The Mythmaker. - Review - book reviews

National Review, Dec 31, 1999 by Randy Roberts

Mr. Roberts, a professor of history at Purdue University, is author, with James S. Olson, of John Wayne: American.

Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, by Scott Eyman (Simon & Schuster, 656 pp., $40)

JOHN FORD'S career as a director spanned the American century. He got his first job in Hollywood in 1914, the same year that the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand jump-started the Great War, and he directed his last film in 1971, when America was fighting in Vietnam. In between, his mythic vision of the American West helped to shape and define what it meant to be an American hero. John Wayne and Henry Fonda were the actors who embodied that ideal on-screen. Ford was the driving creative force that put them there.

But Ford himself was a man of profound and unpleasant contradictions. His films enshrined the ideal of community, but even when most fully engaged in the collaborative work of filmmaking, he remained an outsider. He was, said fellow director Frank Capra, "half-tyrant, half- revolutionary; half-saint, half-satan; half-possible, half-impossible; half-genius, half-blah; half-Irish, half-man-but all director and all American."

Frank O'Brien was one of Ford's star actors in the 1920s, and the two took a long tour of the Pacific together. As O'Brien later remembered: "I had known him . . . for nearly ten years. Yet after four months in which I was with him every second of every day, I think I knew less about him than ever before."

That was exactly what Ford desired-not to be understood. He seldom granted serious interviews, and when he did he spent most of the time deflecting good, honest questions, and lying. He said his real name was Sean Aloysius O'Feeney; it wasn't. He said he was born in 1895; he wasn't. He said he had served in World War I; he hadn't. He said he had spent some time at the University of Maine; he hadn't. Often he lied for no reason at all, to people to whom he had no need to lie. It was almost as if he were his own creation, a fictional character whose biography could be tinkered with endlessly. But it was also a way to keep everyone-his family, his friends, the world-at arm's length.

Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford is Scott Eyman's attempt to unravel the life of the man and to evaluate his enormous body of work. Eyman has written other books about directors, cameramen, stars, and the industry, and his research is impeccable. He is brilliantly successful in detailing Ford's public life as an artist. Ford would have brushed off that characterization-striking instead some sort of silly laborer pose-but he was an artist, arguably the greatest that Hollywood has produced. From silent to talkie, from black-and- white to color, from two-reelers to wide-screen, John Ford adapted and excelled.

His life was like a four-part drama in which he played a different character in each act. In the first act he plucked his role from a Horatio Alger novel. He was born John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to Irish-immigrant parents. His early years were unexceptional-solid family, decent student, good athlete. But after finishing high school he left Maine for California, following in the footsteps of his brother Francis, "a randy black sheep" who had left home young, changed his name to Frank Ford, and was making a reputation for himself as an actor and director in Hollywood. Frank was smart and talented; he was also self-centered, sarcastic, and a mean drunk. Eyman suggests that John Ford "consciously modeled much of his behavior on Frank."

John Ford learned the movie business from the bottom up. He took the jobs that were offered and did what he was told, serving at one time or another as a propman, stuntman, actor, and assistant director. He learned fast and well, and by 1917 was directing two-reelers for Universal. He moved into feature production after joining forces with Harry Carey, a popular western star. The two made more than 20 films together, and by the mid 1920s Ford was an established director. Then in 1924 he directed The Iron Horse, a memorable epic about the building of the transcontinental railroad. Before the first talkies, Ford was near the top of his profession. By the end of the decade he had demonstrated that he could handle major themes, craft distinctive films, and-most important in Hollywood-make commercial hits by tapping into Americans' deepest dreams.

In the second act of Ford's career he played the New Deal Democrat, or, perhaps more accurately, the Irish-American Democrat. During the first half of the 1930s, he directed such beloved Depression-era stars as Will Rogers and Shirley Temple, showing Americans how to face adversity and smile at the same time. With the exception of the beautifully filmed, darkly symbolic Informer, most of Ford's pre-1939 movies have been forgotten by everyone save devoted film critics and Hollywood biographers. But between 1939 and 1941, Ford directed six films that are still remembered and watched: Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, and How Green Was My Valley. Winning back-to-back Academy Awards in 1940 and 1941, he was the leading director in the industry.