Hangman's House

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.

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.

Hangman's House is one of a number of sentimental slices of rural European life to come out of Fox Studios in the late-silent era. This time round the focus is on dear old Ireland, and so who better to produce and direct than renowned blarney-merchant John Ford? Ford's approach to this one is very uncluttered, in that there are none of the improvised comedy diversions that decorated (or bogged down) many of his features. This is perhaps not surprising, since the story and characters being as they are, Ford probably saw no need to inject any further twee "oirishness". Ford's directness is helpful, because the plot is a bit of a muddle as it is. It's not entirely clear whose story we are supposed to be following, as equal weight (albeit different emphasis) is given to three different arcs. Ford probably didn't regard this as a problem though – for him the main character is simply the Irish people, and he photographs each individual as if they were the protagonist.

Ford's economy of expression is much in evidence. A typical Ford shot is the introductory one of Hobart Bosworth, he of the eponymous house. In the centre of the frame we see the man as he is now, elderly and frail. The portrait on the wall behind him shows us what he was, whereas the flames that underline the image hint symbolically at where he may soon end up. This is not to say Ford's shot compositions were overly complicated. For most of the picture he uses simple, delicate arrangements that focus us on the important elements. This is often achieved with soft-focus photography, which also adds to the sweet, romantic look of the images.

One of the characteristics of the late-silent period is the freeing up of the camera, with pictures such as Sunrise having the lens whiz about all over the shop. By contrast Ford wisely limits himself in this respect, and there are only two significant camera moves in the whole of Hangman's House. The first is at the end of the opening scene, a version of the much-imitated pull-back-across-a-long-table shot that was originally done in 1925 Valentino vehicle The Eagle. This is mirrored towards the end with a dolly in on villainous Earle Fox. Besides these examples the camera is "invisible", in that it only moves to follow an actor or an action. Ford would maintain this pattern of camera movement throughout his career, throwing in just one or two noticeable moves per pictures to draw attention to a key moment.

It's a pity the auteurists focused so much on Ford's "themes", because they draw attention away from his restrained and to-the-point command of cinematic technique. To be honest, there is far more going on on that front than there is in the story of Hangman's House, which is clichéd, unfocused and above all boring. Ford's tender shot compositions for the intimate scenes compensate for the so-so acting, and his imaginative coverage of the horse race provides us with a rousing mid-film high point. But pretty though the imagery may be, Ford's pictures of this period were not very interesting. He is one filmmaker whose style would be revitalised by the coming of sound.

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.

Citizen Hogan ( Victor McLaglen) is an Irish expatriate, wanted by the British, hiding out in the French Foreign Legion. He gets a message and says he must return to Ireland to kill somebody.

From the title and what goes on during the first part of the film, I was thinking that he came back to kill Lord Justice O'Brien (Hobart Bosworth), the titular hangman but actually a judge. Maybe the judge sentenced a friend or relative to hang? And although Ford builds this judge up as a very bad guy, haunted by the people he sentenced to death, I can never see what exactly he did that was wrong in the line of duty considering capital punishment was routine at the time. He wasn't said to take bribes. He wasn't convicting anybody, just sentencing them. Would the townspeople like him to just let murderers go? Would they prefer they be paroled in their house, in the bedroom next to their teen daughter's room? Since the townspeople hate him so, the only thing I can figure is that because he is an Irishman cooperating with the British system of justice, they just consider everybody executed by said British as a martyr and thus the judge as a traitor, even if the people he hanged would wreak chaos on normal people if freed. But I digress.

But the judge dies pretty quickly into the film, and yet Hogan hangs around, risking capture. So it turns out the judge was never his actual target, but the actual target is associated with the "Hangman's House".

This seems like a warm up for The Quiet Man in several ways. The tormented lovers kept apart by family, the crowd cheering at a horse race, the odd superstitions of the people, and so on. Even some small bits of dialogue are the same as in The Quiet Man. The only rather laughable bit is that the villain looks SO MUCH like a villain, especially a silent era villain.

This film is probably best remembered as having a bit part for John Wayne in it as he goes crashing through a fence at the end of the horse race, and you probably will not spot him unless you know he is there. But it is worth a look in its own right.