Ford (center),
Stewart, and Wayne on the set of The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance
|
Here are three things you
might want to know about director John Ford: He once pissed in the
bed of an actor he had caught drinking on his set; he was rarely
seen working without a dirty, chewed-up handkerchief in one corner
of his mouth; he won six Academy Awards, more than any other
filmmaker before or since. (They were for The Informer, The
Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Battle
of Midway, December 7th, and The Quiet Man.)
Ford's career -- which
started with silent two-reelers in the 1910s and ended with his
becoming the first recipient of the American Film Institute's Life
Achievement Award -- parallels the growth of the motion picture
industry itself. He came to Hollywood as a young man and left as a
washed-up legend, pausing along the way to discover an actor named
John Wayne. Although he made some of the most important films of
the '30s, '40s, and '50s, and one great one in the '60s (The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valence), few filmgoers today, or even
young film critics, know Ford's work anymore.
Since the 1960s, many who do
know Ford have tended to dismiss the director as either a
sentimentalist (he filled a story about labor unrest with happy,
singing coal miners), a racist (his famous Westerns helped create
the myth of John Wayne as Indian slayer), or a champion of ancient
causes (the problems of the Dust Bowl farmers -- like ancient
history today). Ford's legacy has survived primarily as fragments
that have trickled down into both pop culture and academia: Film
studies students learn that Stagecoach is one of the
prototypes of Platoon, and that Orson Welles studied Ford's
camera work before embarking on Citizen Kane. But how many
boomers recognize the image of the Beverly Hillbillies setting off
to California in a broken-down truck as an echo of the Joads from The
Grapes of Wrath? And this is just one small part of his
legacy.
Enter Scott Eyman. His
revisionist biography, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of
John Ford, makes the case that it was John Ford, more than any
director since D.W. Griffith, who "instinctively understood
the potential of film." Eyman, book editor of the Palm
Beach Post and author of five earlier works on Hollywood
history, has set himself a formidable task. Trying to convince
modern audiences to embrace Ford is akin to defending Tennyson for
the benefit of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age fans. Is there
anyone who wants to look beyond the clichés of Ford's iconic
Monument Valley settings and rediscover the director of The
Informer (1935), a film that's gorgeous and haunting yet
virtually lost from our collective memory? Does anyone other than
History Channel addicts still watch The Battle of Midway?
Can The Quiet Man, a film about a pacifist who breaks his
vow not to fight in order to defend his wife's honor, resonate
with contemporary audiences?
Eyman thinks so, and the
strongest argument in his favor is that he's such a fluid and
graceful writer himself. Just as his 1993 biography of Ernst
Lubitsch was nearly as much fun to read as Lubitsch's films are to
watch, this new book encourages the reader to run to the video
store to hunt for the copy of The Searchers that
might be hiding behind the many Unforgivens and Little
Big Mans on the shelf. A consummate journalist, Eyman
incorporates an impressive amount of research, including
interviews with actors Ford worked with (John Wayne, Jack Lemmon,
Henry Fonda, Roddy McDowall, John Carradine), producers and
directors (Samuel Goldwyn Jr., Peter Bogdanovich), and family
members (Ford's grandson Dan), and others, with a flair that
belies the footwork that went into it. (The book's title refers to
the famous line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in
which a newspaper editor, faced with the facts of a local story,
quips: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact,
print the legend.")
Eyman's critical voice is
less compelling than his biographical skills, however, and he
happily offers the floor to numerous critics and film historians
(from William K. Everson and François Truffaut to Terrence
Rafferty and Stanley Crouch) to comment on Ford's individual films
and his legacy as a whole. While he's a skilled close reader of
films, Eyman seems more at home dissecting Ford's poetry than his
politics. His attempts to defend the depiction of American Indians
in Ford's films are not convincing, in part because he barely
touches on the issue. In the end, he seems less interested in
presenting strong arguments than in opening new doors to the
director's work. Still, as much as I had hoped he would expand on
an idea that he inserts into his prologue -- that Ford and Frank
Capra represent opposing views of America's sense of itself -- I
was happy to read along to Eyman's affable rhythms. "John
Ford was fifty-one years old when World War II ended. He was six
feet tall, weighed 175 pounds, was missing ten teeth, had eyesight
rated a medium-lousy 6/20, had two children and two
grandchildren," he writes in one pithy summation of the
director's life.
The choicest biographical
tidbit Eyman unearths is evidence of an affair between Ford and
Katherine Hepburn. The celebrated actress met the director in the
late 1930s when she worked with him on Mary of Scotland
(1936). Soon they were spending time together on Ford's beloved
yacht, the Araner (named for the Araner Islands, Ford's ancestral
home). The two maintained an intense friendship for several years,
corresponding when apart. Eyman quotes an equal number of sources
who swear that the relationship was platonic, and he suggests that
Ford may have been an early version of Spencer Tracy, the other
introverted alcoholic the actress famously fell for.
