John Ford's West
John Ford was a second-generation Irishman, born Sean O'Fienne, and though he made plenty of great films about Ireland (including The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, and The Quiet Man), Ford is mostly known for Westerns. And these aren't just "cowboy movies". In the 1950s, the French Film magazine Cahiers Du Cinema made their famous case that certain Hollywood directors, in being able to impose a personal style and attitude on their films made during the height of the factory-like "Studio Era", deserved the title artist: in fact, these are the directors who actually became adjectives: "Wellsian." "Capraesque." And perhaps most of all, "Fordian."

So what exactly constitutes the description "Fordian"? Personally, John Ford was gruff, uncommunicative, of military bearing (indeed, he had a side career in the Navy), and known to both bully performances out of actors and mock critics who'd claimed to find deep meanings in his work. The Fordian attitude was filmmaking was "just a job of work". The Fordian legend is as big as the ones he captured in celluloid: when a producer complained a film was behind schedule, Ford reputedly yanked out a few pages from the script, saying, "Now we're AHEAD of schedule." When an assistant suggested a shot from atop a hill, Ford agreed — and ordered the assistant to carry all the heavy camera equipment to the top of the hill so he could shoot there.

Fordian means "prolific": John Ford directed over fifty films in the silent era from 1917-1930, more Westerns than any other director. He made nearly as many feature films in the sound era 1930-1966, usually several a year. During World War II, he joined the Navy as a filmmaker, won Oscars and was decorated by the US for for heroic combat films (on Midway, and the Tokyo raids); he contributed in same role Korea, Vietnam, ending his Navy career as a Rear Admiral. Patriotic and generally conservative, Ford stood up to Cecil B. DeMille and Macarthyite fellow travelers during the Communist witch-hunt, gaining even more respect from his peers. Beneath Ford's rough exterior beat the heart of a poet, though he might have disdained to admit it. His cantakerous and stubborn approach to his "job of work" enabled him to control his films, creating his distinctive style in both form and content.

The Form was both minimalist and epic: Ford's archetypal location was Monument Valley, Arizona, with wide shots of human figures against an overpowering wilderness. Ford didn't like close-ups, used very little camera movement and minimal dialogue. Contentwise, on the other hand, Ford films are far from minimalist: he continually probed the edges of frontiers, physical, psychological and philosophical. He liked to set opposites into conflict: Order vs. Freedom, civilization vs. wilderness, families vs. outsiders, the spirit vs. the letter of the law, myth vs. fact. The "Fordian" effect, then, is a simple delivery of complicated matter, the crisis always a universal one, disguised as a local, even humble, conflict.

German director Fritz Lang said the Western is to America what the Niebelungen Saga (Wagner's Ring) is to Germany — a national myth, within which national character both forged and understood. According to critic Frank McConnell, "more than any other genre of American film — or any tradition of film — the Western redupilcates the possiblities and the abiding concerns of romance." McConnell compared the civilizing mission of the Western hero with knights in romantic tales. The West represented the Mythic Realm, the American Dream, where exiles of decadent European civilization could start fresh, create the world anew. Combined with the Enlightenment notion of Progress (Americanized as "Manifest Destiny"), the American experience in the West was provoked and sustained, and is even now remembered, along the poetic lines of the epic romantic. Ford loved the romance, but he also loved to debunk the romance even as he was enjoying it.

And he had a genuine affection for the ordinary human characters of this extraordinary myth; his films are full of earthy figures and the every day rituals of life in community, and life as an individual in the wild West.

Stagecoach (1939), defined the form and coventions of the Western ever after, bringing a new self-consciousness to the form that contrasted to mindless shoot-em-ups. The group of passengers here are the classic microcosm of society, civilized or otherwise. As they cross the wilderness, they reveal their true selves through the choices they make. Orson Wells says he watched this film over and over and learned to make movies.

My Darling Clementine (1946) is the Fordian retelling of the Wyatt Earp myth, the shootout at the OK Corral. Only Ford actually knew Wyatt Earp, and the aging lawman sometimes hung out on the sets of Ford's early silents as a technical advisor.

Also beloved and respect among the director's filmography are his "Cavalry Trilogy" — Fort Apache (1948), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950). Not strictly Western, but genuine Fordian treatments of classic American problems on one frontier or another are films like Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940).

In his late 70s, Ford, after a couple of flops, looked to be ready to gather his awards and ride off into the sunset; it seemed like his career was over. Then, in a supernova of creativity, Ford directed some of his greatest films in the last decade of his career.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), set in a location atypical for Ford: not Monument Valley, but in a studio soundstage. Furthermore, made well into the Technicolor era, Liberty Valence was shot in black and white: both deliberate artistic choices, as the old master of the movie Western homed in on the myth of the West as lived in popular memory and was portrayed in films. The film is a summing up of Ford's ongoign examination of the American West (it's full of references to previous films), and reflects cultural changes — a sense of the end of the frontier, a darker point of view which engulfed all genre pictures by the close of the 1950s, a film that might actually be placed in the emerging traadition of the "anti-Western", participating it semeed in the new de-mythologization of the "wild West". But while the younger generation of filmmakers was questioning the genre, such questioning was something Ford had been doing all along.

The Searchers (1956) is John Ford's acknowledged masterpiece, a gorgeous color vision of Monument Valley, a tale of obsession, the perpetual outsider. This is a film that must be seen on a wide screen to truly appreciate the breathtaking beauty of its stark compositions. Directors from Martin Scorsese to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg have all expressed admiration and clearly learned a good deal of their craft from careful study of this film. The theme of relentless questing, is one sure to strike an ambitious director, or even ordinary folk like the rest of us, like, in fact, one of Ford's minimalist, but decidedly-complicated ordinary folk, to the quick of our restless human souls. One can even wonder endlessless at our endless wandering, suggested in the words of the film's opening song:

What makes a man to wander?
What makes a man to roam?
What makes a man leave bed and board
And turn his back on home?
Ride away, ride away, ride away.

Sure, John Ford made cowboy movies. But if they were simply "a job of work", then so is the tiresome, sometimes joyful, often messy business of being a human being. Join us at Cornerstone Festival 2001 as the Imaginarium and the Flickerings Film Showcase share a program on this American Movie Master.

© Copyright 2001, Cornerstone Communications