The Spiritual Redemption of John Ford’s Pilgrimage
Note: This is the hundred-and-seventy-first in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Letterboxd, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my favorite 1933 film, PILGRIMAGE, directed by John Ford.
What kind of mother would not only accept, but actively push, for her son to go off to fight in a futile war? That question seems to factor into the initial thesis of John Ford’s 1933 film PILGRIMAGE, a narrative inverted from the approach of his earlier silent (and great movie) FOUR SONS (1928). In that film, a German mother who sees nearly all of her titular offspring wiped out by the War to End All Wars (a moniker the world, and Ford especially, would come to look back at as quaint naivete) finds peace in the arms of her surviving American immigrant son. But PILGRIMAGE’s Hannah Jessop (Henrietta Crosman) is simply unable to find quite that peace by film’s end, for due to her signing him off at the recruitment office, her son Jim (Norman Foster) dies. Nevertheless, Ford, writer Dudley Nichols, and the author of the short story on which the movie is based, I.A.R. Wylie, chart a path for Hannah that finds her redeemed in the arms of her grandson and his mother, the woman whose very existence threatened Hannah’s (controlling) love for her son.
Like FOUR SONS, PILGRIMAGE is an overt emulation of the pastoral Expressionism rendered by F.W. Murnau for his first American film (and my favorite movie of all time), SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927), also a Fox production. Ford once again creates an almost out-of-time-and-space America and Europe; with the former, an Arkansas that becomes snowbound and resembles the New England of Ford’s other 1933 film DOCTOR BULL, and with the latter, a small village that has a mayor so comfortable shoveling manure that he forgets he is supposed to lead a festive parade. These landscapes are beautifully crafted and lit, presenting a liminal depth that certainly obscures the limits of what even a large soundstage’s four walls would normally impose.
It’s important to impart just what these scenic views mean in the context of PILGRIMAGE’s narrative and performances, as they offer gleaming god rays both in day and nighttime (the latter afforded by the strikingly glowing moon) that establish a bucolic ideal. But of course, complications arise, and that’s when swirling fog and disastrous explosion effects come into play. The set design of PILGRIMAGE is indicative of an ever-improving Golden Age of Hollywood faculty to manufacture true dreams, landscapes and images that don’t quite fit into realistic nor totally abstract modes. Along with the likes of George Cukor and Rouben Mamoulian, Ford was studiously expanding on the idea of European filmmakers like, yes, Murnau, and marrying Expressionist concepts to Americana while getting their cameras moving again after the staid days of the early creaky talkie.
The quiet, spacious moments of PILGRIMAGE loom almost as large in my mind as its emotional denouement and earlier tragic inciting incidents, but the two are of course not disparate phenomena. Indeed, Ford leverages Crosman’s theatrical pedigree, as a woman who had appeared on stage as early as 1883, to great effect. There is a sort of old-fashioned mien to Hannah Jessop, but then, she’s an old-fashioned woman, espousing to Foster’s Jim that her parents had to take the land on which their farm now stands from “Indians,” a telling statement for a retrograde character in Ford’s own time and its own outdated indication of the treatment of Native Americans in that same time. In any event, it’s made clear that Hannah is a fierce woman, and that is even more readily apparent when it comes to her son Jim. Hannah doesn’t appreciate Jim sneaking off to see Mary (Marian Nixon), so-called “trash” with an alcoholic father who seems to not be good enough for Jim. One is led to believe that no one would be good enough for Hannah’s son, as she nitpicks like the hens she feeds and generally takes issue with his behavior.
If it sounds like Ford is making a shrewish caricature out of Hannah in PILGRIMAGE’s earliest moments, it’s because he kind of is. One would be forgiven for not finding too much truly likable about Hannah in the film’s first act, which culminates in her aforementioned signing off of her son’s rights to the United States Army and follows languid scenes of Jim and Mary’s nighttime barnyard tryst, a truly wonderful sight ruined by looming violence. The true irony of Hannah’s actions is that Jim is killed almost immediately upon shipping out to France, not even by a direct human enemy, but by a landslide of trench wall upon his whole contingent…all, as is revealed, a day before the Armistice is signed.
