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Overview
John Ford remains the most honored director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards. Drawing upon extensive written and oral history, Ronald L. David explores Ford’s career from his silent classic, The Iron Horse, through the transition to sound, and then into the pioneer years of location filming, the golden years of Hollywood, and the movement toward television. During his career, Ford made such classics as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers-136 pictures in all, 54 of them Westerns. The complexity of his personality comes alive here through the eyes of his colleagues, friends, relatives, film critics, and the actors he worked with, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara, and Katharine Hepburn.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806186948 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 12/17/2014 |
| Series: | The Oklahoma Western Biographies , #10 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Ronald L. Davis was Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where he was Director of both the Oral History Program on the Performing Arts and the De Golyer Institute for American Studies. He has written many books on the performing arts in America, including the best-seller Hollywood Anecdotes.
Read an Excerpt
John Ford
Hollywood's Old Master
By Ronald L. Davis, Richard W. Etulain
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 1995 University of Oklahoma PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-8694-8
CHAPTER 1
Genius with a Camera
WHEN boy-wonder Orson Welles first visited a Hollywood studio in the mid-1930s, he couldn't conceal his excitement. "This," he exclaimed, "is the biggest electric train any boy ever had!" When asked later to name the American directors who most appealed to him, Welles answered, "I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford." Frank Capra, who won almost as many Oscars, once referred to his friend as the "king of directors," whereas Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish filmmaker, pronounced Ford "the best director in the world."
Ford remains the most honored director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards for his work. He was the recipient of the American Film Institute's first Life Achievement Award and continues to be a cult figure among movie enthusiasts around the world, revered by professionals as Hollywood's foremost film poet. During a career that spanned over fifty years Ford made 136 pictures, fifty-four of them Westerns. While he became most closely identified with the American frontier, none of his Academy Awards was for a Western movie. Instead, his Oscars for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952), plus two for wartime documentaries, reflect Ford's versatility and dimension as a cinematic artist.
Almost half of his movies were released before 1930, and nearly half of those were made before 1920. By 1940 Ford was recognized as the dean of American directors, a genius with the camera who told his stories visually, keeping dialogue to a minimum. He has been compared to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Charles Ives for, like them, he stands as an American original. Yet Frank Capra went further: "A megaphone has been to John Ford what the chisel was to Michelangelo: his life, his passion, his cross."
Like Capra, Ford was a first-generation American. He grew up in an Irish enclave on the New England coast, his people scorned by the Protestant power structure surrounding them. While Ford preserved his Irish identity, he loved America and struggled to prove himself in terms acceptable to the cultural majority. Despite his early success as a filmmaker, he continued to feel excluded from the mainstream, a tension that haunted him all his life. Ford overcame his background, his lack of formal training, and personal insecurities to triumph as the American cinema's most decorated director. Yet he seldom mingled in Hollywood circles, accepted none of his Oscars in person, and preferred the company of his own crowd, the hard-drinking, macho acquaintances he caroused with over many years and trusted.
On the surface Ford's work resulted in simple, uncluttered films that somehow possess great sophistication. The director liked to pose as a folksy anti-intellectual who merely did "a job of work" and saw no need to analyze how it was accomplished. Difficult to interview, Ford proved consistently evasive about his craft, which he refused to call art, and safeguarded himself behind sarcasm, lies, and even a guise of illiteracy.
To a large degree he worked by instinct. "There is no secret about directing," he said, "except good common sense and a belief in what you are doing." Like most filmmakers of his day, he started at the bottom and learned his skills through trial and error. Later directors, Ford felt, became too preoccupied with the camera, treating it like some new toy. "Instead of looking at their people," he said, "they look at the camera. The camera obsesses them, and they think that is the secret. It isn't. The secret is in people's faces, their eye expression, their movements."
As many artists have, Ford considered the mystery of what he achieved part of his creativity. He possessed the ability to reduce complexities to an essence without diminishing meaning or power, enhancing the impact of scenes through his uncomplicated approach. "Great artists work with great simplicity," actress Katharine Hepburn once reflected, and Ford understood that early in his career. While his images are breathtaking, the pictures he directed are about people and human dignity. At his best Ford's dramatic sense and timing were flawless, although his work seldom seems theatrical. His was a cinematic approach—realistic and rooted in movement. He often said that a story is a story whether it's Two Gentlemen from Verona or Stagecoach; what matters is that it "works." On projects that he personally selected, Ford honed his scripts with writers until they suited his purpose, allowing sufficient latitude for him to develop ideas with the camera.
"Don't be afraid of sentiment," Ford said, "play it honestly." His films are filled with emotion, yet they only occasionally become mawkish. When admirers attempted to read motivation into his work, he tended to grow bored and mumble something like "No kidding! Is that so?" With Ford, what you saw was what you got; to discuss allusive meaning was to him superfluous. Well-read and informed on whatever subject he was photographing, he chose to pose as a man of action—a rugged, two-fisted man's man, for whom too much talk was an affectation.
