Ford’s first great film, Pilgrimage, is based on an American Magazine story by I. A. R. [Ida Alexa Ross] Wylie, who also provided the source material for Four Sons. Pilgrimage deals with a possessive mother, Arkansas farmer Hannah Jessop (Henrietta Crosman), who sends her son (Norman Foster) to his death in World War I rather than lose him to the girl he loves. Although stark and corrosive in its lack of sentimentality, Pilgrimage has such tremendous emotional power that it became a commercial success and even received some good reviews when released in the summer of 1933. But as a “women’s picture” and four-handkerchief weepie, this is the kind of movie that is never taken seriously by intellectuals who automatically sneer at those genres, and it all but vanished from the landscape of film history, remaining unseen until it was rediscovered in the late 1960s. While Ford celebrates the bedrock values of traditional family life, his films also mourn the inevitable dwindling and loss of such values. The departure for Ford in Pilgrimage is that it locates the source of destruction within the family itself, in a mother whose excessive devotion and pathological jealousy literally cause her son’s death. Hannah Jessop is a flinty, hard-hearted old woman proud of her descent from Indian-killing pioneers. Henrietta Crosman’s only important screen role before Pilgrimage was a comic one, as the matriarch in George Cukor’s 1929 film The Royal Family of Broadway. But Ford may have remembered her from seeing one of her regular appearances in Portland, Maine, when he was an usher at the Jefferson Theatre. The great performance Ford drew from Crosman, with its echoes of Greek tragedy in a rustic American setting, probably owes something to his understanding of her stature as a major actress of the American theater. The healing power of the Fordian comic spirit is embodied in the raucous Carolina hillbilly Tally Hatfield (magnificently played by Lucille La Verne), who befriends Hannah on the boat to France to visit their sons’ grave. Pilgrimage makes a daring pirouette from tragedy to comedy as it chronicles Hannah’s gradual redemption. 
(from Searching for John Ford)