A young person wanting to learn something of American history could do worse than to watch the works of director John Ford (1894-1973).

One of the great American filmmakers—in my view, the greatest—Ford delved deeply and repeatedly into American history, and not just that of the American West for which he is most famed. You also have Ford’s films on the Second World War (including the award-winning war documentaries he made while on active duty for the U.S. Navy), Abraham Lincoln, and the Great Depression. There are Ford films that take place during the American Revolutionary War, the American Civil War, and the First World War. Themes addressed in his films include American race relations, immigration, religion, and urban politics.

One of Ford’s crowning achievements is the so-called Cavalry Trilogy, three films starring John Wayne about the U.S. Cavalry in the West, made between 1948 and 1952. They are all about the same subject and in roughly the same setting, but the story and characters are different in each.

I’d like to propose that John Ford had a second trilogy—perhaps more loosely connected than the Cavalry films, certainly less known and less celebrated, but still a triumph of All-American filmmaking and worthy of rediscovery.

I’ll call it “the Kentucky Trilogy”: the 1925 silent film Kentucky Pride, 1934’s Judge Priest, and 1953’s The Sun Shines Bright. The latter two films are very similar but not the same, both based on Kentuckian Irvin S. Cobb’s Judge Priest short stories. All three films are family dramas with strong comedic flourishes which celebrate homespun American virtues and small-town values. They are heartwarming and emotional but not sugar-coated (there can be villainy in small towns, too). All three take place in the late 19th or early 20th century and are steeped in American history, especially Southern history.

Kentucky Pride, released a century ago last month, is one of a handful of John Ford silent films to survive completely intact. It’s a horse racing movie. Ford biographer Joseph McBride called it “a modest gem” among Ford’s work. Written by Dorothy Yost and Elizabeth Pickett (a Kentuckian who grew up on a tobacco farm and was the granddaughter of Confederate General George Pickett), it is a story told mostly from a horse’s perspective. The filly, Virginia’s Future, introduces the equine cast first and then “those creatures called humans.” She tells us that “with us Kentuckians, pride of race is everything!” Among the four-legged cameos in the film is Man O’War, “King of them all, the perfect horse,” the great racehorse who was as famous and celebrated as Babe Ruth in his day.

Virginia’s Future is born on the Blue Grass horse farm of kindly Roger Beaumont, a breeder and a gambler. Both horse and owner encounter various travails—a broken leg while racing, the threat of being shot, abuse by a new owner for the horse; and for the man, near-ruin from gambling at the racetrack, an unfaithful wife, and a lost daughter. But in the end, Virginia Future’s daughter, the filly Confederacy, wins the great race; the usurping adulterers are disgraced; and father is reunited with daughter (as is horse with horse). Roger Beaumont is played by Alabama-born actor Henry B. Walthall, whose father had been a captain in the Confederate Army. Walthall became a star with D.W. Griffith’s well-known (or notorious) 1915 epic The Birth of a Nation.

Walthall plays a key role, but is not the star, in our second film, Judge Priest, starring Will Rogers. A famed humorist and actor, Rogers plays an easygoing small-town judge—William Pittman Priest—who uses his native cunning to advance the cause of justice and true love. A judge for a quarter of a century—except when the Republicans were in power—he loves his mint juleps, playing croquet with his cronies, and his Confederate past. The setting is 1890: “the War between the States was over, but its tragedies and comedies haunted every man’s grown mind.”

The Judge is attended to by his black servants Aunt Dilsey (Hattie McDaniel in a prominent early role) and Jeff Poindexter (Stepin Fetchit), a reformed chicken thief, layabout, and fishing partner of Judge Priest. Rogers, McDaniel, and Fetchit (real name Lincoln Monroe Perry, from Key West, Florida) were all veterans of the early 20th-century vaudeville and carnival circuit.

While Rogers was a star and prominent national figure before his untimely death in 1935, Stepin Fetchit, whose acting schtick was that he was the “laziest man in the world,” was the first black actor to receive a screen credit and earn a million dollars. Much derided for his supposedly demeaning movie roles by activists during the Civil Rights era, the actor has in recent years been somewhat rehabilitated by his African American biographer Mel Watkins, who makes a case in a 2005 book for the “rebellious, folk-inspired subversiveness” of the lazy Fetchit screen persona. It is kind of ironic that one of the earlier indictments by liberal elites of poor Fetchit’s career was issued in a 1968 CBS documentary produced by Andy Rooney and narrated by Bill Cosby, an actual criminal and rapist.  

Facing an electoral challenge, Judge Priest describes himself as “an old country jake who’s kind of a baby-kisser,” and notes that “the name of Priest means something in Kentucky,” but one thing that it doesn’t stand for is intolerance. The wily old Confederate turns the tables on intolerance and injustice (with an assist from a top hat and coon coat-wearing Jeff Poindexter playing “Dixie” on the harmonica).

Both Judge Priest and our last film, The Sun Shines Bright, are steeped in nostalgia for the past, especially in the post-war past of Confederate war veterans, something that is (along with the antics of Stepin Fetchit) sure to infuriate today’s progressives. Some may see these productions as dated. But this longing for the past and place was there when these films premiered, and has grown only stronger with age. To many today they may seem as incorrigibly retrograde (although similar themes abound throughout Ford’s work). There is an irony here in that, at the time, both director Ford and Judge Priest creator Irvin S. Cobb were regarded as relative liberals. Cobb—whose stories of Kentucky contain regular uses of “the N-word”—celebrated in both a magazine article and a book the exploits of the Harlem Hellfighters, African American soldiers of the 369th infantry in the First World War.

Ford, for his part, was more liberal than many Hollywood Cold Warriors. But the Irishman from Maine had a clear cinematic sympathy for the Lost Cause of the South, abetted by a wife from North Carolina who was a member of both the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Ford’s Western films are filled with honorable veterans of both Union and Confederate armies (John Wayne plays both), and this same trend is also in evidence in the last film in the Kentucky Trilogy.

If the first two films in our trilogy are good films, The Sun Shines Bright is a great one, a mature and deft portrayal of small-town hypocrisy redeemed by small-town goodness. Veteran character actor Charles Winniger plays Judge Priest. The romantic lead, actor John Russell, served at Guadalcanal and would later appear as Bloody Bill Anderson in Clint Eastwood’s The Outlaw Josey Wales. It was supposedly Ford’s favorite film, though some critics suggest he was just intentionally mocking film critics by saying so.

Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who thought very highly of the film, noted that while Ford may have been considered a liberal in the past, in this film he is “conservative and reactionary—meaning a certain idea of tradition; it also entails a certain view of human nature that is relatively pessimistic.” In the film, Judge Priest’s opponent Maydew is very much the progressive: he declares that “no longer can an empty sleeve [of a Confederate veteran] smother the progress of the 20th century.” A campaign poster against the boozy Judge Priest promises that “Maydew will drive out the moonshiners.” The powerful, beautifully rendered, and nuanced screenplay is by Ford collaborator Lawrence Stallings, another Southerner who fought and was severely wounded as a U.S. Marine in France during the Great War.

In both of the Judge Priest films, true love triumphs, a young woman’s good name is redeemed from the intolerance of local small minds, and unjustly accused men are vindicated. The atmosphere of Kentucky Pride is not too different—families are reunited and justice (on the racetrack) triumphs.

All three films underscore that, while there are always evildoers, criminals and liars among us, the inherent character of Heritage Americans, both black and white, is deeply rooted in family, tradition, and friendship. It is also, and above all, fundamentally decent.