The Lost Worlds of John Ford

Beyond the Western

Jeffrey Richards

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350194960
• eBook ISBN: 9781350114692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

The great director John Ford (1894-1973) is best known for classic westerns, but his body of work encompasses much more than this single genre. Jeffrey Richards develops and broadens our understanding of Ford's film-making oeuvre by studying his non-Western films through the lens of Ford's life and abiding preoccupations. Ford's other cinematic worlds included Ireland, the Family, Catholicism, War and the Sea, which share with his westerns the recurrent themes of memory and loss, the plight of outsiders and the tragedy of family breakup. Richards' revisionist study both provides new insights into familiar films such as The Fugitive (1947); The Quiet Man (1952), Gideon's Way and The Informer (1935) and reclaims neglected masterpieces, among them Wee Willie Winkie (1937) and the extraordinary The Long Voyage Home. (1940).

1

John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius

Ford the Man

John Ford, arguably the greatest of all American film directors, was born John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894 in the state of Maine. He was the youngest surviving of the eleven children of Irish immigrants John A. Feeney and Barbara Curran Feeney. Having failed the entrance examination for the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, he joined his elder brother Frank in Hollywood in 1914. Frank, who had rechristened himself Francis Ford, had arrived in 1907 and established himself as a director and star in the fledgling movie industry. Known henceforth as Jack Ford, the young John Feeney became a props man, a stunt man and an extra in his brother’s films. None of Frank’s films have survived. But Ford told Peter Bogdanovich that Frank had been his greatest influence:

He was a great cameraman—there’s nothing they’re doing today … that he hadn’t done; he was a good artist, a wonderful musician, a hell of a good actor, a good director … he just couldn’t concentrate on one thing too long.

He also acknowledged the influence of Griffith (“D. W. Griffith influenced us all”).¹ But as Frank’s career declined due to alcoholism and poor business decisions, Jack’s took off. Ford would later employ his brother as a character actor, often playing drunken old derelicts, which some have seen as payback for Frank’s patronizing treatment of the young Jack.

Ford began directing two-reelers in 1917 and soon graduated to features with Straight Shooting. Teamed with cowboy star Harry Carey, he directed 22 films at Universal between 1917 and 1921. The stories were devised by Ford and Carey and featured a continuing character, a good-bad man called Cheyenne Harry. Ford recalled of these Westerns: “They weren’t shoot-em-ups, they were character stories. Carey was a great actor”.²

Anxious to strike out on his own and establish a solo reputation, and jealous of Carey’s greater earnings (Carey was being paid $2,250 a week to Ford’s $300), Ford moved from Universal to Fox where in 1923 he changed his billing from Jack to John Ford and achieved a great hit with his Western epic The Iron Horse (1924). He successfully weathered the change from silent to sound films and made no Westerns between 1926 and 1939. Instead he worked in a variety of genres mainly at Fox (later 20th Century-Fox) and RKO Radio Pictures, winning his first Oscar for his Irish melodrama The Informer in 1935.

He established a productive relationship with screenwriter Dudley Nichols and they were to work on fourteen films together. As Stephen O. Lesser writes:

The Ford–Nichols relationship was critical in the developing careers of both men, although Nichols’ contribution to Ford’s style has become a matter of dispute. In recent times, the weight of opinion has swung against Nichols, claiming that Ford only revealed himself as a poet of the cinema once free from the schematic bonds of Nichols’s screenplays. On the other hand, it was only after Ford had discovered Nichols that Ford achieved the critical success needed to fuel his career and establish his reputation. It is safe to say that the two men shared similar outlooks and worked well together, each bringing out tendencies in the other that resulted in a symbolic, atmospheric style of filmmaking.³

Another key relationship in Ford’s career was with Darryl F. Zanuck, head of 20th Century-Fox. Zanuck told his biographer Mel Gussow in 1968:

In reviewing all the work of the many directors I have finally come to the conclusion that John Ford is the best director in the history of motion pictures … Ford had that enormous sense of the visual. He makes the camera act … He was an artist. He painted a picture—in movement, in action, in still shots … He was a great great pictorial artist.⁴

Ford returned the compliment:

Darryl’s a genius—and I don’t use the word lightly … he is head and shoulders above all producers … We had an ideal relationship.⁵

This is remarkable coming from Ford who detested most producers and resented any tampering with his films. Zanuck had absolute control of 20th Century-Fox, choosing the properties, assigning scripts to writers, deciding the casts, supervising the final edit. With Ford who cut in the camera as he was filming, Zanuck’s main effect was to reduce the running time of Ford’s films by editing out what he considered extraneous scenes slowing down the trajectory of the story. The studio’s fondness for Americana allowed Ford to make his easy-going Will Rogers trilogy and three masterpieces, Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) which brought Ford his second best director Oscar. A third followed for How Green Was My Valley (1941) before the war interrupted his career. He set up the Field Photo Unit which became the cinematic branch of the Office of Strategic Service (OSS) and was employed throughout the war making training films and documenting the progress of hostilities. Two of Ford’s documentaries won Oscars, Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943), although they were not specifically awarded to the director. Much against his will, Ford was seconded from the unit to MGM in 1945 to make a tribute to the PT (Patrol Torpedo) boats, They Were Expendable, which turned out to be another masterpiece.

Anxious to avoid being tied to a studio, he set up after the war an independent company, Argosy, with Merian C. Cooper. Their first production, the Catholic allegory The Fugitive, was a box office disaster and Ford produced his celebrated cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), to recoup the company’s fortunes. He also established a new partnership with the journalist Frank Nugent who was to script eleven films for Ford, including The Quiet Man (1952), his long-cherished Irish romance which brought him his fourth best director Oscar.

During the 1950s Ford became increasingly disenchanted with American society and his vision darkened. During the 1920s and 1930s he can be seen actively subscribing to an optimistic populist view of American history and society. In his films, the move is always westward: from Europe to America (Mother Machree, Four Sons, Flesh, The Informer, How Green Was My Valley), the dream of the immigrant; and in America from East to West, the aim of the pioneer (The Iron Horse, 3 Bad Men, Drums Along the Mohawk, Wagon Master). His films reached an optimistic peak with Wagon Master (1950) which tells of a Mormon trek across the desert in search of the Promised Land.

But with the development of the Cold War, anti-Communist paranoia fueling the McCarthyite purges and the beginning of civil rights agitation, Ford turned from the optimistic age of frontier America and the dream of an ideal society to be created there and began to eulogize settled traditional societies with what is basically paternalist government, sustained by simple Christian faith, good neighborliness and time-honored rituals; hence his affectionate depictions of Old Ireland (The Quiet Man), the Old South (The Sun Shines Bright) and the South Seas (Donovan’s Reef).

However, he depicts a bitterly divided United States...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction and Acknowledgments
• 1 John Ford: The Enigmatic Genius
• 2 John Ford’s Ireland
• 3 John Ford’s Empire
• 4 John Ford’s Faith
• 5 John Ford’s Underworld
• 6 John Ford’s Wars
• 7 John Ford’s Navy
• Conclusion
• Index
• Copyright