Just Pals. 1920. Directed by John Ford (as Jack Ford)

Film

No upcoming events

Just Pals. 1920. USA. Directed by John Ford (as Jack Ford). With Buck Jones, Helen Ferguson, Georgie Stone. Silent, with piano accompaniment. 52 min.

John Ford’s first film at Fox was this delightful rural comedy, featuring cowboy star Buck Jones as a small town layabout who rescues an orphan boy (George Stone) thrown from a passing freight train and befriends him. Buck is secretly in love with the local schoolmistress (Helen Ferguson), who only has eyes for the junior bank clerk in his resplendent seersucker suit. Ford renders the languorous rhythms of small-town America with an affection that stops short of sentimentality—this is a world still within memory. Jones, a former cowboy and stuntman recruited by Fox as the studio’s second-string Tom Mix, reveals the modest, ingratiating presence that would sustain him through decades in B pictures at Columbia, Universal, and Monogram. 35mm print from MoMA’s archive

This film accompanies William Fox Presents: More Restorations and Rediscoveries from the Fox Film Corporation.

Past events

Sun, Mar 10, 2019, 1:30 p.m.

Piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura

MoMA, Floor T1, Theater 1

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1
Wed, Mar 6, 2019, 6:30 p.m.

Piano accompaniment by Bernie Anderson

MoMA, Floor T1, Theater 1

The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1

Licensing

If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA’s collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).

MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit https://www.moma.org/research/circulating-film.

If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA’s archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].