ABSTRACT
From a stylistic perspective, John Ford’s reputation as anauteurcan be neatly summarized in the now famous John Wayne quotation, “Pappy was a painter with a camera.” Effectively awarding him cinematographer status, Ford’s scholars and critics have carefully analyzed the director’s compositions as though each shot were an individual work of art. Yet, commentators have tended to overlook the role of color, by both favoring the director’s black-and-white works, and privileging line, shape, and scale in his chromatic ones. The recent 20th Century Fox restoration of Ford’s first color feature,Drums Along the Mohawk(1939) provides an opportunity to explore the role of color in the compositional system familiar to his other works. This essay argues thatDrumsis an experiment in color cinematography that weds Ford’s late 1930s high contrast black-and-white aesthetic to developing norms of Technicolor mise en scène.
