3 Godfathers (1948)
Directed by John Ford
Three outlaws on the run discover a dying woman and her baby. They swear to bring the infant to safety across the desert, even at the risk of their own lives.
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What critics compared 3 Godfathers to
Satoshi Kon follows his meta homage to the movies, Millennium Actress , with a Christmas card to Tokyo’s homeless inspired by John Ford’s religious western 3 Godfathers.
Adapted loosely from John Fords 1948 Western 3 Godfathers, this story of three homeless people a grizzled, world-weary drunk, an over-emotional drag queen, and a headstrong but vulnerable runaway girl who find an abandoned infant on a snowy Christmas Eve and traverse Tokyo in search of her birth parents is an honest and heartfelt parable.
Tokyo Godfathers is what happens when John Ford's sentimental 1948 Western ''3 Godfathers'' is reset in modern-day Tokyo on Christmas Eve by rising Japanese postmodern anime filmmaker Satoshi Kon: John Wayne and his fellow desert bandits are replaced by a homeless alkie, a former drag queen, and a sullen teenage runaway who find an infant girl while scrounging through city trash and band together to find her parents.
Inspired by the 1949 John Ford chestnut "3 Godfathers," in which a troika of cowboy-bandits (including John Wayne) rescues a newborn, "Tokyo Godfathers" unwinds in more straightforward fashion than Kon's earlier features.
Based on an old story by Peter B. Kyne, this material has been made into at least half a dozen Hollywood films, including several during the silent era, and most notably John Ford's 1948 film 3 Godfathers.
While neither as visually nor as thematically intricate as Millennium Actress, Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers – a reimagining of John Ford’s weepy Western 3 Godfathers in which three homeless friends attempt to return an abandoned baby to its parents on Christmas Eve – is nonetheless a delightfully rambunctious holiday fable about the vital importance of family.
What begins as a hellish depiction of war begins to turn into "3 Godfathers."
Yet mostly it’s just another western like the many I watched with my grandfather, father, or godfather without the long lasting sparkle of a True Grit (2010) or a 3 Godfathers (movies I thought of often while watching News of the World).