The Pride of Palomar

When a crowdfunding campaign opened for this movie under the aegis of Truefilm, I was very happy to kick my money in for a DVD. Borzage's mature works can be described as Magical Realism, a special world in which nothing is impossible, especially in the face of love.

The DVD just arrived. I wasted no time in watching it. There is nothing in it, alas, that smacked of Borzage's great works, but it proved to be a fine A Western with a lovely score compiled, orchestrated and conducted by David L. Gill.

Forrest Stanley returns to his family's ranch at El Palomar. His father has died and there is a huge mortgage on the land, held by Eastern banker Alfred Allen, who intends to improve the land and sell it to Warner Oland -- playing a Japanese agent -- who will sell it to Japanese farmers. Because Stanley is a returning veteran, he has a year to pay off the mortgage. Allen and Oland fight him: Allen fairly, Oland vilely. Stanley has the support of all the locals and Allen's daughter, Marjorie Daw.

The movie is full of exciting scenes, great photography and much good humor. It is blighted to the modern viewer because of its racism. Four years earlier, Japan was an ally during the First World War and many a spy thriller had a Japanese agent fighting the good fight, but times had changed, and this movie reflects that the Yellow Peril was again something to be feared.

Even if this is not a perfect film, it is a very good one and an important revival in the works of an important director. It is worth the time of anyone who wishes to see as much of Borzage's work as possible.

I rather think "magic sentimentalism" would describe Borzage better than "magic realism". With Ford and Capra, he is one of the earliest cinematic peddlers of the American Dream (what might be characterised as the immigrants' idealised view) which gives him very little in common with Jean Renoir or Marcel Carné.

The immigrant's idealised view was however in its turn rather selective about those immigrants it liked and those it didn't really care for. Ford made a lot of fuss about the Chinese workers (some the men who had originally built the Transcontinental) employed on the film The Iron Horse but never gives them any role at all in the film beyond that of anonymous coolies while privileging the Irish and the Italians (with a preference naturally in Ford's case for the Irish) about whom the film the film waxes painfully sentimental.

But, if he has no real interest in the Chinese, Ford does at least acknowledge that they did the work his film credits to the other immigrant communities even if he does not bother to make clear how crucial their role actually was.

This film is sentimental enough about Mexicans in California even if it is somewhat ambiguous even there (they are characterised, as nearly always in Californian mythology, as victims of their own fecklessness)but when it comes to Japs and Chinks it is altogether a different matter. What a very nasty hypocritical little film, it is.

The 1924 Immigration Act would effectively ban Japanese immigration. There was of course no such thing as Japanese "colonisation" in the US; the Japanese had been imported to replace the Chinese whose immigration had been banned since 1882 (Chinese Exclusion Act). During these "yellow peril" years, Swede Warner Oland was in constant demand as sinister orientals (starting with the German-funded anti-Jap serial Patria in 1917) but even as big a star as Sessue Hayakawa became sickened at the prejudice and moved to France.

Of course all this anti-immigration sentiment was long in the past. The offensive legislation was repealed....in 1966! And, with regard to the internment of Japanese Americans in the Seond World War, the US accepted that there had been a "fundamental violations of the basic civil liberties and constitutional rights"...in 1988!

Provided you don't have slitty eyes (and not black of course), the US, it is well known, is a place where, however desperate your troubles may appear, there is always a benevolent millionaire around the corner or a competition of some sot to be won.

American Dream mon cul!

World War I veteran Forrest Stanley (Don Miguel Farrell) returns to his father's ranch to find his father dead and Eastern capitalist Alfred Allen come to foreclose the mortgage and to sell the ranch to the evil Japanese Warner Oland for colonization. As a veteran, he gets one year grace to pay off the mortgage. This he does with help from the capitalist's daughter Marjorie Daw.

Some nice location shooting in rural California.

Includes a strong Anti-Japanese message and the one Chinese is also evil. The Mexicans don't come off much better. Presumably the hero is named Farrell so he can have a 'real' American as a bride.