John Ford

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Robert C. Sickels

Film director John Ford is a profoundly influential figure in American culture far beyond his own prolific, wide-ranging, and often impressive output in a 50-year plus cinema career that began in the silent era with The Tornado (Universal, 1917). Despite the variety of subject matter he tackled for the screen, he remains historically, critically, and in the public consciousness, as the architect of the Western, the genre on which he cut his teeth during the silent era. It was, however, not only the numerous popular and acclaimed Westerns he made for which he is important: his romantic, émigré's vision of the Old West and the pioneering spirit has crept into the perception of American history, blending idealized fiction into the harsher truth of fact for generations of Americans and, certainly, for non-Americans in the many countries where his work is regarded as a classic staple of Hollywood cinema at its best.

John Ford is the most decorated director in Hollywood history, and his four Academy Awards as best director in part illustrate his range while, curiously, ignoring his westerns (from which he took a decade-long break from 1927). He won his first Oscar for a return to the political roots of Ireland with The Informer (RKO, 1935), a tale of a simple-minded Irishman (Victor McLaglen) who betrays an IRA leader. It was garlanded with Oscars and extravagant critical praise for its stylization and grim atmosphere. Ford returned to Ireland again for The Quiet Man (1952), a Technicolor comedy, vigorous and funny. In between, he was honored by the Academy for The Grapes of Wrath (1940), from Steinbeck's novel about a family trekking to California to escape the disaster of the 1930s dust-bowl, and How Green Was My Valley (1941), a nostalgic tearjerker set in a Welsh mining community. To these films, add The Whole Town's Talking (1935), a comedy melodrama with Edward G. Robinson; the Shirley Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie (1938), set in colonial India; Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), What Price Glory (1952), Mogambo (1953) and his last feature, Seven Women (1966), set in an isolated Chinese mission in the 1930s, and one gets an inkling of the depth and range of Ford's interests and his professional skill.

Ford was born Sean O'Feeney in Portland, Maine, on February 1, 1894, one of the many children of his first-generation Irish immigrant parents. Of his siblings, he was closest to his brother Francis, some 12 years his senior. Always restless, Francis ran away from home to seek his fortune at an early age, changed his name to Ford, and forged a modest acting career in the theater, before moving into the film business with Edison and Biograph. By 1913, he was in Hollywood, writing, directing, and acting in silent action serials at Universal Studios, where, in 1914, his younger brother joined him. Known initially as Jack Ford--the name under which he was credited when he began directing, changed to John in 1923--Ford learned the rudiments of filming as gopher, jack-of-all-trades, and apprentice to Francis, eventually being allowed a hand in acting, writing, and camera work. In 1917, just as Francis Ford's star was fading, Universal's founder and chief Carl Laemmle made John Ford a director, entrusting him with The Tornado, a two-reel short. The film was a success, and thus launched the most prolific directing career in film history. In Ford's four and a half years at Universal he made his reputation as a director of westerns, and forged a significant creative relationship with actor Harry Carey, whom he later frequently cited as having been the most important influence on his work outside of his brother Francis. When the fledgling director met Carey, 16 years his senior, the actor had already worked in almost 200 films, and would appear in 25 of Ford's 39 films for Universal. By 1921 Universal had relegated Carey to "B" westerns, but Ford's stock had risen considerably. He had proved himself capable of making films that came in on time, often under budget, and generally turned a profit.

Ford used his increasing reputation to jump ship to Fox, where he made 50 films. The move was well-timed: within a few years after his arrival, Fox rose from a second tier studio to an industry leader, and although Ford, always stubborn, had run-ins with management from time to time, for the most part he enjoyed a freedom few of his counterparts could claim. By 1939 Ford's stock could not have been higher, but he had been absent from his first love, the western, for some ten years. Aware that the genre was not taken seriously by critics but that he certainly was, he determined to use his reputation and influence to bring prestige to westerns. The first fruit of his ambition was Stagecoach (1939), a watershed film that marked the first of the director's nine films to be set in his signature landscape of Monument Valley, and the first of his famous collaborations with John Wayne. Contemporary audiences think of the Valley as a cowboy movie cliché, but Stagecoach was its first appearance and it owes its resonance and associations to Ford's work. As Jane Tompkins argues, for a western film "not just any space will do. Big sky country is a psychological and spiritual place known by definite physical markers. It is the American West, and not just any part of that but the West of the desert, of mountains and prairies, the West of Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and some parts of California." Ford's repeated use of Monument Valley caused it to become an archetypal mythic landscape, a virtual stand-in for any and all of the above named places. Never identified by name in any of the Ford films in which it is featured, Monument Valley serves to represent locations as diverse from one another as the city of Tombstone, Arizona (My Darling Clementine, 1946) and the Texas plains (Rio Grande, 1950, The Searchers, 1956).