Has Anybody Heard Of John Ford (NOT The English Metaphysical Poet)?...

I've been reading (fascinated in fact!) another biography of the "greatest American film director of the 20th century" I suppose he could be called, namely John Ford (1894-1973), born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine of Irish immigrants. (The book by the way is "Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford" by Scott Eyman, published 1999 by the Johns Hopkins University Press.)

I've been a devotee, aficionado, FAN of Ford's since childhood and was especially pleased that by the late 1960s film critics such as Peter Bogdanovich, Andrew Sarris, Robin Wood and Molly Haskell "revived" Ford as a seriously taken "artist" despite his penchant for westerns and John Wayne, both usually deprecated by movie reviewers in publications such as Time, Life and Newsweek during the 1950s.

Ford was a complex and very difficult human being who was it seems both loved and hated simultaneously by those closest to him including his own children as well as his "spiritual" son John Wayne and "adopted" such as Harry Carey Jr and Ben Johnson.

His films include "The Informer" (1935), "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940), "How Green Was My Valley" (1941) and "The Quiet Man" (1952), all for which he won the Oscar for "best director" and moreover both "The Informer" and "HGWMV" were "best picture."

My own "favorites" are many, maybe too many to say "favorite" but I very much like "Stagecoach" (1939, the picture that "made John Wayne a star" as they say); "The Long Voyage Home" (1940), an adaptation of short plays by Eugene O'Neill with John Wayne in a supporting part as a Swedish sailor and very credibly so; "They Were Expendable" (1945), a moving depiction of the US defeat in the Philippines at the start of WWII; "My Darling Clementine" (1946), an "interpretation" of the Wyatt Earp legend which is both poetic and prose -- and I could go on and on to the cavalry trilogy ("Fort Apache," 1948, "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon," 1949, and "Rio Grande," 1950), "Wagonmaster," "The Searchers," "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and I even like "Two Rode Together" (1961) which makes me perhaps the ONLY person "in the world" to do so.

Well what I want to know is -- does anyone today, commenting here, have familiarity with John Ford's work? If so do you like it or no? If you like it or some of it what do you like and why?

I'm just curious and by the way I wouldn't mind discussing say Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock too as well as Orson Welles but if I may I'll "start" with Ford.

Anyone interested?...

Did he direct The Searchers?

Yes he did...

Ford could have been greater. For instance the broad humor of The Searchers diluted the film somewhat. He was not trenchant enough. But I can't say I've ever seen one of his films that I turned off, he always entertained, and on top of that he had such great scenery to work with it could be said that his composition was under-rated.
And there were times when he got just the right thing from just the right actor: my favorite example is Henry Fonda telling the guy he caught a ride from at the beginning of Grapes of Wrath what he was in jail for 'Home-ee--side'.

"Yer jus' bustin' ta find out ain'tcha? Well it was home-ee-side." Buster gulps hard and the long lanky ex con in the soft hat descends from the truck cab with almost a lazy grace -- yup a wonderful moment and Ford's work is full of stuff like that; truly memorable movie "moments" if you will.

Yeah I really liked that scene when I first saw it as a kid; it knocked my expectations right out so to speak which is what Ford enjoyed doing and found harder and harder to do so at his rather sad "end"...

Ford is rather like Bob Dylan. When you have a large corpus of work, there are bound to be gaps, and some mediocre stuff. But when it works, there are few who did it better.

Ford would be incensed to be compared to Dylan ("Dylan? Dylan THOMAS???!!!" he'd rasp) but the comparison is apt to a degree -- as BOB Dylan had just ONE great decade but Ford had at least two and a half and STILL in the 1960s, nearing 70, he made "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962)...

I am not sure I would limit Dylan to one decade. Blood on the Tracks is more than ten years after The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), and the troika of Time Out of Mind (1997), Love and Theft (2001) and Modern Times (2006) certainly show staying power. I liked Desire (1976), as well as Slow Train Coming (1979).

Just sayin'.

I liked "Nashville Skyline" but there was nothing better than "Highway 61 Revisited" and "Blonde on Blonde."

I guess no one else has anything to say re John Ford? "Ancient history"?...

Bringing it all Back Home

Maybe I should ask "Who remembers Bob Dylan"?...

pro/con: Was John Ford the best directer in US film history?

no. then who? well, someone with a lot of films. Woody Allen?

Well I still vote for Ford although one can certainly add Hawks, Hitchcock and Welles and there are arguments for John Huston and Stanley Kubrick surely and even for the more "obscure" like William Dieterle, Mervyn LeRoy and William Wellman.

I wouldn't say "Allen" though I like SOME of his films quite a bit -- "Radio Days," "Hannah and Her Sisters," "Bananas," and the Diane Keaton movie, the Oscar one, the title escapes me, though Keaton is an ANNOYING actress, for me. (Then while we're at it there's Francis FORD Coppola and Martin Scorcese eh...)

