Why is this film not great? All the elements for a masterpiece are in place: the stock company, Frank Nugent manning the screenplay, the Irish milieu and the most Fordian line ever - "there's only one way to describe the candidate, and that is that he was victorious in defeat". So Wha'happen? This is a mediocre film that should nonetheless be analyzed shot by shot. The last hurrah is Ford's, not Skeffington's and I wish I was enough of a theorist to go into every detail of how that becomes obvious over the course of the film. I once heard that the film critic Serge Daney said something to the effect that every film is a documentary of its own creation, and that is so true here. The sight of John Carradine alone evokes a whole world and life: the seven films of Ford's he participated in in the thirties; the fact that he hadn't been seen in one in almost 20 years. His scenes are a meditation on the ineffable quality known as "stardom": for all his sepulchral presence, he can't hold a screen the way Spencer Tracy can, and their moments together are a battle between the magnificent character actor who has never and will never rise above that status (except when he's with Edgar G. Ulmer, naturally) and the star. Ford understands all of this - all of this and more. What is being mourned - and, make no mistake, it's being mourned way before Skeffington's actual death - in this film? Is it the death of a man or of a way of life? The way Skeffington ritually changes the flowers under his dead wife's portrait daily tells us that these people are already in mourning for themselves. The wake scene for the nondescript ne'er - do - well seems disproportionally long, but as the film progresses, you understand that it functions as a foreshadowing of the film's central ritual. All this is great. But making all the sons into buffoons is a cheap, knee-jerk statement on the generation which is replacing these dinosaurs, and it is impossible to get a sense of how McCluskey's manipulation of the media (this, of course, represents "the modern world") leads to his victory, given the fact that the one time we see him on TV he seems like a totally unlovable clown. Was Ford going for Nixon's Checkers speech here? Nixon's nervousness and uncomfortableness read to many as a form of "truth", and his "we're not giving up that dog no matter what anyone says" read as a particularly bumbling form of honesty. Ford should have at least shown us that. This way, the deck is so stacked that it's impossible to care. Andrew Sarris was right: Sturges (director of The Great McGinty) shoulda taken this one.
Review of The Last Hurrah
