The Fugitive

One of John Ford's favorite films; he sometimes considered it his masterpiece. It's hardly that, just as its companion piece, THE INFORMER, isn't quite the masterpiece everyone once thought it was. A powerful passion play set in a modern, fictitious south-of-the-border country, THE FUGITIVE is hauntingly photographed by Figueroa and boasts a highly effective performance from Fonda in which an intensely warm and likable saintliness largely replaces a three-dimensional character.

Much of this stems from Ford's influence on Nichols's screenplay, which changed the complex, sinful "whiskey priest" of Greene's original novel into a man whose main fear is that he's not...