a fraud. Willie's humiliation stems from being acclaimed as a town hero, complete with a brass band at the train station in a scene paralleling similar moments in both Keaton's Battling Butler (1926) and Capra's Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). Then, alas, he is forced to stay at the hometown Army base, as the town turns against him as a slacker. The accusation eats at him, even though he knows it's not true. His superiors patronize him and refuse to send him to combat, continually offering him "Good Conduct" medals as compensation. Unlike a Capra hero he doesn't internalize the shame into suicidal despair, but he does have to stoically live with it eating away at him. He gets off easy, though, for Willie's ordeal is only most of the length of the war (Pearl Harbor to D-Day). Another Ford protagonist gets a life sentence under similar circumstances, condemned to know that he has succeeded under false pretenses, ignored even when he tries to confess. That would be Senator Ransom Stoddard, "the man who shot Liberty Valance." James Stewart, like Dan Dailey, was a lanky actor skilled in manipulating himself around a frame, and in all three of his Ford films (Two Rode Together [1961], Liberty Valance, Cheyenne Autumn [1964]) he's Dailey's logical heir, cast as a man coasting on his reputation. As much as Stewart as Ransom Stoddard consciously recalls his work as Capra's Mr. Smith, it also echoes Dailey in this film.

Gregg Rickman
© FIPRESCI 2009

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