alr

The Informer

Screening on Film
Directed by John Ford.
With Victor McLaglen, Heather Angel, Preston Foster.
US, 1935, 35mm, black & white, 91 min.
Print source: UCLA

Ford’s rising star in the mid-1930s—due largely to the success of his films starring Will Rogers—allowed him to convince RKO that he should adapt Liam O’Flaherty’s novel of the moral and social cost of the 1922-23 Irish Civil War, allegorized by an impoverished Dubliner’s cruel betrayal of his best friend. RKO gave Ford a medium-sized budget and a relative freedom hitherto unknown to him. The studio’s initial dismay at the unconventional results was calmed when the critics began to universally praise the film for its serious subject matter and stylistic audacity. The apotheosis of Ford’s expressionist style, The Informer has become a controversial point among Ford scholars and fans—while some miss the relaxed lyricism of later Ford and find the Huit clos universe of the film overly mechanistic, many admire the film’s uncompromising look at a fallen world where only compromise and defeat are possible.

Part of film series

Read more

Classic Ford.
A John Ford Retrospective, Part I

Other film series with this film

Read more

John Ford:
A Major Retrospective

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Melville et Cie.

Read more

Psychedelic Cinema

Read more

Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith

Read more

António Campos and the Promise of Cinema Novo

Read more
sepia photo of Artie Freedman in silhouette with a video camera at show

Boston Punk Rewound / Unbound. The Arthur Freedman Collection

Read more

The Yugoslav Junction: Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

Read more

From the Jenni Olson Queer Film Collection

Read more
a mausoleum that looks like a miniature Spanish cathedral, next to a variety of others, against an evening sky

The Night Watchman by Natalia Almada

Read more
a double-exposed image that includes a 16th century Russian man being fed grapes by another amid decadent decor

Wings of a Serf