"Searching for John Ford", Joseph McBride
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.
Ford knew
how to tell a story through economy of expression, using shots with the characters’
faces that, in their silence, showed the complexity of emotions and thoughts
that crossed them, never disturbing the narrative flow. As an example, in 7 Women (1966), the head of the mission (played by Margareth Leighton)
enters the room of the candid and beautiful young girl (Sue Lyon) and sees her
half-naked. On the surface, Leighton's face shows a certain surprise at the
realization that the girl is already a young adult, but, by letting us see the hesitation she has
when approaching the nymphet, as well as the way she touches her hair and shoulder, Ford let us realize that the eldest is a repressed
lesbian with an attraction for the younger one. Nothing is explicit verbally, only
through the subtle control of the actors' gestures and a careful mise en scène, this idea is transmitted to the spectator.
Joseph
McBride is a film historian and screenwriter, author of several biographies of
filmmakers such as Frank Capra and Orson Welles. Searching for John Ford, published in 2001, is his detailed study of the American filmmaker and
an attempt to understand Ford’s complex and mysterious personality, tracing an
extensive biographical account of the director and a critical analysis to most
of Ford’s films, properly contextualized.
Excerpts:
"(...) Ford's political views were complex and have been inadequately understood. Too often he and his films were roughly equated with the reactionary politics of his favorite actors, John Wayne and Ward Bond, or with some of his own conservative public stands after he returned from service in World War II. His attitude toward the great moral crisis of postwar Hollywood, the anti-Communist witch-hunt, was contradictory. During that era, he switched his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican, and he ended his days supporting Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and the Vietnam War. But simplistically labeling Ford as a flag-waving jingoist ignores much that is disturbing and ambivalent about his view of American history. By refusing to engage in serious discussions of his personal feelings and the themes of his work, and by declining to accept the label of 'artist,' Ford was protecting his inner self from those who might find his truths threatening or subversive."
"The clash between tradition and modernity is a central theme underlying all of Ford's work, exemplified in his romantic portraits of bygone days, his mournful elegies to their passing, and his obsession with the breakup of families caught in the wake of tumultuous social change. One of his favorite visual motifs is that of leave-taking: the loved one standing silently on a hillside watching someone walk or ride away forever. This endlessly recurring Fordian image had its roots in the primal leave-takings his parents made as they departed Spiddal in 1872."
Link to the complete book in PDF:
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| John Ford and John Wayne on the set of The Horse Soldiers (1959) |
[1] François Truffaut, "God Bless John Ford," The Films in My Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1978) p. 63.
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