Pilgrimage

One of John Ford's early films, which stayed in shadow for a long time. Hannah is a hard woman on a farm in Arkansas. She prevents her son from marrying the neighbours' daughter. He enlists and is killed in the First World War. The real subject begins ten years later. The American government runs a programme taking mothers who lost sons in the war to France to see the graves, and Hannah joins the party. The journey is not a story of mourning but a reckoning: she has to accept that her own decision was responsible for her son's death. Murnau's influence on the visual language is plain. The Arkansas town was built entirely on a soundstage and the lighting sits close to the German cinema of the period. Henrietta Crosman plays Hannah. The film stayed in the shadow of Ford's known work and was restored and shown again years later. A valuable discovery for anyone curious about early American cinema and lesser-known Ford. For a viewer who comes to Ford for the westerns, the genre here is something else entirely; this is wholly a portrait of a mother.