Álvaro Arroba

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Pilgrimage

Ten years later and after many temptations to swap it for 7 Women, or The Wings of Eagles, the sublime and still little known Pilgrimage is back on my list, albeit this time as a late silent era choice. Of course, it is an early Ford sound film from 1933, but the shot of the mother, the bride and the potted plant in the train window brings together the more delicate films of Chaplin, Borzage, Murnau and King from the late 1920s that I also wanted to include on this list.

Moreover, Ford here begins to break the delicate sweetness he painstakingly constructed with a physical rough comedy of cultural contrasts (some sequences in Paris are almost worthy of Jerry Lewis). Those back-and-forth tone changes of his brand that made him the quintessential anti-classical filmmaker, one that destroys the later theories about the modernity of post-1959 cinema.