“It had a lot of damn good photography.” John Ford’s characteristically terse recollection of The Fugitive, one of his favorite films, is borne out from the film’s first shot, in which a priest’s shadow forms an enormous, looming crucifix. And it’s all uphill from there for the “last priest” in revolutionary Mexico, sought by the militia, protected by peasants, betrayed by weakness. Henry Fonda stars as the nameless fugitive, Dolores Del Rio as the woman he actually never touches, as both are much changed from Graham Greene’s story of a whiskey priest cursed with faith. Ford, setting the story in a mythical land, showcases Figueroa’s Mexican imagery as if under glass. The scene in the abandoned church, its chiaroscuro created by black shawls and candlelight and smoke, is justly famous. The distinguished Mexican critic Carlos Monsivaís called it “a triumph of allegory over realism.”

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Dudley Nichols, based on the novel The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene. Photographed by Gabriel Figueroa. With Henry Fonda, Dolores Del Rio, Pedro Armendáriz, J. Carrol Naish. (104 mins, B&W, 35mm, From Warner Bros.)