NOT Woody Allen. Not the best anyway. The movie you are thinking of is Annie Hall, and it was, IMHO, one of his best. I liked Midnight in Paris, and Vicky Christina Barcelona, but I would not stack either of them against Hitchcock or even Altman.

Hard to chose who is the best, but the list has to include John Huston. His first movie was The Maltese Falcon, and he did NOT go downhill from there!

Recently I have been going through the 1001 Movies You Have to See Before You Die, and I have a new appreciation of D.W. Griffith.

Kubrick fell after his Eyes Wide Shut. Altman did not stop in time. Allen made a range of movies from some excellent dramas to his Bergmann style films, his early slapstick, followed by Love and Death. Then there was the brilliant Stardust Memories, the stunning Zelig, the Purple Rose of Cairo, Husbands and Wives, Deconstructing Harry, Cassandra's Dream, Match Point, all Oscar caliber along with Manhattan and Annie Hall. Another Woman, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Radio Days were all three also Oscar caliber. I don't think another director has made so many films of this quality.
Nothing against Huston and Ford, or Altman for that matter, though Kubrick also was responsible for the juvenile Full Dinner Jacket.
Coppola has to be considered though he made fewer films than the others, and Scorsese might be the best challenge to Allen.

King Vidor's The crowd is a hard film to beat

Don't get me uh wrong; I LIKE Woody Allen but I spend most of my time with the "older" folk (yes Allen is now over 70 but "all MY friends are dead" so to speak).

"Annie Hall" yeah -- see what I mean; that to me is a "recent movie."

Sure Griffith was a great pioneer and "everything" comes from him. I like "Intolerance" however better than "Birth of a Nation" which is a truly "great" FILM but which, in part, revived the Ku Klux Klan in America: the sudden POWER of movies hmm. (As President Wilson said -- "History written with lightning.")

King Vidor? I still watch "Northwest Passage" and I actually believe his "War and Peace" with Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda and even Mel Ferrer isn't a bad picture.

There's a line (there ALWAYS is!) in some film in which someone says he's "old" and the response is "You were BORN OLD" -- oh yeah that's John Wayne to Hank Worden in "The Searchers"! Well jus' call me "Old Mose" eh.

Oh and Kubrick's best pics were "Paths of Glory" (right wing Republican Adolphe Menjou is excellent, never better in fact, as a corrupt but wily old general in this greatest of "anti war" movies) and of course the incomparable "Lolita" in which young 14 year old Sue Lyon "steals" the film from the likes of James Mason, Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers(!), all of whom are "excellent" too. DON'T see the "new" "Lo" with Jeremy Irons (it's much too "contemporary"; see Kubrick's)...

I respectfully disagree on Allen. His middle years lost me. And Zelig...kind of reminds me of what a record producer said to Leonard Cohen after he first heard "Hallelujah": Leonard I know you are a genius, but are you any good?

Another director one ought to mention -- Billy Wilder...

You just can't argue these things. I think Zelig was a masterpiece, a story of a man with no center, a parable of the human need to belong eclipsing the desire for freedom.

Nothing wrong with Wilder.

No I'm not "arguing"; only "presenting" MY prejudices...

Actually I can argue, but I chose not to, primarily because this is a matter of taste. I won't quibble with your assessment; I just don't agree with it. I saw it when it first came out, and my feeling at the time was, "meh." But that was me. I also liked Broadway Danny Rose, and Purple Rose of Cairo, but not enough to rewatch them. I did like The Front as well.

I guess there is just no accounting for some people's taste.

I saw Love and Death in high school, and thought it was one of the funniest movies I had ever seen. Years later, in college, I snuck into a class that was watching the Seventh Seal, and sat at the back. It reminded me so much of Love and Death that I laughed my way through much of it, which caused some very strange looks thrown in my direction.

Again I say Allen is well a "great director"; however I also don't appreciate I guess his films as much as Harsch does. And yes of course that's a "matter of taste" but then film critics LOVE to argue and say all sorts of things as when Pauline Kael attempted to discredit Orson Welles re his scriptural contribution to "Citizen Kane" but she "wuz wrong" as Walter Brennan might have put it.

I "accept" Harsch's critique of Ford as "not as good as he could be" because Harsch is correct; in the movies hardly anything is "as good as it could be" but then I like Kurosawa too (and is "Seven Samurai" anything BUT "as good as it could be"!) and HE liked Ford...

I have no qualms with Woody Allen as a Great Director. I had problems with him being The Great Director.

As does Harsch re Ford -- fair enough! I mean I KNOW say Fellini is "good" but I'd rather watch John Huston films. Ford by the way HATED Huston but in some ways they were quite alike -- maybe that's why?...

I recall Siskel and Ebert when Zelig came out. Siskel said the character was empty, etc.; Ebert nearly shouted, 'That's exactly the point!'

Well Ebert outlived Siskel so I guess he "won"...

Not in Alaska, where the tally so far seems to be 1 to 0 against Zelig.