Letter: Harry Carey Jr and the golden era of American cinema

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/dec/30/harrey-carey-jr-cinema

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A melancholy history of Hollywood recounted in terms of the offspring of its greatest personalities would reveal a litany of also-rans, failures and addicts. Harry Carey Jr was one of the happy exceptions to that rule. His father was John Ford's favourite actor; the director dedicated his 1948 film Three Godfathers to "the memory of Harry Carey – bright star of the early western sky". Ford's The Searchers (1956) ended with John Wayne standing, one arm across his chest, in a pose made famous by Carey Sr.

Carey Jr worked prolifically with Andrew V McLaglen, the son of Victor McLaglen, another of Ford's stock company. For that director he made many episodes of TV westerns and roughly a dozen films, often starring Wayne and James Stewart, including The Rare Breed (1966), Bandolero! (1968), Something Big (1971) and Cahill (1973).

Carey was sought out by American directors who recalled the golden era of their national cinema and his part in it. Peter Bogdanovich cast him in Nickelodeon (1976), a tribute to silent cinema, and Mask (1984), and he also appeared in Walter Hill's homage to the lawless west, The Long Riders (1980), and a television western, Last Stand at Saber River (1997), based on an Elmore Leonard novel.

However, it was the British director Lindsay Anderson who gave Carey the most substantial and intriguing part of his later career. In 1981, Carey had contributed to Anderson's book on Ford and when the director made The Whales of August (1987) he cast his friend as the handyman Joshua. There was a poignancy in the casting since the film's star, Lillian Gish, had acted with Carey Sr 75 years previously in DW Griffith's An Unseen Enemy.