John Ford Series Introduction

Last Wednesday begat my CALM series You Don’t Know Jack: The John Ford Starter Pack, announced and ruminated on before for this site. To provide itinerary for the moment, and now that it’s out there, I hastily jotted up some introductory passages that are now transcribed here. After-the-fact additional comments are highlighted.

The best way to start would be to frame the reasons for this retrospective. John Ford is often taught, but not understood. John Ford only has fans being older people like me, it seems, and I’ve often wondered why. Prelim reasons were laid out in the substack; I have no idea whether this series will adhere to those goals very much, or not, since I’m mostly winging these specials.

This is a reflection of my own movie journey, sort of. I don’t know who or who hasn’t seen Stagecoach or is familiar with John Ford. If you haven’t or aren’t, welcome, but if you have and are, welcome back. Stagecoach was my first John Ford, back in college. The Searchers was a few years later. Some others here and there.

What I began to notice is that while none of them, except particularly My Darling Clementine in those early days, took hold individually. Eventually though, the body of work as a whole, itself, did. The more I saw, the more complete the man and the art became, or at least to what delusions I had about him. The work was meaningful, unique, beautiful, lasted long in my mind after the fact. All things considered, both the man and the art, in the conditions it thrived under, it’s impossible for anything like it to ever happen again.

However, this took a long time, and a lot of discernment while looking to others for what exactly is great about John Ford. Instead, I found a lot of dissent. As a student of movies, and a fan of John Ford, I wanted to redirect such bad faith, in my own way, just like I feel I try to do generally in my interests.

These selections in the oncoming weeks, if anything, were chosen not only because of their reputations or what I think of them, but because they are the best representations of John Ford’s work, together, in the most pleasing presentation as possible, since I have physical, HD copies for them all.

But the enthusiasm approach is generally not as useful as one would like to think, one can’t will someone into liking something nor can they pour the syrup of zealousy on the pancake of the disbelievers, the ornery and the obstinate, and expect them to eat that breakfast. The game of out-enthusing anyone that came before, or any currently, is folly, but at any rate the goal is to at least close the gap between those of you that are unconvinced to someone who feels like I do.

Comment: I’d like to have included at the time, since it is called a “Starter Pack”, it is also to mentally arm those who might want to tackle his “lesser” movies, in order to study what they do in their confines, what exactly is or becomes “Fordian” through them and out of them. Auteurism, and given time John Ford is a great tool towards illuminating that end (and comparing him to someone like Hitchcock or Hawks, even more recent auteurs like PTA or Wes Anderson, as convenient examples), is detecting what the “signature(s)” is that filmmaker puts on a subject, distinctions in the middle of that genre’s conventions, molding its genre into their “personal genre”. On top of being very useful tools for exegesis, exploration like this is one of the joys of being a movie fan. As much as I’d like to resist one-size-fits-all types of models, studying movies vis-a-vis the Auteur Theory is simply the best one we have right now. Maybe a better one will emerge in the future though, who knows.

It started becoming clear that the mystery of John Ford, the enigmatic person often heralded as the poet laureate of American Cinema (there hasn’t been someone to replace him since), the Ford Ford Ford and John Ford of Orson Welles mantra (which he said in an issue of Playboy in 1967, by the way), is best understood through his movies—and a lot of them—rather than the other way around. We seek the man from his movies rather than the movies from the man, if that makes sense. At the same time, while we have his art and his interviews (which he rarely gave even an inch to, the ornery cuss, when the discussion of art is concerned), there’s so much about John Ford that seems impossible to understand, or insoluble.

If there ever was one person that could be called America’s Director, for better or worse, it was John Ford. Nobody did more to chart American History on film, from the Monument Valley West to the Irish East, the worlds of Mark Twain, Harper Lee, Abraham Lincoln, the colonial revolution and horseless indians, the mounted Comanche and Sioux versus American Cavalry, transatlantica and European immigration, the heavily cross-sectioned culture gumbos of its largest cities and its border towns.

