DVDs & BOOKS

Upstream (1927)
Production Company: Fox Film Corp. Producer: William Fox. Director: John Ford. Writer: Randall H. Faye, from the story “The Snake’s Wife,” by Wallace Smith. Photographer: Charles G. Clarke. Cast: Nancy Nash (Gertie Ryan), Earle Foxe (Eric Brashingham), Grant Withers (John Rogers), Lydia Yeamans Titus (Hattie Breckenbridge Peyton, the landlady), Emile Chautard (Campbell-Mandare), Raymond Hitchcock (Hitchy, the star boarder), Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen (Callahan and Callahan), Jane Winton (the soubrette), Lillian Worth and Judy King (the sister team), Francis Ford (medicine showman), Ely Reynolds (Deerfoot), Harry Bailey (Al Forest). Transfer Note: Copied at 24 frames per second from a 35mm tinted print preserved by Twentieth Century Fox and AMPAS from source material provided by the NZFA. New Music: Donald Sosin (score, piano), Marshall Coid (violin), Rob Jost (bass), and Brook Martinez (drums). Running Time: 60 minutes.

When news breaks of discovery of a lost feature by a great filmmaker, one has all sorts of mixed expectations, hopes, and fears. Will it be a dog?—one of those silent films about which cynics can say, “Well, now we know why it was thrown away.” Or could it possibly be a masterpiece? Or will it be simply a solid film that further confirms what we know from that filmmaker?

John Ford’s Upstream turns out to give us something quite unexpected, and entirely different from any of these options. Certainly it’s a modest and minor Ford film, without any location shooting and taking place almost entirely in a New York theatrical boarding house populated by less-than-successful players and vaudeville acts, a mix of has-beens and hopefuls. The print identified in the New Zealand Film Archive in 2009 is essentially complete and measures only a few feet less than the original length, but it runs under an hour. The cast is without recognizable stars, even at its release on January 30, 1927. The young woman at the center of the film’s romantic triangle is played by Nancy Nash, whose career in credited parts lasted little more than a year. Grant Withers, as the knife thrower in the act, was taking his first lead. Among the vaudeville team, audiences would have been familiar only with Earle Foxe, playing Eric Brashingham, whose rise to success in Hamlet propels what little plot the film possesses. Film Daily’s review hints at Hollywood expectations: “It is difficult for Foxe to be convincing in this town when you are accustomed to seeing him clowning.”

And yet minor as it may be, Upstream is the most exciting sort of find—something that could not have been anticipated before its discovery. It is recognizably a film by John Ford but reveals a side of his work not found elsewhere, or not found in the concentrated form we have here. It’s as if one had been able to roll together the little throwaway moments, the rapid asides of character observation, that punctuate Ford’s other films—and that are often exactly the moments one most treasures in them. Ford’s greatest films have curiously slack pacing and roundabout structures, their main story lines regularly broken by disconnected touches. (There are hundreds of these, and every Ford fan has favorites, but think of, say, in The Searchers, the way Hank Worden’s wounded character looks up to speak, “Grateful to the hospitality of your rocking chair, ma’am”; or the silent moments in They Were Expendable when, on Pearl Harbor attack day, a very young navy seaman puts down on the bar his glass of milk; and in The Grapes of Wrath, when Jane Darwell’s Ma Joad holds earrings up to her ears for a last gaze into a clouded mirror before departing west.) Upstream does little more than pull such character asides together and make them, just barely, into a story that will sustain feature length.

The film’s cinematographer, Charles G. Clarke, only 27 but already with 10 years of filming experience, recalled the atmosphere on the production, his first with Ford: “I could see no relationship between the different scenes we would be filming and often wondered when we would settle down and start making the picture. After about three weeks of this sort of casual filmmaking, the unit manager announced, ‘The picture is finished, everyone is off salary.’ The shock of this floored me for I could see no rhyme or reason in what we had been filming…. The picture was cut and released under the title Upstream. To my amazement it all went together and was quite a good picture. What I did not realize then was that John Ford edited his picture as he directed it, and that his casual manner was only a cover for the actual planning and thought that lay behind his direction all along.”

