The Long Gray Line

John Ford’s The Long Gray Line, a biography of Irish immigrant Marty Maher, a sort of den father at West Point for 50 years, is loosely anecdotal, cornball, and entertaining, and has enough testosterone in it to float a battleship. It was shot in CinemaScope, and the visual possibilities — shown most completely in the wide-screen letterboxed credits — were probably one of the movie’s attractions for Ford. But on video, the movie’s images have been cropped, with faces partially lopped off or disembodied voices emanating from off screen. This is a fine work from one of our finest directors, electronically mutilated. F