The fact that Vincente Minnelli‘s The Four Horsemsn of the Apocalypse (’62) hasn’t been remastered for HD streaming or issued on Bluray — that should tell you something.
Bosley Crowther’s N.Y. Times review, published on 3.10.62, is also instructive. Crowther’s verdict ends with the following sentence: “The less attention paid to this picture, the better for the simple dignity of the human race.”
The rest of the review is pretty good also: “As different from Rudolph Valentino as Glenn Ford depressingly is — and, believe us, it’s more than just the difference between a guy who did the tango and one who does not — there is that much (and more) between the impressiveness of the filmed The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which Valentino leaped to fame, and the one with Mr. Ford as its hero, which dragged its great sluggish bulk into Loew’s State yesterday.
“In the first place, this latest film endeavor to bear the name of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez‘ popular novel of World War I has no more resemblance to the novel — or, indeed, to the 1921 Rudolf Valentino film — than may be found in the similarity of names of characters and in a couple of cut-ins of ghostly horsemen riding in clouds of surging smoke across the screen.
“This one tells a slow and vapid story of a colorless Argentine sport (Glenn Ford), caught with his father, mother and sister in Occupied Paris during World War II, who takes up with the wife of a French journalist and, finally, when down to his last dress suit, joins the Resistance movement and carries messages in folded magazines. It is a pompous and idiotic fiction, and it is staged by Vincente Minnelli in an incredibly fustian ‘Hollywood’ style.
“Although some of it smacks of actual Paris and the country regions of France, most of it reeks of the sound stages and the painted sets of a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio These, on wide screen in color and lighted like a musical show, convey no more illusion of actuality than did Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
“The second thing is the way it is played — or isn’t played — by a cast of the most non-Argentine and non-French seeming people you’ve ever seen. Mr. Ford as the gay hidalgo from the pampas who hits the boulevards wearing a gray fedora, black gloves and swinging an ebony cane is about as convincingly Argentine and possessed of urbanity as a high-school football coach from Kansas who has never been out of the state. And in his romantic scenes with Ingrid Thulin, who plays the wayward wife, he is aggressively flat and solemn. In short, he is just plain dull.
“Miss Thulin is beautiful and graceful, in her svelte Scandinavian way, but she is made to act a very shallow woman — and her voice and lip movements do not match. Charles Boyer is drab as the father who had been living in Argentina since his youth and still talks with such a thick French accent that all the other Frenchmen sound like hicks alongside him. Yvette Mimieux plays Mr. Ford’s young sister who gets in with a Paris student crowd that swings into the Resistance movement with all the fervor and frenzy of high-school rooters at a football game. Paul Henreid as the journalist whose wife deceives him and Paul Lukas as the Germanic uncle of Mr. Ford who becomes a top Nazi general in the Occupation dutifully go along. The less said of Karl Boehm as a Germanic cousin and Lee J. Cobb as the Argentine grandfather whose anti-Hitler sentiments in 1938 are as fiery as those of a Jewish character in Exodus, the better for all concerned.”
You might presume that dismissive reactions like Canby’s helped to diminish Ford’s career, as he soon after stopped appearing in grade-A productions. And yet on 4.13.62, only a month after Apocalypse opened, one of Ford’s best films ever, Blake Edwards‘ Experiment in Terror, premiered to excellent reviews and better-than-decent business. Ford’s performance as an emotionally somber San Francisco detective was one of his best ever.
