Hangman's House

With a pleasingly Gothic setting, John Ford's tale of revenge starts out well but loses impetus as it tries to keep us in the dark about the reason behind Victor McLaglen's decision to take leave of the Foreign Legion in order to 'kill a man' in Ireland. June Collyer and Larry Kent are a little too bland as the romantic leads, but Earle Fox delivers as a villain with absolutely no redeeming features.

This is a hidden gem of a film from Ford's silent period. Much of Ford's output often feels somewhat erratic, with different narrative pieces introduced and never quite fitting together, but Hangman's House is a shockingly well put together film. At only 70 minutes, it feels stuffed with detail, but that detail never feels like a distraction here. Instead, everything works in tandem, revolving around everything else with a solid narrative core. It's got so much of what animated Ford (horse racing, Ireland, the underdog everyman against the traitorous outsider), and it ends up working wonderfully well together.

In Algeria, in the French Foreign Legion, is an Irish man, Denis Hogan (Victor McLaglen) who receives news and immediately declares that he must go home to Ireland, even though he has a price on his head there. We do not learn the reasons for his return until much later, though. Back home, the elderly judge, Lord Justice O'Brien (Hobart Bosworth), the hangman's judge as he's called, is nearing death and trying to arrange for the advantageous match of his daughter, Connaught (June Collyer), at the same time. She's in love with the local Dermot McDermot (Larry Kent), but Father has his eyes on the wealthy socialite John D'Arcy (Earle Fox), who should be able to open doors for her future. Because he is dying, Conn gives into her father's demands and marries D'Arcy.

Lord Justice O'Brien is haunted by the people he sent to the gallows, though. There's a wonderful little moment where O'Brien looks into the fire and sees flashbacks (including an uncredited John Wayne) of his victims. Beset by guilt, when Hogan appears outside his window in a hood, resembling Death to a certain degree, O'Brien has a heart attack and dies on the night of his daughter's wedding. Conn, though, is trapped in a loveless marriage with the unappealing D'Arcy while Dermot promises to be her friend no matter what.

There's a big horserace in the county, and Conn has placed her own horse, The Bard, in the race. When the jockey mysteriously disappears, Dermot offers to ride for her, an offer she happily takes. However, D'Arcy fights the idea, having put all the money he could borrow on another horse (and presumably being responsible for the disappearance of the jockey). The race is the kind of well-filmed spectacle Ford demonstrated he could handle in The Shamrock Handicap with exciting jumps and falls as the horses race over fences and walls, ultimately leading to the expected outcome of Dermot winning.

D'Arcy is broken, his dreams of fleeing Ireland with his winnings dashed, and Dermot and Conn begin to hope that they might be able to find a way to be together. Dermot flings his wallet at D'Arcy with a promise to kill him if Dermot ever sees him again, and Dermot goes to find Citizen Hogan, having heard that Hogan might know something about D'Arcy's past. Hogan, having been captured by the English soldiers at the race and escaped at the hands of his Irish loyalists, finally offers up his reasons for returning to Ireland. D'Arcy had married Hogan's sister in Paris, abandoning her, an action that led to her death.

Without a plan on what to do in the future, Dermot returns Conn home, to her father's large house, and goes home himself. However, D'Arcy has come back and he's trying to sell everything in the house. Dermot and Hogan return for a final showdown, and it's the amalgamation of elements into an exciting conclusion that Ford had already become well-practiced at.

Why did I enjoy this movie so much? Because despite its short runtime and rather large set of characters, elements of setting, and crisscrossing motives, everything ends up coming together in a satisfying way. Like a series of cogs fitting together perfectly to create the smooth motion of a single machine with a single purpose. Every character is there supporting the central story of justice being visited upon those who have escaped it. Every action is in support of it. And, more importantly, the characters and their motivations feel real, avoiding sensations of contrivance. It's a very good movie, a real hidden gem.

Having worked as a 'grip' during his summer holidays between terms at the University of Southern California, John Wayne was given the opportunity to rub shoulders with John Ford in this film as an extra. When Wayne sustained an injury to his shoulder, Ford suggested to him to work full-time in films.

I rented this at Netflix to see John Wayne in his earliest credited role, and there he is and in more than one scene, too, at the races. They had to kind of bury him with a family and friends and put him in the back of a wagon, until it was time to tear down the fence, in order to tone down this extra's height, good looks, and enthusiasm! Otherwise, he would have taken over the whole scene. No wonder Ford was interested in him.

In addition to Wayne, though, I was surprised to see how good this movie is overall, even today. It has some of the 1920s melodramatic touches and rather silly (from today's perspective) plot devices, but that is more than outweighed by John Ford's film shots of the Irish countryside and its people.

I swear Ford took some of the "Irish" shots out of this and set them into "The Quiet Man," in color and with sound; for example, the buggies with the men and women in the side seats are just shown in passing in "Hangman's House," but of course Ford makes them a prominent plot device in "The Quiet Man." There is actually more loving detail of upper class Irish life in "House," including some spectacular sets of houses and the waterways, than in "Quiet Man." Listen to the music in the race scene in "House": it's a version of the same tune that Michaleen starts in the last sequences of "The Quiet Man," when Wayne goes down to the train station to fetch O'Hara home. I always wondered why Ford featured that so prominently.

Ford also used some very imaginative camera setups, including having some of the horses in the race come straight at the camera and then jump over it, as well watching the old hanging judge suffering torments of conscience...with the camera filming him from the back of the fireplace, through the flames! Victor McLaglen dominates the film, too. It's quite a revelation for someone who has just seen him in "The Quiet Man,"and seeing his performance in "House" enhances the whole fight scene at the end of "The Quiet Man."

All in all, this excellent movie complements "The Quiet Man" quite well.

On the opposite side of the disc for 3 Bad Men, I figured it was short and I might as well cross it off my John Ford list. Not worth the time. The story here is just boring, and, though it's interesting to see Victor McLaglen in a silent role and John Wayne as an extra (this was his first film appearance, and that's probably what the film is best known for), it's one of Ford's worst. McLaglen is supposedly the star, but he's mostly a side character. The main story revolves around a love triangle. June Collyer is the daughter of a notorious judge who sentenced many people to the gallows. Her father insists she marry a rich man (Earle Foxe) to ward off his bad reputation, but she's in love with Larry Kent. McLaglen plays a mysterious figure from Foxe's past who shows up to expose his own evil history. Wayne appears as a spectator at a horse race who gets so excited he breaks the fence in front of him. I admit I fell asleep about ten minutes before the end of this one but wasn't interested enough to go back and finish it.