The American Museum of the Moving Image (35th Avenue at 36th Street in Astoria) is concluding its monumental John Ford retrospective with no fewer than four 1940’s climactic cinematic events, beginning with Tobacco Road (1941), with Charley Grapewin, Gene Tierney, William Tracy, Marjorie Rambeau, Elizabeth Patterson, Dana Andrews and Ward Bond, on Saturday, Feb. 16, at 2:30 p.m.; My Darling Clementine (1946), with Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Tim Holt, Ward Bond, Alan Mowbray, John Ireland, Jane Darwell and Grant Withers, on Saturday, Feb. 16, at 5 p.m. and Sunday, Feb. 17, at 5 p.m.; The Grapes of Wrath (1940), with Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon, Russell Simpson, John Qualen, Zeffie Tibury, Darryl Hickman, Ward Bond and Mae Marsh, on Sunday, Feb. 17, at 2 p.m.; and How Green Was My Valley (1941), with Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Roddy McDowell, Donald Crisp, Anna Lee, John Loder, Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald, Rhys Williams, Patric Knowles, Arthur Shields and Mae Marsh, on Saturday, Feb. 23, at 2 p.m. and on Sunday, Feb. 24, at 6:30 p.m.
John Ford won two of his final four directorial Oscars for Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and How Green Was My Valley in 1941. Curiously, he was in the center of critical controversy for both films, first for The Grapes of Wrath’s losing out to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, though Hitch himself never won a competitive directorial Oscar; and second for Ford’s How Green Was My Valley’s beating out Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane for the Oscar, though as I argued much later, How Green Was My Valley was probably the best film to win the Oscar, and that now covers 80 years.
