Hollywood's poetic genius
Tom Sutcliffe
About John Ford Lindsay Anderson (Plexus pp. 256, £12, £5.95) This is more than a biography. It is a gospel. About John Ford is a convincing, affecting and at times poetic explanation (with photographs playing a vital descriptive part) of why and how Ford and his films were good. Not a synoptic gospel, to put beside and parallel with Dan Ford's Pappy or Robert Parrish's Growing Up In Hollywood (two of Anderson's prime sources of information), but one written — like St John's — from an objective, philosophically developed position by somebody with the advantage of direct and relevant experience.
What makes it a book for everyone, rather than just for specialists interested in The Film, is that Anderson believes in the goodness of Ford's films not merely as an incidental critical attribute, but as a matter of serious moral note. In other words, Ford's films at their best have a profoundly poetic quality; they express permanent values that make them important in the same way that Shakespeare's plays are important. Anderson wants everybody to share in that good news, and his battle with the auteurists and structuralists is being fought precisely to keep Ford where he started and where he belongs — as a popular artist.
The method of About John Ford, appropriately, is that of a documentary film. It is pieced together from a variety of sources and materials. Anderson had five encounters with Ford, though he was in the first case (and in Ford's eyes, I suspect, remained) a critic, not a professional colleague. Ford had a reputation for being difficult, especially with critics, and it is hard to imagine anybody being more resistant to the hagiographical interview than Anderson's description of their early meetings shows him to have been. Anderson was particularly keen on My Darling Clementine and They Were Expendable: of the latter Ford commented, 'I have never actually seen a goddamned foot of that film . . . I was horrified to have to make it.' Perhaps Ford was romancing, for he had a very Irish tendency to suit the words to the moment, and Irish diplomacy. (His real name was Sean Aloysius O'Feeney, though he was born in Maine.) In 1971, with typical Irish sweetness, he signed a photograph he sent to Anderson 'To my colleague'. Certainly by then Anderson's If... had made him a director to reckon with; yet it was Anderson's response as a critic that brought them together, rather than any professional discipleship.
The first meeting, in Dublin in 1950, led to an article in Sequence reprinted here. One of the interests of the book is the extent to which Anderson's literary style has become firmer over the years. There was a slight floweriness, a desire to convey physical impressions (the stuff of film) in words, that the later written descriptions of meetings in 1952, 1957, 1963 and 1973 avoid. These tightly evoked encounters range from extremely funny to touchingly sad, and are enormously revealing. Ford not attending to Anderson's documentary, Every Day Except Christmas, at the National Film Theatre in 1957 is a marvellous piece of self-debunking. Ford talked all the way through. The film finished with a longheld (Fordian?) straight to camera shot of a young male porter: 'You ought to have finished with Alice,' was the comment.
Ford, preparing for death in 1973 at Palm Springs, aged 78, seems imbued with that 'silent, self-communing confrontation with destiny' that Anderson remarks in so many Ford heroes. One is moved by this astonishing valetudinarian chapter as one is by similar moments in many of Ford's films. Simply expressed emotion is not foreign to either Ford or Anderson, though the self-conscious satirical streak which runs through If. . . and 0 Lucky Man! (not a characteristic of This Sporting Life or the superb filmed version of In Celebration) may blind people to their strong sentiment. More importantly for this book, Anderson demonstrates judgment and descriptive powers that most professional journalists would envy, but few achieve.
Just over a third of About John Ford was originally written in the early Fifties for an abandoned series of British Film Institute monographs on Great Directors. Ford was then little older than Anderson is now, and it was, as Anderson points out, the wrong time for a book. In recent years a number of lost Ford silent films have come to light, and Anderson interpolates (in italics) substantial reactions to these in his 25-yearold text. Ford, as it turned out, had ten films still to come — and a kind of transfiguration in critical terms at the hands of Andrew Sarris and Dr J. A. Place, a process which Anderson brilliantly rebuffs.
Anderson uses the opportunity to reconsider earlier assessments: 'Probably it was inevitable, writing at a time when the "commercial" and the "creative" are so often at odds, that I should have dismissed the bulk of his silent work with superior scorn . . . John Ford, silent movie maker, was not the victim of commerce. He was happy in .the role of popular story-teller, providing entertainment for a vast, avid, uncritical and innocent (artistically at any rate) audience . . . we can sense his enjoyment in the vitality of the work. He was telling his stories in a language that came to him naturally. It had only been invented ten Years or so before . . . Questions of style, conscious aesthetic aims, would come later'.Not least of the merits of Anderson's book is its critical honesty, its readiness to admit previous limitations in sensibility.
About John Ford offers many and varied Perspectives on the old man's work and character. Ford himself, Anderson knew, loved a good story and often presented as fact what was really only 'poetically true.' Forty pages are devoted to the last decade of Ford's career, including The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Sergeant Rutledge. If Anderson devotes what seems disproportionate space to justifying his distaste for The Searchers, it is because that watershed film — which he dissects and demonstrates to be typically self-conscious and 'arty' — provided a new, undesirable generation of Ford fans with a tool to support their misreading of his genius. This is the theme, taken up brilliantly and exhaustively, of the chapter headed 'Ford and His Critics: Auteur or Poet?'
Film criticism may become easier, Anderson suggests, with the video recorder offering the chance to quote. Will that matter, when it can be done as well as in this book? In the meantime, he has assembled a highly expressive and vast array of film stills and other memorable photographs of Ford working. And, as a conclusive twist in the richness of reference, the book includes letters from the interviews with a selection of the men (and one woman, Mary Astor) that Ford worked with — as actors and writers. These by no means invariably confirm Anderson's own assessments. Nunnally Johnson, scriptwriter of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, continues to be blind to the contribution of the director to the whole business. All he did, we are told, was put the script on film. But Mr Johnson sees things from his own angle. Anderson, being himself a director, has other awarenesses.
The documentary method gives a wonderfully three-dimensional vitality to the book. Opinions and facts (where necessary) take their appropriate places, seen clearly for what they are. And the parallels between Anderson and Ford, both Perhaps 'more comfortable with heroes than with heroines,' both devoted to their personal, though informal, repertory companies of actors, both self-consciously difficult and unconventional to confront, both resistant to the press, both so traditional in their humanism, gradually fall into place. Anderson's love of Ford is the most important part of Anderson the artist, however different his output may superficially seem. In the end Ford becomes more familiar, more truthfully if elusively represented in Anderson's resonant homage, than he would be in a real biography.
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