The Other Forde

The title of the post is wrong on a number of levels. There is just to start with, the extra ‘e’, although part of me enjoys the mischievousness of it. More of a problem is that, as much of a fan as I am of his work, Walter Forde’s career simply doesn’t compare to that of John Ford; his films aren’t as good and as a director he couldn’t be described as an auteur. There are no overriding themes, so sense of him building a picture of the British nation in the same way that John Forde did for America.

So what is there to be said? His 1932 Rome Express is the basis, the blueprint, for many of the films set on trains that followed; it's a fast moving comic thriller that compares well with and influenced Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes six years later (as an aside Sydney Gilliat wrote the scenario for the former and was co-screenwriter on the latter). Meanwhile Rome Express is, in my view, a superior work to Von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express made with Marlene Dietrich in the same year and exploring similar themes. The Ghost Train (1931) set a standard for British comedies, the storyline of a group of people trapped in a remote location and confronted with what at first glance seems to be a problem of the supernatural (Forde himself remade it ten years later). Then there is Saloon Bar, unknown, unheralded, but perhaps one of the finest murder mysteries of the 1940s.

Forde's was an art of the interior; he was at his best showing a group of people inside, in the confines of the train carriage, the station waiting room and the pub. The limitations of such settings stretched his imagination and stimulated his creativity, while a free reign was often disastrous (I hesitate, but try to watch Land Without Music (1936))

The Knowledge will write in more detail on Saloon Bar (1940), which is perhaps Forde's best work, at a later date. But all of it is worth seeing.