Here’s something you don’t see everyday: a new film by John Ford. Thought lost for more than 80 years, this delightful comedy was recently rediscovered in the New Zealand Film Archive and restored by the Academy Film Archive and 20th Century-Fox. The central focus of the film is a love triangle between a knife thrower (Grant Withers); his “target girl,” Gertie (Nancy Nash); and the egotistical Brashingham (Earle Foxe), a hammy Shakespearean actor. With the action confined mainly to a low-rent boarding house for scuffling vaudevillians, Ford’s skill at effectively defining and depicting characters finds space to flourish, featuring among others a pair of dancers, a squabbling sister-act, a long-suffering landlady and an aging actor long past his prime. Filmed at a transition point in Ford’s career, Upstream is the last completely silent film Ford made and was filmed at the beginning of what would become a 13-year break from the Western genre that had defined many of his earlier works.