Indeed, Upstream starts with no narrative drive whatsoever—and only when the boarders gather at the dinner table 10 minutes or so into the film does it hit us that we’ve already come to have a lively sense of at least 12 distinct individuals, through rapid introductory sketches. This subtle achievement is underlined through a flamboyant tracking shot across all their faces. Some have been identified as types: the “Soubrette” (former Ziegfeld girl Jane Winton), the “Star Boarder” (Broadway actor Raymond Hitchcock, best known for his Cole Porter revue Hitchy-koo), the aging tragedian (Emile Chautard, who had turned to acting after giving up in 1924 his active film directing career in France and then in the United States). Most of the boarding-house residents are variations on the theme of acting as ludicrous impersonation, as a bit of a joke, to be undertaken in high spirits: “Callahan and Callahan,” the vaudeville duo demonstrably consisting of an Irishman and a Jew (Ted McNamara and Sammy Cohen; the pair had clicked in Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory [1926] and would be teamed in three more Fox films over the next year); or the “Sister Act” (Lillian Worth and Judy King), “being mother and daughter, they are more closely related than most sister acts,” an intertitle explains.

What Ford has created, only a few minutes into Upstream, is a community—the sort of mutually supportive group that forms the bedrock of so many of his best films, including The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, Wagon Master, and the cavalry trilogy. Brashingham, who falls for his own thespian pretentions, fails to understand both the wit in acting and the value of community. Everyone has initial shock that the lazy, insouciant Brashingham should be, among them all, the one to be elevated by the theatrical manager who interrupts their dinner, but the boarding-house members soon support the old tragedian’s tutorial on Hamlet and come to be proud of Brashingham’s success. The manager seeks only his famous theatrical family name (“I’ve got a rush order from London for a Brashingham to play Hamlet”), a little joke on the Barrymores. (John Barrymore, initially known for his light-comedic stage roles, had taken Hamlet to London in 1925.) But Brashingham (the brash ham) proves, by the film’s finale, unworthy of esteem. After literally booting him out of the boarding house, the community comes together again around the new couple. A theater marquee visible through a window in the final shot promises “COMING SOON. TRUE LOVE WILL WIN.”
What plot the film has is loosely drawn from “The Snake’s Wife,” by author and illustrator Wallace Smith, one of his 10 stories linked by their setting in “Mrs. Fisher’s Boarding House for Vaudevillians.” All were initially published in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Magazine—this one in the May 1926 issue—and collected in Are You Decent? (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927). The story is instructive only for lacking everything that enlivens the film. The rather plodding little romantic drama of “The Snake’s Wife” focuses on the scenes that become the film’s final ones, but in the story the newly eminent Shakespearean returns from London with his “good trouper’s” heart unchanged. “Somber miseries” and “melancholy” looks abound.

The film was something of a family project. John Ford’s older brothers are behind and in front of the camera. Francis Ford, 12 years older and with his stardom and directorial career essentially behind him, plays one of the “medicine show” duo (the frizzy-haired one), first seen distilling and bottling their “Magic Tehachapi Root” cure. Edward O’Fearna, five years older than John, was assistant director. (Their family name was Feeney; Edward changed his to something more Irish, while John followed Francis in taking the stolid Anglo-Saxon name, which Francis said he borrowed from a passing car.) John Ford would also often maintain family-like bonds (not lacking rancor) with the leads in his early films, finding them work long after many were barely employable elsewhere. The two love rivals in Upstream can both be spotted, for instance, in Ford’s 1946 Wyatt Earp film, My Darling Clementine: Earle Foxe as the gambler who attempts to cheat Earp at poker; Grant Withers as Ike Clanton, who speaks the film’s first word, “Texas?”

