John Ford

Abstract

John Ford’s film career began with the earliest days of Hollywood silent filmmaking c. 1914 and continued until 1968, spanning the rise of the studio system, the coming of sound and color, the postwar restructuring of the studio system in the face of the antitrust decision, television, and rapid expansion of independent production. The industry awarded him four Academy Awards for direction and two for documentaries, an unsurpassed record. In 1935, his film The Informer was influentially seen as an example that the US film industry could produce film art to equal the Europeans. At this time he was actively involved in the formation of the Directors Guild of America. In 1939, Stagecoach elevated the western genre to A-picture respectability (and made John Wayne a major star). During the same remarkable two-year period (1939–1941), Ford made Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941). In following years, his work attracted serious attention from Andre Bazin, Sergei Eisenstein, Lindsay Anderson, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, and others. Ford’s worldview and subject matter were beginning to be seen as deeply concerned with American history and myth. Ford is now regarded by many as a major American storyteller. During World War II, he headed a documentary film unit for the US government, seeing frontline active service in Europe and the Pacific. Following the war, his Hollywood films took on a darker, elegiac tone, notably—but not limited to—the cavalry trilogy, The Searchers (1956), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and 7 Women (1966). As Ford’s thinking changed during this period, so did thinking about Ford: particularly in France, then Britain and the United States, a serious film study culture was developing, annexing critical methods and analytic concepts from older established disciplines and arts. From this rose auteurism—authorship theory—and mise-en-scène analysis. Ford was quickly inducted into the pantheon of major film directors (not, of course, without some controversy). Social and political wings of film thought examined Ford’s changing representation of Native Americans and other races and ethnics; gender (women, masculinity, sexuality); class differences; character types and construction; his populism and its attendant irony and comedy; and increasingly, visual style. Since the 1960s, the development of serious film studies can be measured by the development and changes in their presentation of the case of John Ford. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of filmmakers, critics, and scholars removed Citizen Kane (1941) from its long-held, solitary position as The Great American Film, giving The Searchers equal status.