Here’s John Ford’s slightly eccentric remake of his tremendous 1926 Western, Three Bad Men. It’s a Christmas parable, for some reason, and the previous version’s plucky young heroine is now a stranded and endangered male infant. The wise men are bandits. (Shepherds and kings combined, à la the myth of American democracy?) I’ll bet the Merian Cooper papers, housed in Brigham Young University’s Arts and Communications archive, could explain it all for us. (Ask ’em: http://lib.byu.edu/sites/artcomm/artscom/) Exalted reputation notwithstanding, Ford clunked on occasion. Eccentricity notwithstanding, this isn’t one of those occasions. Don’t you find that the same ol’ Christmas texts start paling and palling after so many repetitions? This’ll get you there from a completely different angle.
Records indicate that our whole gang watched this on Dec. 15, 2003. They also indicate the following:
“The Robert William Pedro Hightower stuff really lodges in Spencer’s (7 years of age) head. Drew’s (12) nose starts gushing, for no discernible reason. ‘Too much blood!’ says Claire (2), over and over.”