Speaking of history. Ford Westerns, like most Westerns, have some commentary on the controversial treatment of Natives. It should be said that, for Stagecoach, audiences of 1939 were far from sick of the myth and the savagery of the untamed Indian. Its internal, unquestioned acceptance of this aspect is a reflection of the evils of the American public in its past. These realities, our colonial stories, as distasteful as they are to see and imagine, are not shied away from. We should be forced to confront unvarnished pasts like this. As a matter of fact, many Westerns, contrary to belief, do not seek to propagandize or prove the “superiority” of the White race, rather the racist attitudes depicted were simply true representations of how real people cruelly perceived and acted towards natives (Chinese and Mexicans too, in many cases). Anyway, more than you’d think, in Westerns everything is not Black and White, sometimes rather a jubilee of grays, and other neutrals.

When the words John Ford are brought up, one thinks of these Westerns, and with Ford, Stagecoach in particular almost every time. Otherwise, maybe The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In most cases I tend to think of this as undercutting the artist, but at the same time I think that’s the way John Ford would have liked best to be remembered by. “My name is John Ford and I direct Westerns,” as he introduced himself in the legendary Director’s Guild McCarthyite meeting before sticking up for Joseph Mankiewicz to a petrified Cecil B. DeMille.

Something I must note is that many of his critics over the years have attacked, among them, in addition to this portray of natives, claiming him militaristic and jingoistic, due to his glorification of the armed forces, and has brought his political alignments into question. Like much about John Ford, his thoughts were closely guarded. What we do know is he hated cops, despised any authority (especially producers) and being under close watch, and loved his actors as much as he made fun of or berated them. On the contrary, the more he fucked with you the more he liked you. He was fair, and (what we can gather through is movies) sympathetic to the outcast and the loser.

Comment: By this point I revisited They Were Expendable in the series, which is a movie that shows the futility and the hell that was the Pacific Theater machine and its cycle of death, upholding the solemn glory for those that sacrificed and kept fighting regardless of who it was for, a sentiment far from bloodthirsty mongering. Critic Tag Gallagher said he felt Ford, a self admitted coward, loved the panoply of the military. I touched on a comment Ford made to his editor Robert Parrish about his document The Battle of Midway, which he filmed on his 8mm camera as Japanese bombers were personally attacking him: “This is for the mothers of America, the fathers know about the war already, this is to show the mothers that their sons are dying.”

It is true Ford’s women were generally marginalized in his films, and while it’s a subject I won’t get into until it is more appropriate later, I will say that Ford’s movies, while they feature mostly male characters doing male things as rites of passage, sometimes to possess a woman (again these were more rituals than of misogyny), Ford has a particular blend of sentimentalism with romanticism reminiscent, but very different to Frank Borzage’s (they worked at Fox simultaneously but it’s unclear whether they influenced each other, but Ford often employed Borzage’s brothers), and while these are resistant to Feminist perspectives (save for things like The Quiet Man, 7 Women and Mogambo, maybe others), they both make delicate, feminine movies. The final movie of this series proves the ultimate, both as bloat and literally, Fordian character of all time was a woman.

Comment: The campaign that my cryptic example nominates to such a distinction, the “most Fordian character”, is closely ran in competition by Shirley Temple in Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie, believe it or not.

Let it be once and for all, before this conversation comes up again, that using the crude probes of ideology to part the sinews of Ford’s work is misguided and missing the point. John Ford is too complex of an artist that has affected too many different people in too many different parts of the world for too long of a time to be talked about as some sort of unchanging artifact or a type. Rather it would do much more benefit to the considering audience to treat him as someone who was wading along in the mosaic of time, responding to it, to the movies and the industry, to the world and change. It is better to see Ford as a drifter who made choices along the way, and while Ford had his famous fights with producers about things like closeups and dialogue and happy endings, he said he “fought like hell and lost every time”.

John Ford complained on numerous occasions of the post production doctoring that producers would meddle in, as much as Ford developed a system of filming as little as possible in as few takes as heaven would allow, that didn’t stop them.

The point here I want to focus though is that while all this took place, an astonishing amount of his auteuristic voice still comes out in each movie (from what I’ve seen) in their own uneven ways. So the ability to take assignments he wasn’t interested in with stories he hated and to emerge with something uniquely Fordian is insane.