Although he worked within a commercial system, John Ford earned sufficient freedom within the movie industry to perfect a personal style. He balanced studio assignments with productions he selected himself, always keeping in mind that the making of motion pictures was a business. "I've got a whole lot of respect for the people who go to see movies," he said. "I think we ought to make pictures in their language." He saw movies not as art, but as commercial entertainment, some examples better than others. Ford's favorite posture was that of a simple teller of tales who occasionally blundered into masterworks. He insisted that it is fatal for a director to consider only the aesthetic side of his craft, just as it is fatal to become preoccupied with theories about technique. What is important is to make films that please the public, yet at the same time reflect the personality of the director.
Since Ford hated authority, he battled with studio heads, who respected his talent but found him difficult. "You don't handle Ford," one Hollywood producer said. "You turn the reins loose and you try to hang on." Within the old studios, however, he was known as a craftsman who stayed within assigned budgets and finished pictures on schedule. While working, he demanded total control. When he failed to get it, he either became bored or ran amuck, as he did with Mr. Roberts, when he was expected to transfer a successful Broadway play to film and felt stifled. Like other great directors of his time, Ford might spend six months preparing a movie, then shoot it in four or five weeks, sometimes less. "It is wrong to liken a director to an author," he argued. "He is more like an architect." If the director is creative, he puts "a predesigned composition on film."
Although Ford developed a reputation for making films inexpensively, he was no assembly-line director. By the time his pictures went into production, he had the story so firmly in mind that he was free to improvise as shooting progressed. He liked to keep the entire cast on hand at all times, in case he should need someone unexpectedly. If he thought of a last-minute wardrobe or prop change, there might be a flurry of activity while he altered his approach or gave actors additional pieces of business. In Ford's view an element of spontaneity, even a degree of uncertainty, was necessary to assure the freshness he wanted on film; otherwise actors simply mouthed dialogue.
He often decided at the last minute that a scene was too wordy and would eliminate lines; Ford never lost the conviction that he was working in an essentially visual medium. "When a motion picture tells its story and reveals its characters in a series of simple, beautiful, active pictures," he said, "and does it with as little talk as possible, then the medium is being used to its fullest advantage. The director must be able to take printed words and transmute them into images." For Ford the script, with rare exceptions, became what a libretto is for composers of opera—a text to focus, enhance, and add dramatic power not to music in Ford's case, but to visual imagery.
"The main thing about motion pictures is to photograph the people's eyes," he insisted. "Look at their faces." Ford didn't shoot through ashtrays or down skylights, nor did he use complicated dolly shots or moving cranes. He stationed the camera at eye level and let it tell the story. Still, his compositions are those of a painter. Ford has been called the greatest stylist in American films, but the essence of his style remained simplicity. For him less truly became more. "I try to make people forget they're in a theater," he said. "I don't want them to be conscious of a camera or a screen. I want them to feel that what they're seeing is real."
Ford boasted that he was the best cinematographer in the business, which in certain regards may have been true. Yet according to his Oscar-winning cameraman Winton Hoch, "Ford never worried about anything technical. The camera was just a box capturing an image to him. The mechanics were not important unless they became unwieldy." Fortunately Ford worked with excellent cinematographers, who knew how to carry out his intent. He often claimed that he cut his pictures with the camera, giving the editing room minimum footage to work with. Film editor Gene Fowler, Jr., denied the contention, but admired the filmmaker's straightforward approach. "I always said that if anybody wanted to direct, they should look at about six John Ford pictures," Fowler declared, "because his techniques of shooting were so simple, yet so obviously effective."
Visualist though he was, Ford also won the respect of moviemakers more oriented toward language. Screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who later turned director and won Academy Awards for both two years in a row, is a prime example. In 1948, approaching the height of his celebrity, Mankiewicz wrote Ford, "Not so long ago I ran across an old diary of mine in which, after seeing one of your films, I commented rather unhappily upon the likelihood that I could ever come within even hailing distance of you as a director. It was a possibility about which I still have very little optimism."
Ford took all of his honors and praise with a grain of salt, rejecting the notion that moviemaking owed much to genius or profound theories on art. He told his friend Robert Parrish that his six Oscars meant nothing. "The only thing that's important," said Ford, "is to keep working." Although picturemaking was his life, the director found taking his profession seriously difficult and claimed he never thought he was doing anything important. The son of proletarian parents, Ford continued to view the world through proletarian eyes. While he respected art, he could never accept himself as an artist. He hid his sensitivity beneath a blustery facade and attempted to cloak his creativity in workaday jargon, fearing that to do otherwise would appear unmanly.