By the time that he made Upstream, Ford was only 32 but had directed more than 50 feature-length films, and his apparently relaxed mastery is evident. Oddly, the title card with his director credit is missing on this sole surviving print, which helps explain how it was so long overlooked. The reason for the film being titled Upstream is no clearer after viewing it (the word is not in Smith’s story), notwithstanding one strained attempt to haul the title into the intertitles via farewell words to Brashingham from his boarding-house Hamlet mentor: “Go Upstream to success! Wear humbly the regal laurel of genius!” According to Charles G. Clarke the film was known during production as The Public Idol: “The change in title was the result of a curious system that then prevailed. In those days, a film company sold a program of features to the theater owners for a year ahead…. In this case, a film called Upstream was scheduled to be made starring Dolores Del Rio, but for some reason it was not put into production. To make up for the deficiency, the Fox Film Company simply changed the name of The Public Idol to Upstream.”

As preposterous as this sounds, Clarke’s story is supported elsewhere. Film Daily reported in November 1926 that “Jack Ford’s” next Fox film, to be based on Wallace Smith’s “The Snake’s Wife,” would be called The Public Idol. And Dolores Del Rio indeed resisted a planned production to be titled Upstream because, as she complained in a January 19, 1927, letter to Fox production chief Winfield Sheehan, her recent films had repeatedly displayed her body “in a manner most embarrassing to me,” and she was worried that the script of this Upstream also had “some risqué scenes in it.” Eventually, the earlier Upstream (set in Bolivia and based on a 1923 play, Up Stream, by the English writer Clifford Bax) was made at Fox with Del Rio and released in 1928. By that time, of course, the title had already been used by the Ford film, and so Del Rio’s film too needed to be retitled, becoming The Gateway of the Moon. That’s now another lost film—but who knows what the future may bring? Meanwhile, the recovery of John Ford’s Upstream, castoff title and all, gives us one of the most purely enjoyable angles on his work. —Scott Simmon

About the Music
When I first read about the discovery of Upstream, I was instantly intrigued. Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, Italy’s famed festival of silent film, agreed to have me play for its European repremiere in October 2010. Our quartet (myself, along with violin, bass, and drums) jammed on half a dozen character themes I wrote for the occasion. At subsequent performances in Bologna, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere in the United States, I added tunes and expanded the ensemble to a sextet. I wrote a new tune for witty lyrics by my wife, Joanna Seaton, that she sang during the opening titles and a few places in the film. Her performance accompanies the end credits on this DVD.

In our live performances we also incorporated a few standards—including George M. Cohan’s 1904 hit “Give My Regards to Broadway” and the 1911 “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” by Seymour Brown and Nat D. Ayer—that we felt the characters would have known, and would be in keeping with John Ford’s practice of using tunes familiar to his audience. And of course “Auld Lang Syne,” whose lyrics are shown onscreen. When offered the chance to record Upstream for the NFPF, I spent many weeks watching the film and fleshing out the tunes and improvisations in a much more detailed way. We recorded in March 2013 in Henry Hirsch’s superb Waterfront Studio in Hudson, New York, with Peter Breiner overseeing the production. I played Steinway and Gaveau pianos and had three great musicians, Marshall Coid, Rob Jost, and Brook Martinez. We recorded the old-fashioned way, on analog tape, mixing down to two-channel stereo before converting everything to digital media. (A video of the session is included as
a DVD extra.) Joanna recorded her vocal in our home studio. We hope you will enjoy the results as much as we did creating the music for this lovely film, whose characters have become a welcome part of our family. —Donald Sosin

About the Preservation
Upstream, along with the Strong Boy preview, was preserved through a partnership of Twentieth Century Fox, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the New Zealand Film Archive from a tinted nitrate print received by the NZFA through Jack Murtagh and Tony Osborne. The preservation work was completed by Park Road Post Production in New Zealand with support from Twentieth Century Fox. 

Further Viewing and Reading
Five of John Ford’s silent films—Just Pals (1920), The Iron Horse (1924), 3 Bad Men (1926), Four Sons (1928), and Hangman’s House (1928)—are together in Twentieth Century Fox’s John Ford’s Silent Epics DVD set. Ford’s Bucking Broadway (1917), with new music by Donald Sosin, can be found on the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray of Stagecoach (1939).

The Charles G. Clarke passages above are from his book Highlights and Shadows: The Memoirs of a Hollywood Cameraman, edited by Anthony Slide (Scarecrow Press, 1989).