The Irish in John Ford's Seventh Cavalry Trilogy: Victor McLaglen's Stooge-Irish Caricature

Abstract

Irish-Americans are not as sensitive as they once were regarding ethnic stereotypes applied to them, but neither has the issue been laid to rest. Alexandra Ripley's recent novel Scarlett, an alleged sequel to Gone with the Wind, according to syndicated article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch of November 12, 1991 titled Best Seller Arouses the Ire of Irish-Americans, portrays the Irish Catholic peasantry of the 1870s as constantly fighting, singing, dancing, gun-running and, of course, drinking. The same article cites the Irish Echo's indignation at the book's portrayal of the nineteenth century Irish as a fickle, ignorant and violent race, prone to treachery and the most outrageous superstitions. The image of the Irish in the 1870s American West presented in John Ford's classic cavalry trilogy, most notably as embodied in Victor McLaglen's role, is not dissimilar from the offensive caricature set forth in Scarlett. Indeed the adjectives in the above quotations could often as aptly characterize John Ford's Irish as Ripley's. This might seem paradoxical in that Ford was himself an Irish-American and apparently proud one given to emphasizing his Irish heritage at every chance and even, according to Joseph W. Reed, sometimes to exaggerating it (29). Far from contemptuous of Ireland (at least consciously), Ford was an apparent hibernophile. It is rare film of his that lacks an Irish note of some sort; Irish or Irish-American characters, subject matter, actors, and music abound from his earliest works to his latest. His first film, The Tornado (1916), had as its central figure an Irishman, Jack Dayton, determined to make enough money in the American west to pay off the mortgage on his mother's house back in Ireland. And many of the subsequent works in Ford's long and prolific career dealt with distinctly Irish or Irish-American themes: The Prince of Avenue A (1916), The Shamrock Handicap (1926), Mother Machree (1928), Hangman's House (1928), The Informer (1935), The Plough and the Stars (1936), The Quiet Man (1952), The Long Grey Line (1952), The Rising of the Moon (1957), and The Last Hurrah (1958). The two major Ford biographies, Andrew Sinclair's John Ford: A Biography and Tag Gallagher's John Ford: The Man and His Films, reveal this distinguished American film director's deep Irish roots. Born John Martin Feeney in Portland, Maine in 1894, Ford was the son of Irish parents--a father from the Galway coast and mother, native Irish speaker, from the Aran Islands. Gaelic was often spoken in the house, Gallagher notes, midst frequent spats over pronunciation(2). Nor would Ford's exposure to the Irish language, his knowledge of which he took great pride in, have been necessarily confined to the house. As Kenneth Nilsen, in recent Eire-Ireland article points out, the Portland, Maine of 1880 to 1920, which would embrace the years of Ford's growing up there, was home to sizable Irish-speaking immigrant community, most of whom hailed, like Ford's parents, from West Galway (8). Jack Feeney's father returned to Ireland more than once, according to Gallagher, and took his son with him when the boy was eleven or twelve. Ford even claimed to have gone to school in Ireland for several months, school where instruction was in Gaelic. Indeed, Lee Lourdeaux is far from alone among critics in viewing Ford's Irish-American Catholicism as the central dynamic in his work, noting the seminal impact of Ford's hyphenated ethnic identity on his canon (88). It is ironic then that this Irish Catholic auteur / director should be, as noted earlier, the source of what are arguably some of the most disparaging images of the Irish to have appeared in American cinema, ones that energized stereotypes which by the 1950s were otherwise largely on the wane. Ford's films often evidence kind of vestigial colonialist mindset, trace of racial self-contempt going oddly hand in hand with maudlin Irish boosterism. …