The Dryden will screen The Long Gray Line (John Ford, U.S. 1955, 136 min., 35mm).

In this impeccably designed Technicolor drama, John Ford cast Maureen O'Hara—one of his favorite female leads—in the role of Mary O'Donnell, wife of Martin "Marty" Maher Jr. (Tyrone Power), an Irish expatriate who joined the United States Army in 1898. Based on Maher's autobiography, The Long Gray Line recounts his nearly fifty years of service at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he began as a dishwasher and rose to the rank of master sergeant, before serving out the remainder of his years there as a beloved coach. In many respects, The Long Gray Line is a masterwork of realist cinema. Much of the film was shot on location at West Point, whose campus and surrounding environment was rendered by Ford and his cinematographers (Charles Lawton Jr. and Charles Lang) using Cinemascope lenses and a muted, naturalistic color scheme. The film traverses long passages of time through elegant, barely noticeable cuts and dissolves, while O'Hara and Power embody their characters at various points in their lives so convincingly that we believe we're seeing them age before our eyes. But even amid these realist tropes, The Long Gray Line does not shy away from spectacle and exaggeration, whether in the form of slapstick—power was a genius of physical comedy—or melodrama.

[source: George Eastman Museum website, 2016-Mar-21]