The Guard, Irish writer-director John Michael McDonagh’s new cop
movie, opens with shots of a verdant West Irish landscape and overcast sky,
backdrops to the grimacing face of Sgt. Gerry Boyle, glaringly watching a car
crash from beneath his police hat. Eventually, he heaves himself out of his
patrol car, kneels among the smoking carnage and slaps two fingers on the neck
of a lifeless teen. Once Boyle is satisfied that the kid’s pulse is as flat as
the land around him, he removes the drugs he assumed were in the kid’s pocket
and proceeds to take a hit from the stash. It’s all just another routine occurrence
for Boyle—one of the many in his uneventful life at the Galway County Police
Department.

The Guard, written and directed by (an Irishman himself) is an
atypically good cop movie. McDonagh’s reflective script and darker tone
separates it from the usual pacing of the standard cop film. Despite its
slow-burn beginning, the plot picks up when Boyle (a spot-on Brendan Gleeson)
has a twist of lime splashed into the whiskey shot of his life when things go
awry in his small Irish town: drug lords, a missing rookie cop and hookers
attempting blackmail begin cropping up in his sleepy town. So much starts
happening, in fact, that African-American FBI agent Wendell Everett—who’s
looking to be a hero, stop the bad guys and get the hell out of that
middle-of-nowhere town—is called in as backup.

The straight-laced Everett (the
incomparable Don Cheadle) and the indifferent Boyle must team up to solve the
mystery, and guess what? They make quite the unlikely pair! Boyle’s relaxed
style of police work clashes buoyantly with Everett’s relentless devotion to
the case—not to mention the fact that Boyle bluntly admits to being a racist,
saying, “I’m Irish, racism is part of my culture.”

McDonagh’s scattershot
direction—which ticks like a metronome from great to confusing—effectively
conveys the idiosyncrasies of the characters and the distinction of the
West Irish setting. His unusually introspective screenplay is enhanced by Cheadle
and Gleeson, whose chemistry carries the movie and applies mortar to various
scenes that would have otherwise collapsed into cliché.

McDonagh claims that The Guard gives us an “original lead character” and a film that “arrives out
of left field.” That clearly isn’t true, but McDonagh has polished an old model with the shine of Irish culture and
added fresh nuances and insightful undertones to the conventional script, all
of give The Guard a fresh voice all its
own.

Directed by John Ford

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Fans of John Ford’s Western panache know the unique flourishes of his movie landscape: As magnificent silhouettes ride horseback across a desolate horizon—their heroic forms outlined with the gorgeous palette of a setting sun, their cadences set to a glorified soundtrack—he creates a fantastical vision of the American frontier. Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary, Directed by John Ford, extracts this aesthetic from the director’s half-century career, essentially making clip-show pornography. You couldn’t ask for a better subject. Ford’s movies speak for themselves as relics of sincerity from a forgotten age; the ’70s introduced us to Clint Eastwood’s lone rider, and the genre began a slow decline toward self-parody and cynicism. The regular faces that populate Ford’s oeuvre—particularly John “Duke” Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda—battled to uphold a moral system in a world suffering from disrepair. They weren’t always successful (“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a steely-eyed reporter retorts to Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), but the messages were unmistakable. 

That’s a good thing for Bogdanovich, because Ford’s profound filmmaking is far more illustrative than he was during interviews. The documentary, premiering on Turner Classic Movies on Nov. 7 in an updated version of the original 1971 cut, features brief excerpts from discussions with Ford near the end of his life. His answers are moody and curt. When asked how he shot a specific scene, he abruptly replies, “with a camera,” then puffs his cigar and sits in silence. 

Other interviewees fill in the gaps: The Duke discusses how Ford got him interested in motion pictures, Stewart recalls Ford’s strict set dynamic and Fonda, delivers anecdotes as his wide eyes fill with nostalgia. The occasional narration by Orson Welles fleshes out a grandiose aura. All this material was recorded roughly 30 years ago; Bogdanovich brings us into the present through new interviews with equally iconic filmmakers, notably Eastwood and Steven Spielberg, who recall the influence of Ford’s mythmaking on their own artistic development. Spielberg shares a wonderful anecdote from his teen years, when he wandered into a studio office and received a sudden lecture on proper camera positioning from Ford himself. It makes an easy case for connecting the dots between Young Mr. Lincoln and Spielberg’s upcoming biopic on the assassinated president. 

Although there’s hardly enough information to get a sense for Ford’s life, Bogdonavich provides so many excerpts from the movies that the directorial talent is unmistakable. That makes it a perfect introduction to TCM’s month-long schedule of Ford films beginning after the documentary debuts, in addition to a similar retrospective at BAM Rose Cinema kicking off on Nov. 22 with The Searchers. It’s no coincidence that Bogdanovich closes his tribute with the memorable final shot from that classic Duke vehicle exploring American-Indian crossbreeding; in a gorgeous frame-within-frame composition, Ford demonstrated that the power of cinema was a dialect of its own.