This is one of several movies John Ford made about things around World War I. He hasn't made one about the war directly. Any look at battle has been short and quick with the focus of the films on events around the fighting itself. That's no different here with Pilgrimage, his 1933 film, but I can't help but comparing the similar output from Howard Hawks who made films about men in the thick of it, embracing aesthetics of different aspects of the war along with the experiences of those who fought it. Hawks trained men for combat during the war, and Ford made movies. I wonder if that's part of the reason why he kept choosing and crafting scripts about people around the fighting instead of directly part of it.

It's a curious story of a woman, Mrs. Hannah Jessop (Henrietta Crosman), on a farm in Arkansas and her young adult son, Jim (Norman Foster). The mother is dead set against her son's romance with the neighbor girl Mary (Marian Nixon), daughter to a drunk. No woman will be good enough for her son, and to keep them apart she's willing to draft him into the war effort, sending him to fight in France. In a bit of pre-Code drama, Jim gets Mary pregnant before they can marry, and as he's being shipped off to war she informs him without enough time for a marriage. Yes, this is the stuff of melodrama.

Jim dies in France, the only young man sent to France from the town who died in combat, and ten years pass. Henrietta scorns Mary as well as her grandchild Jimmy (Jay Ward). This kind of heartlessness ends up feeling a bit broad in the beginning, but what changes is the actual, titular pilgrimage. The US government wants to send gold star mothers to France to visit the graves of their sons, and it's important to the local governmental authorities that Henrietta goes, being the mother of the only local boy killed in the war. After some hemming and hawing, she decides to go.

This is about a third of the way through the film, and it gives the melodramatic opening a surprisingly effective air as Henrietta joins up with other gold star mothers on the boat to France. There are two in particular that get attention. The first is Henrietta's cabinmate Mrs. Rogers (Louise Carter). Carrying around the framed picture of her deceased son, she's mournful and shares her deep emotion with everyone. Henrietta is understanding but obviously offput. However, there is also Mrs. Kelly Hatfield (Lucille La Verne), a large lady from Texas who is happy to make jokes about smart cows refusing to live as close together as people in New York.

What ends up happening is that the movie jumps between tones for a while. With most of the women, it's sad faces and tears, but with Mrs. Hatfield it's light comedy and laughs. What's surprising about the film is that it balances these two tones shockingly well, allowing just enough time from one major moment of sadness or amusement to pass before transitioning to the next. The ladies go dress shopping in Paris, quickly followed by them visiting a memorial service for the dead. This kind of jumping is hard to pull off, and Ford as well as his editor Louis Loeffler manage it shockingly well. It doesn't feel like whiplash, it feels like a woman divorced from her own guilt about the fate of her son and being surrounded by the sadness she should be feeling finding ways out of it.

This is a surprisingly effective middle section, and it really feels like it's going somewhere. And then a major contrivance strikes, and I never quite got invested at the same level again.

In a huff, Henrietta decides that she's going to make her opinion of her boy known, that he wasn't a good boy and that she has no desire to see his grave. She walks out onto the streets of Paris and finds a young American man, drunk, and slurring about his mother. Yes, this young man, Gary (Maurice Murphy), is in pretty much the exact same predicament as Jim had been in. He wants to marry a French girl, Suzanne (Heather Angel), but his mother won't let him. They have a small adventure into the countryside, witnessing a small French festival, and Henrietta begins to feel the emotions she should have been feeling for her son towards Gary. This is emotionally where the story needed to end, but the late stage introduction of such a contrivance as a perfect match for her own situation made me roll my eyes a bit. A similar but not so on the nose situation would have probably been more appropriate. Like an American needing to choose between a career and his family, or something, along with introducing it earlier. I would have probably found it more satisfying if Henrietta had found her kind of solace without a last minute detour into another character's story. Maybe having her and Mrs. Hatfield coming to some kind of understanding where Mrs. Hatfield has moved on from her grief, providing a sort of opening for Henrietta to walk through to find her own.

