How the West was filmed
Allan Massie
SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD by Joseph McBride Faber, £25, pp. 838, ISBN 057200753 It s a rare film that knows its own author. Actually it's a rare one that had a single author, though Chaplin's come very close. Film-making is an exercise in collaboration. Producer, director, script-writer, cameraman, sound engineer, editor, actors and actresses, all play their part. When the Hollywood studio system was fully developed, the producer was the dominant figure; the director, then, as Gore Vidal likes to say, was 'the producer's brother-in-law', handed the script, cast list, locations, and told to get shooting. Sometimes several directors would work on a movie in succession; they were almost as expendable as writers. When the shooting was finished, so usually was the director's job. He might have little say in the final product.
The studios saw directors as technicians. It took critics and theorists of the cinema, many of them French, to decide that directors were artists and the true `auteurs' of the movies they made, Most weren't. A few, a very few, were. One of them was John Ford.
Even that claim must be qualified. Between 1917 and 1970 Ford directed 113 full-length feature films. I don't think that even Joseph McBride, his admiring critic and biographer, would claim Ford's authorship for all of them. Like everyone else in Hollywood he was often compelled to do only what he was hired to do. He didn't always do it very well. There are films he lost interest in, and directed perfunctorily. There are others he botched, The Fugitive, his version of Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, for example. Sometimes he took, or was given, subjects that were all wrong: Mary of Scotland was one. But there are many, at least 20, which are so distinctive in their treatment of themes which are the common currency of film that one inescapably grants Ford authorship. There are few film directors of whom one can say as much.
Ford was an artist, Like many — most? — true artists, he hated being asked to explain his work. Perhaps he couldn't. That's not surprising. Most novelists flounder — see the Paris Review interviews — when asked to account for what they have done, why and how. It's the first and great merit of Joseph McBride's biography that he understands this, also how Ford's intransigence
continues to prevent his being taken as seriously as his work warrants ... His films were the true outlet of this secretive man's inner thoughts and feelings, but since these thoughts and feelings were expressed more visually than verbally, they have often been misunderstood — or not seen at all — by critics who think primarily in literary terms ... Discovering how Ford's great films emerged from his jealously guarded inner life is the object of this biographical search.
Ford was horn in Portland, Maine in 1894. His father, a saloon-keeper, was an immigrant from County Mayo. So was his mother Barbara Curran. They were 'shanty Irish', and being Irish was important to Ford. He followed an elder brother to Hollywood, and was directing westerns before he was 25. He married in 1920. His wife was Protestant and members of her family had fought on the Confederate side in the civil war. They stayed married, despite long absences and infidelities on Ford's part. Both were alcoholic, Ford a binge drinker between movies, frequently having to be put in hospital to be dried out. Family and home are revered in Ford's films; he made no success of them in life.
Perhaps he was happy only in work, and with the people he worked with — the Ford Stock Company as they were called. There he was loved and feared. He was mean, bullying, brutal in language; also sympathetic and generous. He was roughest with the actors he liked best, even loved. He bullied them, not just to extract from them the performances he sought, but from a deeper personal need. There was something of the mental sadist in him, and in both life and work one can read a severely repressed homoeroticism. He treated people worse than anyone should be treated, and yet many of them loved him — despite or because, who can say?
Till near the end, he was a skilful operator in the Hollywood jungle. 'Jack,' said the script-writer Philip Dunne, 'was not a devious man in the sense that he lied and cheated; he merely preferred the labyrinthine approach to the head-on assault.' McBride writes that his
carefully cultivated eccentricities helped him get his own way creatively to the maximum extent possible while still appearing to be deferential to the conventional guidelines of the studio factory system.
'My name is John Ford. I make westerns.' He made good films that were not westerns too, but it is the westerns he made that he is most remembered for. His westerns are beautiful and usually seem easy-going (they are certainly easy watching), but they are anything but simple. In the best of them there is always a moral ambiguity; he does not shrink from suggesting, rather than revealing, the dark side of the great American myth. The opening-up of the West meant closure for the American Indians. He valued community, but the community was often cowardly and vicious. The hero has to step out of the community, even stand against it, to do what is right. Freedom opens the way to commercialism, which treats the individual not as a person, but as a consumer. Ford was nostalgic, sentimental, and poetic; also hard and clear-sighted. Like Scott in the Waverley novels he shows us what is lost in the advance of civilisation. None of his great films allows us a comfortable moral response, however warm the closing mood may be.
McBride's book, though not uncritical, is a labour of love. At times it is a labour to read. It is over-weighted, even smothered, by detail: one damned thing after another, especially in the middle section dealing with Ford's war service with the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of
• Strategic Services, and in the account of the arguments over the blacklist in the post-war anti-communist hysteria. But it is very good indeed on Ford the man, on the making of his films, and in the criticism of them. It deserves to be regarded as the definitive work on Ford. It makes you want to see the films again, or to catch up with those you have never seen. In this it is refreshingly different from so many literary biographies which treat a writer's work as something less interesting than his life. Finally, it makes the case for Ford being the true auteur of his best films. He was often a hack, often a mean son of a bitch, but one of the few true masters of the cinema. McBride makes you understand why Orson Welles said:
John Ford was my teacher „. Stagecoach was my movie textbook ... I wanted to learn how to make movies and that's such a classically perfect one.
Who did Welles admire? 'The old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.'
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