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John Ford

1895–1973

 

Some of John Ford's films are among the most famous ever made.  Through them he created not only a lasting vision of America, but also an idea of Ireland which was accepted by many Irish Americans as a reality.  In truth, both were deeply personal to the man himself.

      Ford was born Sean Aloysius Feeney to Irish immigrants at Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  His family connections were with the west of Ireland, and he was a distant cousin of the celebrated Irish author Liam O'Flaherty, author of The Informer.  He was educated at Portland High School, but lasted only three weeks or so at the University of Maine.  Instead, he went to California to join his brother Francis, who was working in Hollywood for Universal Studios.  For four years he worked as a bit player, stuntman, and special-effects man at Universal, appearing in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.  In 1916 he changed his name to Jack Ford, and the following year he became a director.  He married Mary McBryde Smith in 1920 (they had one son and one daughter), and the next year he moved on to Fox Films, where he began his long-time association with the screenwriter Dudley Nichols.

      In later years, Ford claimed he made westerns, but they represented only a small part of his output.  He won an Oscar for his version of The Informer in 1935, but equally important were Stagecoach, Young Mr Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

      Ford had a long struggle to get The Informer made, because the studio bosses were not enthusiastic about a novel of revolutionary vengeance set in Dublin during the troubles.  Ford astutely changed the setting of the film from the grim days of the Irish civil war of 1923 back a few years to the war of independence in 1920, making the police British rather than Irish.  The informer betrays his old comrade to get money to go to America, but he is tracked down by the 'organization' and killed.

      Indeed, it was grim stuff, but it represented a view of Ireland that was realistic and moving.  Ford had already made some Irish-related films (The Shamrock Handicap, Mother Machree, Riley the Cop), but his interest as a filmmaker was in creating an idea of America rather than Irish America.

      In 1952 he finished an Irish project that had been in the making since before the war: The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne as an American boxer who has vowed never to fight again and Maureen O'Hara as the girl he want to marry.  It enjoyed a huge success, and was of some importance in the emergence of a national film industry in Ireland.  In later years it also brought visitors by the hundreds of thousands to the beautiful country around Cong in Galway where it was filmed.  But in its details it presented an idealized Ireland, free of clashes of culture or politics (as when the Catholic villagers cheer lustily for the Protestant bishop to ensure that the local rector can stay).

      In 1965, Ford returned to Ireland and the earlier revolutionary years to make Young Cassidy (1965), based on the rich autobiographies of the playwright Sean O'Casey, which recounted the years of grim poverty he endured before he achieved fame and success.

      John Ford claimed to be apolitical, and that he loved only America.  He was a long-time member of the US naval reserve, fought with the marines in the South Pacific (being wounded at Midway), and was given the rank of rear admiral by President Nixon on retiring.

      The film critic John Baxter places John Ford very exactly: 'He was an immigrant, a Catholic Republican; he speaks for the generations that created the modern United States between the Civil and the Great Wars (1865-1917).  Like Walt Whitman, Ford chronicled the society of that half century, expansionist by design, mystical and religious by conviction, hierarchical by agreement, an association of equals within a structure of command, practical, patriotic, and devout.'  In his films, Ford mythologized the armed forces and the church as paradigms of structural integrity.  'All may speak in Ford films, but when divine order in invoked, the faithful fall silent, to fight and die as decreed by a general, president, or some other member of the God-anointed elite.'

      All of this comes directly from John Ford's Irish background, but these were values which were not confined to his community, but were shared by a significant number of other Americans, to make his vision of America, what it had been and what it was, their vision too.  He carried with him a sense of history, both Irish and American, that informed that vision.

      At the end of his film The Last Hurrah, based on Boston politics from which the Kennedys emerged, Mayor Frank Skeffington, an old-time Irish ward boss at heart, loses an election rather than compromise with the modern world.  John Ford had a great respect for tradition, the traditions of love, family, and community.  His people speak little; their actions speak for them.  In true Irish fashion, the dances and fights and feasts that are such a feature of his films, and reach their apex in The Quiet Man, reinforce a sense of community.  His people sing, eat, and get drunk as acts of communion.

      For his own generation and later ones, John Ford created an image of America.  For many Europeans, his America is the real America, but in his Irish films, too, he has created an ideal of a land that still captures the hearts and imaginations of many millions.  It is an epic achievement to be proud of.