"John Ford: The Man and His Films", Tag Gallagher

John Ford (1894-1973) was, as François Truffaut wrote, "an artist who never said the word 'art,' a poet who never mentioned 'poetry.'" [1] His work is constructed on a personal and singularly lyrical vision, particularly incisive on the mythology of the Old West. His films, based on ideals of tradition, homeland, family and community, are mostly filmed in long and medium long shots, with a remarkable pictorial composition where the camera is essentially immobile. Films as My Darling Clementine (1946), Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) have acquired the classic status and served as references for acclaimed filmmakers like Orson Welles (who saw Stagecoah forty times, while in preparation for Citizen Kane), Ingmar Bergman or Pedro Costa. His westerns, with cavalry figures in line, solitary heroes riding across Monument Valley, female characters waiting inside their homes for the return of their loved ones, and stretched-legged sheriffs sitting on chairs in porches, represent a nostalgia for a vanished time, inevitably romanticized by the memory of a patriot poet.

But to say that Ford only did westerns is quite reductive. He was also an expressionist, especially in the ‘30s and '40s with the somber The Informer and the religious allegory The Fugitive, and directed some of the most important cinematic sociological portraits (The Grapes of Wrath (1940) or How Green Was My Valley (1941)), that could also reflect his ideals of family and duty.

John Ford: The Man and His Films is a profound analysis of Ford’s oeuvre with intense and original writings on some of the filmmaker’s most important films by film critic and historian Tag Gallagher. Dividing the director’s work in four periods: The Age of Introspection (1927-35), Age of Idealism (1935-47), Age of Myth (1948-61) and Age of Mortality (1962-65), Gallagher examines in detail the composition of Ford's frames (with illustrations), the characterizations of his characters, the narrative coherence between his westerns and his sociological films, and how small details can be resonated with the filmmaker's previous work (a gesture of Wayne's arm in The Searchers is a tribute to the early westerns made with Harry Carrey). Through Gallagher's eloquent and sensible prose, Ford is shown to be a mature and intelligent artist with a personal universe, trying to search for the intersection between fact and legend.

Excerpts:
"There is less determinism and more free will than elsewhere in Ford in this period [Age of Myth]. Duty, previously regarded by the hero as divinely appointed, henceforth resides in the group and is socially assigned. Previously people lived in idealistic commitment; individuals might die but the Idea would endure (e. g., Ma Joad). This theme continues, but the static concept is replaced by a dynamic antinomy and given concrete representation: subsistence and change — and an uncertain change - become the matrices through which all other themes must operate. And henceforth the films of John Ford essentially constitute a cinema of passage, whose central symbolic antinomies are the parade and the house."

"But Fordian heroes are lonely; isolation and self-exclusion are the prices they pay. Tom Joad cannot rest while society’s outcasts tread the road; Mr. Gruffydd must leave the valley. All are obsessed by duty, all become “priests,” take vows equivalent to chastity, give up everything for their task. And over the years Ford’s concept of his hero evolves toward ever more pronounced obsession and introversion. The heroes played by Fonda illustrate this evolution—Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, the Fugitive priest - and the process continues through the Wayne heroes, climaxing in the suicides of Tom Doniphon (Liberty Valance) and Dr. Cartwright (Anne Bancroft, 7 Women). The hero’s ability to moderate intolerance becomes progressively more questionable, and the cost to him more ruinous."

Link to the complete book in PDF:

John Ford
[1] François Truffaut, "God Bless John Ford," The Films in My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1978) p. 63.

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