Film Essay essays

Film Essay essays Western films are the major defining genre of the American film industry, a nostalgic display of praise to the early days of the expansive, untamed American frontier. Director John Ford was a much-celebrated director who made some of the most famous pictures in Hollywood cinema, if not all of filmmaking. He was the supreme Western director. In 1939, Ford directed two classic Westerns, the more celebrated Stagecoach, and the less renowned Drums Along the Mohawk. Although both films being described by critics and connoisseurs of film of raising ideological contradictions in juxtaposition with one another, there is a subtle similar view that both films do agree in retrospect to their views of American civilization. There is a similarity in themes each film expresses, although each film expresses its themes in a different degree of intensity within its narrative, but in the end, these similar themes signify that both films do present a related ideology of American civilization. Not in accordance to the mainstream view of critics that these films contradict each other, these two films compliment each other. It is merely the time separation that each film is situated in that creates such disparity the critics sense between the films. Drums Along the Mohawk is set around the time of 1776, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence and around the time of the American Revolution. This setting designs the film to express such a positively conceived ideology of America and a strong optimistic view. America is to be free from British influence and have their own identity as a fully-fledged nation hence their birth as an independent nation. So much potential is conceived and progress to be achieved. Stagecoach is more of a commentary of civilization in the West during the time around 1880. The wilder...