Although John Ford's work is filled with conflict between the individual and society, he seldom deals with inner turmoil. It's the public person that Ford is concerned with, the individual who will contribute to society or will fail. Yet Ford himself was a mass of inner turmoil that stemmed in no small measure from his Irish background. What Hollywood projected was the work-oriented Irish director, gaining acclaim and self-esteem through a job well done. Less public was Ford's Gaelic penchant toward despondency during idleness and his abuse of alcohol. What the pub offered his kinsmen in malebonding and social solidarity, Ford found on location in Monument Valley and with his cronies in Hollywood.
But the tensions went deeper, as a study of his films will reveal. Ford was squeamish about sex, while the characters in his movies seem incapable of accepting mature love. "I cannot recall one of his films in which the man-woman relationship came off with any feeling or profundity," Ford's long-time screenwriter Dudley Nichols maintained. "Like many fine artists-Herman Melville for instance—his true feeling was for the man-man or man-men relationship." Sexual attraction in Ford's hands was sublimated in courtship and gallantry, while love between the sexes acquired value only when linked to marriage and family.
In the villages of Ireland's western coast, from which Ford's parents emigrated, sexual division was traditionally sharp-women worked in the farmhouse and kitchen, men in the barn and fields. Male celibacy remained high, while bachelors tended to be awkward around women other than their family. Marriage frequently came late and was between members of the same village or parish. Even after marriage the sexes congregated with their own kind.
Irish Catholicism, social anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes points out in her study of mental illness in rural Ireland (Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenia), has been steeped in sexual repression, while its priests have glorified ascetic virtues. The personality of the Irish rural male tended to revolve around feelings of masculine inadequacy and alternate dependency and hostility toward women, a conflict that originated in a strong mother-son relationship. That Ford's male-female love interests on the screen seem deficient in sexual vitality (as was his own marriage after a brief while) reflects the repressed turn-of-the-century Irish village attitudes that he learned from his parents. Although he spent most of his life in Hollywood (notoriously libidinous if one believes the scandal sheets), he opted to stand apart. Fearful of intimacy, mistrustful of love, ashamed of sex, Ford was most comfortable with a celibate life, which he could view in traditional Irish fashion as martyrdom.
In a different age Ford might have turned to homosexuality, but had he done so in the first half of this century, guilt would have overwhelmed him. Without question he preferred the company of men, and male bonding reached inordinate proportions. He may have been physically attracted to men on occasion, but there is no indication that he gratified his appetites homosexually. The director's unquenchable need to dominate might be construed as a subconscious desire to ravish, but it is unlikely that the impulse became overtly sexual. Whether Ford harbored doubts about his sexuality is a matter of conjecture. His discomfort with behavior that smacked of effeminacy suggests that he was not secure in his masculinity. But his was neither an age nor a society that prized sensitivity in males, and to be labeled an artist made a man suspect in all but the most sophisticated circles. Ford resolved his dilemma by dwelling in a masculine world, enjoying male companionship and post-adolescent horseplay and desexualizing situations he wasn't comfortable with or that harbored potential danger.
It has been said that while Americans are in love with love, the Irish are in love with death. Modern psychiatry has linked sexual repression with morbidity and a preoccupation with death—characteristics rampant in American popular culture throughout most of the nineteenth century. John Ford had a morose side, particularly evident when he wasn't working and, like traditional Irish villagers, he dwelt in a secretive, privatized world. But while Ford flaunted his Irish heritage, he was also an ardent American—pragmatic, aggressive, a man of action. His screen images, although full of Irish undercurrents, more directly establish his vision of America and embody the immigrant's dream of a new world.
"Westerns," said Ford, "are typically American," but he lifted this popular genre on the screen to epic proportions. Until late in his career inexpensive Westerns were the financial mainstay of the American movie industry, but Ford did more: he captured the nation's creation myth on film. Movies and the frontier saga were ideally suited to one another, but it took Ford's genius to raise the Western to its full potential. "A running horse remains the finest subject for a motion picture camera," he once said. "Is there anything more beautiful than a long shot of a man riding a horse well, or a horse racing free across a plain?" As the screen's greatest action director, Ford filled his canvas with the West. Yet his West went beyond historical fact to incorporate legend as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from John Ford by Ronald L. Davis, Richard W. Etulain. Copyright © 1995 University of Oklahoma Press. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Series Editor's Foreword,Preface,
1. Genius with a Camera,
2. Outsider,
3. Silent Pictures,
4. The Sound Revolution,
5. Americana,
6. War,
7. Back to Monument Valley,
8. Troubled Times,
9. Master Filmmaker,
10. Decline,
11. Despair,
Filmography,
Bibliographical Essay,
Index,