So we’re left to reckon with a woman who was just generally nasty to her son and was also directly responsible for his death when the movie’s story jumps forward ten years. Mary was made pregnant before Jim’s departure and little Jimmy, their son, is now a young boy. Hannah has nothing to do with either Mary or Jimmy and her coming is like a threatening tornado to the pair. Hannah is roped into what is essentially a publicity stunt, as Ford makes abundantly clear in an ironic commentary considering his forthcoming participation in World War II propaganda efforts, which will send “Gold Star” mothers with sons killed in the Great War to France to visit their final resting place. Hence, the “pilgrimage” of the film’s title. It is at this point that Ford turns the movie almost into a comedy, as Hannah is at the center of “fish out of water” scenarios not only in the ultimate destination of France, but also the more “sophisticated” New York City ahead of the trans-Atlantic crossing. There, Hannah meets fellow mothers, some often literally prostrate in their grief, and others (like one played by Lucille La Verne) offering comic relief.
This collective group of women find some joy in their travels and Ford employs numerous instances of broad comedy to illustrate joy coming back into Hannah’s life even as she travels to visit the grave of her dead son, including a ridiculous scene where she totally eviscerates a French shooting gallery with her Arkansan marks(wo)man skills. But after confessing her part in her son’s ultimate fate to the other mothers, Hannah almost seems to contemplate suicide on a Parisian bridge. It’s a credit to Ford’s tremendous staging and directing talent that it’s never so heavy-handed as all that, but the connection is made once Hannah realizes that there is a fellow mourner of a kind on the bridge. A young, affluent, and drunk American is about to throw himself off because, as Hannah learns after saving him, his aristocratic mother won’t let him marry a “common” French girl who, Hannah also learns, is pregnant with their child.
OK, so maybe the suicidal Hannah angle isn’t exactly didactic, but the parallels between this young couple’s plight and the one that this mother disapproved of with her own son are clear as day. And they make Hannah’s extreme efforts to remedy things for the youths, which includes a heart-to-heart with the man’s mother (played by the pre-gossip-columnist Hedda Hopper!), all the more heartfelt. One can feel Hannah’s attempts to create what she never could for her own son: a loving and judgement-free environment.
Hannah’s journey abroad climaxes in an eerie graveyard full of crosses, all representing young men sent to death for a war’s meaning that, even or especially in 1933, many weren’t sure of. Her choked emotion and fall onto the grave of her son is the poignant moment of PILGRIMAGE, and in my opinion, her resolutions with Mary and Jimmy back at home in Arkansas, while heartfelt and moving, represent an epilogue to the true confrontation between mother and the remains of her dead son.
I’ve somewhat addressed Crosman’s performance, but let me be clear that her stoicism and earnest stage-bound training make the character’s breakdowns all the more alarming and emotionally felt. Foster, who would go on to direct a number of Disney pictures and act in what is literally a lifechanging film for me in the form of Orson Welles’ much-belated THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (2018), was 30-years-old when PILGRIMAGE was made, making his “gee shucks” innocence and arrested development all the more palpably felt. Nixon as his lover Mary serves admirably, but it’s in the scenes between her and Foster that the aforementioned set design, and George Schneiderman’s cinematography, really shine as the technical elements are able to frame their bodies in such a way as to communicate much more than their faces and voices could.
The confluence of sheer spectacle (perhaps an overestimation in some’s view, but to me, the artifice of the movie is incredibly affecting), symbol-laden narrative, and powerful central performance make PILGRIMAGE a knockout emotional experience. It wasn’t common then and it isn’t really common now that an earnest drama (with comedic elements), centered on a septuagenarian, would be made, let alone celebrated. PILGRIMAGE wasn’t exactly a great success in its time, and today it certainly resides in the obscure region of Ford’s vast filmography, but it was indeed the best film he had yet made, an almost nerdy visual emulation of what Ford himself called the best movie he had yet seen (SUNRISE), and a redemption story of affecting depth.
