The Fugitive (1947) - The Fugitive
In an unnamed state of Mexico, in which a ruthless police lieutenant (Pedro Armendariz) wages war upon the clergy, a Priest (Henry Fonda) travels the countryside disguised as a peasant. When his identity is discovered by a group of villagers, the Priest continues to perform religious services in secret, even though it jeopardizes his safety. In one such ceremony, he baptizes the child of a mysterious woman (Dolores del Rio), a child who was fathered by the very policeman who persecutes the Catholic people. The Priest's flight is paralleled with that of an American bank robber (Ward Bond), whose wanted poster hangs alongside that of the fugitive Priest. The Priest eventually succeeds in escaping the police state, but learns that the criminal is mortally wounded and wishes for the last rites to be performed. Thus the Priest faithfully (and fatefully) re-enters the territory to perform a final act of charity, as the lieutenant's soldiers close in upon them.
Commonly considered Greene's single greatest literary work, the novel was inspired by the author's travels through Mexico in 1938, at a time when the country "suffered at the hands of President Calles -- in the name of revolution -- the fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth."
"I had seen the devotion of peasants praying in the priestless churches," recalled Greene in his travel memoirs, Ways of Escape, "and I had attended Masses in upper rooms where the Sanctus bell could not sound for fear of the police."
In Greene's novel, the central character is a "whiskey priest," and it is he, not the lieutenant, who has fathered an illegitimate child with Maria. As might be expected, much of this moral ambiguity had to be abandoned during the screenwriting process. "You couldn't do the original on film," said Ford. Under the guidelines of the Production Code, such a character could never be rendered on screen, so Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols reshaped the central figure, so that the Priest's greatest sacrilege is pride in the ceremonial trappings and elevated status of priesthood. The lieutenant was transformed into a heartless tyrant, no longer a political idealist driven by a misguided desire to help his people. Maria was reduced to a quiet symbol of maternity -- "decorative and mutely impassioned," said Variety -- though she is given a touch of the Magdalene as the barmaid of a rural cantina.
After the end of her brief romance with Orson Welles and tired of being typecast as a Latin spitfire, Del Rio had walked away from Hollywood in 1943 and returned to Mexico, where she was able to play more fully-developed characters. For Del Rio, The Fugitive was a comeback of sorts and was her first American film since her departure; it would remain her only one until returning to appear in Flaming Star with Elvis Presley in 1960.
Ford is best remembered today for his boisterous adventure films, such as The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1956) or She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); and for his crusty, unpretentious demeanor, often denying the existence of thematic subtext in his work and refusing to discuss his artistic intentions as a director. But The Fugitive belongs to an earlier, lesser known faction of his work, self-consciously "arty" films that demonstrated his interests in German expressionism, English literature and religious ideology. Films such as The Informer (1935),
