A wider shot of Ford work

On a hot Friday afternoon, composer Christopher Caliendo was on a Capitol Records sound stage, conducting an ensemble that played his new score for John Ford’s 1928 silent classic “Four Sons.”

As the black-and-white images of the World War I drama flickered on a screen, Caliendo lifted his baton to lead the musicians. It’s an action he would repeat several times that summer day to get the stark, haunting music perfect.

“Four Sons” is just one of the 24 films featured in “Ford at Fox,” a massive collection of the Oscar-winning director’s work being released Dec. 4 by Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Between 1920 and 1952, Ford made 50 films at Fox, the studio where he directed some of his greatest movies. Though some of the films have been released before on DVD, including his 1940 classic “The Grapes of Wrath” and 1941’s “How Green Was My Valley,” for which he received best director Oscars, 18 of the films are new to digital. Five of those are silent films, including his first for Fox, 1920’s “Just Pals.” Caliendo composed scores for two: “Four Sons” and the 1924 epic western “The Iron Horse,” Ford’s first major film. Caliendo is also the music director on the new versions of the other three silent films.

“Ford at Fox,” which also features a coffee table book and a new documentary titled “Becoming John Ford,” gives cineastes a rare opportunity to watch a filmmaker grow and mature as an artist.

Before he came to Fox in 1920, Ford was directing forgettable two-reel westerns starring Harry Carey. “Harry Carey was making more money than he was,” says film historian and documentarian Nick Redman, who directed “Becoming John Ford.” “So when Fox offered to double his salary, that motivated him to leave Universal and come to Fox.”

But the quality of his films didn’t improve. “Then they finally gave him ‘Iron Horse,’ ” Redman says. “It was not originally supposed to be an epic, but he turned it into an epic, and that became a defining moment in his career.”

Now it is up to Caliendo to bring new life to the early Ford films.

During a break in the recording, he says that his premier objective in composing the scores was to “nobilize the film to an aesthetic that John Ford would appreciate. Fox was good enough to supply the financing to do this right . . . supplying [the money] for what I think is the proper instrumentation.”

Authenticity is an important aspect of composing new scores for silent films, says Caliendo, who wrote a new score for Redman’s restoration of Sam Peckinpah’s “Major Dundee” and was recruited by Redman for the Ford project.

In the case of “Iron Horse,” he explains, “you want to write minstrel music that certainly sounds very different from ‘Four Sons,’ where you are dealing with Tin Pan Alley and immigrants that were coming in at the turn of the century as opposed to Civil War music [for ‘The Iron Horse’]. I like the pure approach.”

For “Four Sons,” Caliendo gave each sibling and their mother a different theme.

Because the canvas is so wide in “Iron Horse,” Caliendo had to compose various styles of music. “There were Chinese immigrants in the film, so you have to write Chinese music,” he explains. “And we used maybe eight or nine different flutes to capture the different Indians, whether they were peaceful or warlike.”

Research is key, he says. “You want to be devoted to the material.”

--

susan.king@latimes.com