"Certainly, it's true that Hepburn helped unlock Ford's
ambition, freed it up,' says Eyman. "Before Hepburn, he was a
high-line workaday director, given to expressing himself only
infrequently. After Hepburn, he would rarely do anything
else."
Born in 1894 to two Irish
immigrants living in Portland, Maine, Ford started life as Jack
Feeney. Raised in a family with six other children in a so-called
Irish battleship, a kind of three-deck house that dots
Northeastern cities, Ford followed his brother Francis to
Hollywood in 1914. Francis, who had by that time changed his name
to Francis Ford and was working for Universal Studios, employed
Jack as "a prop man, assistant director, stuntman, and bit
actor." (Ford also played one of the hooded Klansmen in D.W.
Griffith's Birth of a Nation.) The young director made his
first short film, The Tornado, in 1917, then put together
his first feature, Straight Shooting, the same year, using
film stock he had tricked the studio's supply department into
giving him. The film starred Harry Carey, a popular Universal
actor who would go on to become a backbone of many Ford films.
Though the budding director got his start on his brother's
coattails, their fortunes reversed as talkies came in, and Francis
became dependent on his younger brother for work for the rest of
his life.
Eyman paints Ford as an
eccentric and somewhat tragic product of his Irish-Catholic
heritage -- a melancholic drunk with a soft spot for the Old
Country (four of his works have overt Irish themes) and for ghosts
(the dead speak to the living in many Ford films). Like most great
men, he's a bundle of contradictions. While his films overflow
with emotionality, Ford's marriage was not particularly
passionate, and his relationships with his son and daughter were
downright disastrous. His films bespeak a bold social conscience,
but their creator publicly shied away from political affiliations.
And though he demanded professionalism from others, his physical
appearance, marked by the handkerchief hanging from the corner of
his mouth, was often repulsive.
As Eyman documents, Ford's
mean streak was nearly as legendary as the characters he put on
film. The book recounts a spellbinding conversation in which Ford
baits Robert Wagner, who desperately wanted to star in The
Searchers:
" 'You'd like to play
the part, wouldn't you?' " asked Ford, after some
preliminaries.
" 'Yes, Mr. Ford.'
" 'Well, you're not
going to.'
"A stunned Wagner got
up and headed for the door.
" 'Boob?' [Ford's
nickname for Wagner]
"Wagner turned.
" 'You really want to
play the part?'
" 'Very much, Mr.
Ford.'
" 'Well, you're still
not going to.' "
The role went to John Wayne.
The fact that actors would grovel for Ford is an indication of the
esteem in which he was held during his lifetime. Of contemporary
directors, only Steven Spielberg comes close to this star power.
That Ford's reputation is fading into obscurity is a measure of
how audiences' tastes change over decades as politics and public
cynicism dictate what seems authentic on-screen. Ford fell out of
favor in the 1960s as John Wayne became an icon of the status quo,
and the Western genre came to symbolize the law-and-order
tradition and mindless acceptance of authority that the
counterculture movement wanted to undermine. At the same time,
Ford's dramatic style began to seem dated. As a humanist, Ford
always worked in broad strokes. To anyone watching today, the
power of The Grapes of Wrath is undercut by Ma Joad's
syrupy "we are the people" speech that ends the film.
Likewise, it's difficult to look past the colonialist trappings of
The Searchers and see it not just as a Western but also as
a story of a lost soul.
Eyman contends that Ford was
that rare studio director who was able to put his personal
signature on his work, and that he did so by pretending to be a
journeyman. "To come out an artist was invariably fatal, as
[Josef von] Sternberg and [Orson] Welles, among others would find
out," Eyman writes. Indeed, a John Ford film has a
distinctive look and feel, one that has nothing to do with the
unique topography of Monument Valley. Regardless of the great
performances he got from his actors, Ford's best films show their
genius in their painterly visual elements. Today, we don't always
know what to make of a director who uses pictures rather than
action sequences to tell a story. And to his detriment, Ford's
best images -- the long line of cars at the end of The Grapes
of Wrath, the shadowy Dublin streets of The Informer --
are often employed in the service of easy sentiment. Like many an
Irishman before him, Ford wants to put a soft focus on suffering.
To be a Ford fan is to accept that the films succeed in spite of
themselves, to realize that Ma Joad sentimentality is offset by
Henry Fonda's acting, by Ford's keen visual interpretation of the
world. Eyman's victory is to get us to look past the blarney and
up at the sky.
Robin Dougherty writes
about film, theater, and television for a variety of publications,
including Salon, Sight and Sound, and Miami New
Times.