John Ford’s most recent critical reputation has also rested on this period from 1939-1966, which consisted no fewer than 14 Westerns out of the 35 or so. Now this is only part of Ford’s 120 total feature films, out of which through Ford’s way of doing things (under budget, finished shootings early), none of which lost money. Ford did not survive so long with so many movies in such a competitive, ruthless industry by embracing the world around him, instead he retreated inside, put up barriers to producers and outside artistic influences.

An inherent irony to the Ford question too is that historically the Western, arguably the most American of genres, has always been taken more seriously overseas in Europe or Japan. Meanwhile in America the critical circles thought the Ford from 40s up to his death was a dinosaur, film repetitive subjects and characters, the New Critics of the 70s and the 80s thought there should be fringe of the director’s personal obsessions, Ford was still making his cute movies, cute movies from a funny old man.

One day I will have to address the problem with the evaluative plague to lean in on artists that don’t constantly reinvent themselves from the ground up every time

Another irony is that while most of John Ford’s earliest movies (most of them Westerns with Harry Carey) are still missing, the ones that we do have, the surviving prints have been found not in America but in other countries: Straight Shooting, his first feature, was found in a Czech archive. Last year’s discovery, The Scarlet Drop, was found in Chile.

A primary difference with Ford’s westerns to others is that Ford comes from a place where the Frontier West was alive. Well, really old, but still there; all but dead. He was friends with actual gunslingers, Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickock among them, who told him stories and offered advice on the films themselves.

Before getting into this series I want one to consider the following, as I feel it is the essence of Ford’s Classicism. Again when I speak of Classicism or Classic moviemaking it has nothing to do with its Vintage, its evaluative quality or its repeated appearance on best ever lists, or anything in that manner, and has more to do with the style of filmmaking that grew out of the teens and 20s, which had more formal innovations than all the decades that followed combined. Ford more or less retained this classicism to the end, the kind of “invisible editing” and/or “invisible camera”, or in other words, free of a camera that interrupts the flow of the imagery, all the way through his 50 years of filmmaking, giving him a fidelity that withstood a business so reliant on fads and stressed invention. Like Billy Wilder, I think the older he got and the less he was beheld to those and the currency of trends he became a free man, made movies more fully dedicated to himself than to others.

Which brings me, finally, to the first in this series, again, is Stagecoach. The year 1939 was all around a huge year for movies to most, even if the previous year carried Hathaway’s Spawn of the North, Borzage’s Shining Hour and Three Comrades, Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby, Richard Wallace’s The Young in Heart, Lubitsch’s Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife, Cukor’s Holiday, Capra’s You Can’t Take It With You, Curtiz/Keighley’s Adventures of Robin Hood, but nevermind.

Key thing about this movie I wish to address, aside from that it’s a great movie, a highly accessible movie, let it be known it is what has followed Stagecoach that makes it now seem trad and obsolete, due to Ford’s directness in his direction, the obviousness in its instincts. It was a new way of the Western, which was further proven by everything that followed.

Comment: In truth, every tool in the playbook Ford used for Stagecoach was already decades old, carrying images that Ford reused from his Harry Carey days, as far as advising John Wayne to straight up carbon copy his performance after Carey himself. Also, look at Ford’s inclusion of TWO players from his first feature, Straight Shooting (1917), present in Stagecoach: Duke R. Lee and Vester Pegg.

While it is based on the story Stage to Lordsburg by Ernest Haycox, it is more directly an adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s Boule de Suife. The major differences between de Maupassant’s version and Ford’s (scripted by Dudley Nichols) is that while the former is a satire of the hypocrisies in the social strata in France, Ford’s band of motley in Stagecoach all approach something closer to each’s mythological fulfillments and inevitabilities in a populist, morality-chamber pageant. Each is either running from something or chasing something. Pete Bogdanovich says in his book John Ford “What Ford can do better than any filmmaker in he world is create an epic canvas and still people it with characters of equal size and importance—no matter how lowly they may be” and “His outlook on life gives them their unity.”

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