So, the ending is fine, not quite living up to the promise of the journey overall, but the movie as a whole, while feeling a bit patchy, ends up working overall. The opening is melodramatic, but it's solid enough foundation on which to build Henrietta's journey. The actual resolution gets her to where she needs to be, but it's less elegant than what could have been. I was ready to love this movie by the time Henrietta was shouting at everyone about how her Jim wasn't a good boy, ready for her to turn around in melodramatic fashion, but the actual mechanics of that resolution were just too obvious for my tastes.

Still, I liked the film overall. It's imperfect, but solid enough.

"Pilgrimage" is a phenomenon.First of all ,the subject is not,as the audience is expecting at the beginning of the movie,the story of two lovers but it focuses on the boy's mother ,Mrs Jessop,wonderfully portrayed by Henrietta Crosman.It's very rare that the star of a movie is a middle age woman ,particularly in a John Ford work,even if women often play a prominent part in his films (his last effort was "seven women") Mrs Jessop is a hateful over possessive selfish mom:"I'd rather see my boy dead than with that woman";her hatred knows no bounds when she enlists her son in the army (WW1 time) "whereas other mothers try to hide their son's age".

John Ford wanted the viewer to side with his pitiful heroine only in the last part .His film is never melodramatic because the tragic scenes alternate with prosaic ones (the shooting range in France is telling).And I dare you not to cry when the mom lays withered flowers on the grave and when she meets again her grandson .The cemetery scene is in direct contrast to the ceremony under L'Arc De Triomphe Sur La Tombe Du Soldat Inconnu:between the two moments,Mrs Jessop has become a mother.At last.

You'd never know this was directed by John Ford if his name weren't in the credits. There's not a bottle of booze in sight, no fist fights, no comedic interludes. Henrietta Crosman is a tough, domineering Arkansas mother who denies her grown son every privilege of independence. Of course, no woman is good enough for him either. And when he falls for some blond, and she for him, Crosman signs a waiver, has the boy drafted, and sent to France, leaving behind his now-pregnant girl friend. The son is killed in the Argonne.

Ten years go by, during which Crosman avoids any contact with the girl, now a school teacher, and her illegitimate son. Then Crosman is approached by an organization sponsoring a pilgrimage of Gold Star Mothers to the American cemetery in France. She's a bitter old lady by now and spurns their offer but, soon enough, finds herself joining the few dozen other ladies on the trip.

Aboard the ship Crosman gets to know some of the other mothers, including one from Carolina who has three sons buried in France. The two rustic Southern ladies, each pretty tough, get along well and, with the other's good-natured self confidence induced in her, Crosman begins to see that there may be a bit of warmth and amusement in life, after all, that one need not be a carbuncle on the integument of one's community.

In France she accidentally runs into a young man who is having almost the identical problem with his mother that Crosman's son had with his. The authoritative mother is driving the young couple apart. Crosman visits the rich, aristocratic mother and tells the story of her own self discovery. There is a good deal of sniffling and embracing before Crosman throws herself on her son's grave and begs his forgiveness. Back home, she embraces her grandson and his mother.

If it isn't mainstream Ford and it isn't a masterpiece, it's nothing to be ashamed of. It's inevitable sentiment is balanced by the gruff, no-nonsense demeanor of some of the characters. It's all helped enormously by Henrietta Crosman's appearance. (Her acting skills are no more than modest.) She is unable to look at anything without "glaring" at it. Her big black eyeballs in that pale face and under that white coif are overwhelming. They seem not to look at objects so much as look into them. The surprising thing is not that she has a little trouble becoming a warm and loving mother at the end, but that she can do it at all. (I still wonder how she's going to treat her grandson if he shows signs of becoming uppity.) Overall, it's a rather artfully done but routine drama about a person who never had any doubt whatever about what was right and what was wrong. That's an inhuman position. And by the end of the film the character has become human.