By Wayne Allensworth
Westerns were once upon a time the most popular American film genre. And the great John Ford directed some of the best ones. Our greatest star in the Western film firmament was John Wayne, who was associated as a friend and collaborator with Ford for much of his career. Their names are inseparable in American film history. Movie buffs know the Ford-Wayne films that did so much to define the Western and secure its place in American filmography: Stagecoach, the cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande), The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The Ford-Wayne collaboration cast a giant shadow over the American cultural landscape that has reached far beyond their lifetimes.
One Ford-Wayne film however, 3 Godfathers, doesn’t get the attention it deserves, especially during the Christmas season. That might be because it is far from a conventional John Wayne vehicle, though it is markedly a Ford film, with some of Ford’s favorite Americana music, its sense of humor, its longing for community, the striking Winton Hoch technicolor cinematography, with each shot framed like a marvelous painting, its sentimental take on the old America, its historical and religious reverence, and its elegiac quality. 3 Godfathers is a thinly veiled Christmas allegory, with the film’s three good bad men, another common motif in American Westerns, played so well by Wayne, Pedro Armendariz, and Harry Carey, Jr, subbing for the Biblical three wise men. The film’s cast is drawn from what came to be called the John Ford stock company, with so many familiar, expressive faces and personalities in the supporting cast: Ward Bond, Jane Darwell, Hank Worden, Jack Pennick, Mildred Natwick, Francis Ford (Jack Ford’s brother), and the great Ben Johnson among them. The movie is dedicated to Harry Carey, Sr., “Bright Star of the early Western sky,” who died a year before the film’s release in 1948, and who had starred in three earlier versions of the story. The Abilene Kid, played by his son, was Harry Carey, Jr.’s film debut.
3 Godfathers begins with the Wayne-Armendariz-Carey trio robbing a bank in the fictional town of Welcome, Arizona. The sheriff, played by Ward Bond, leads a posse in hot pursuit that takes us deep into the desert. The not-so-bad outlaws run across a stranded wagon, in which an ill woman extracts a promise from them to protect the child she gives birth to before her demise. From that moment on, 3 Godfathers is loaded with Biblical allusions, and a Bible from the wagon-manger directs our three rascally heroes on their odyssey to save the infant. The Kid becomes a technicolor angel, a sainted figure who acts as the conscience of the trio. Hoch’s magnificent photography and Ford’s composition frame him as a salvific Christ-like figure who inspires his friends to an apostolic sacrifice in the great American desert, as they follow a star to New Jerusalem. The Kid and Armendarez’s Pedro don’t make it, but Wayne’s Bob Hightower carries on.
I won’t go into any further detail; just watch this touching, endearing, and funny movie. Just one more point: the film ends on a sentimental note of Americana that touches on the elegiac quality that Ford’s later Westerns adopted: As Wayne/Hightower leaves Welcome on an open freight train car bound for prison, and a choir of the town’s women sing Shall we Gather at the River, Duke waves his ten gallon hat to them as the train leaves town and he and John Ford’s America ride off into the sunset. It’s an ending that always tugs deep at this viewer’s heart.
3 Godfathers deserves a place on any list of Christmas classics, as it melds the Christmas movie with the most American of movie genres.
Merry Christmas!
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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