JOHN FORD: THE IRISHMAN
Andrew Szanton medium.com
JOHN FORD, the film director, born in 1894 and raised in Portland, Maine, grew to maturity at the same time as Hollywood films did, and may be the greatest American film director ever. He directed a…
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Medium
JOHN FORD, the film director, born in 1894 and raised in Portland, Maine, grew to maturity at the same time as Hollywood films did, and may be the greatest American film director ever. He directed a vast number of films, from silent two-reelers, to full-length black-and-white westerns, to combat documentaries to lush historical epics in color. Ford helped define our understanding of American history from the Revolutionary era (“Drums Along the Mohawk”) to the 19th century Indian wars (his cavalry trilogy “Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “Rio Grande”) and on to WWII “They Were Expendable.”

Orson Welles watched Ford’s film “Stagecoach” more than 40 times as he prepared to break into the movie business. Young directors, too, have paid tribute to John Ford in their work. Both “Mean Streets” (Martin Scorsese, 1973) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) had scenes that were homages to “The Searchers.”

Behind the scenes, Ford played a major role in furthering the careers of actors and actresses, from John Wayne and Henry Fonda to Maureen O’Hara and Katharine Hepburn. He went to bat for actors and actresses with talent, but never wanted them to know what he’d done, afraid it would make him look soft.

John Ford was born as Sean Aloysius Kilmartin O’Feeney, the 13th and last child of Sean and Barbara O’Feeney, two immigrants from Galway. Sean O’Feeney, Sr. and four of his brothers came to the United States to fight in the Civil War. They didn’t care which side, so long as they got decent wages. After the Civil War, Sean O’Feeney did some farming and commercial fishing. He owned a saloon, worked for the gas company, and served as an alderman. There were a lot of O’Feeney children around, and they went to Peak’s Island, Maine as a family in the summertime, where young Sean played a lot of baseball.

Sean was a quiet, very observant boy, who knew a lot but didn’t say much. Sensitive, kind-hearted and nearsighted enough to need glasses, he played football, tried to act tough and answered to the nickname “Bull.” He had a vivid memory, especially for slights. Several times as a child, Sean sailed to Ireland with his parents, on a boat that went directly from Portland to Galway.

So John Ford’s childhood was not a wealthy or privileged one, but he had his freedom. He had a sense of belonging in an extended family, full of tough, feisty men. He had a sense of his Irishness, and a sympathy for the outsider.

Sean graduated from Portland High School, applied to the Naval Academy in Annapolis — but was rejected. What to do? He had a brother Francis, 13 years older, who’d changed his name to “Francis Ford” and established himself in Hollywood, as an actor, writer and director at Universal Studios. After a few aimless months at the University of Maine, Sean O’Feeney went out to Hollywood and renamed himself “John Ford.” He got work for a studio as a laborer, and in just a few years worked his way up — to prop man, to assistant director and then to director. John Ford was very ambitious — but he didn’t want to get work in Hollywood just because he was Francis Ford’s brother.

The young John Ford thought of himself as homely. Many of the actors and actresses in Hollywood were strikingly good-looking, and part of the cameraman’s job and the director’s job, was to use camera angles and lighting to play up those good looks. Ford felt a visceral dislike for actors — or anyone who enjoyed fawning acclaim. “Players,” he’d call the actors. They were playing a part, playing around, while the director and the costume and props people and the stuntmen were working. A recurring Ford theme was that the little man to whom no one pays attention has more courage and value to the production than the big star.

Almost every actor who worked in a John Ford movie recalled Ford chewing on an unlit cigar or a handkerchief, and working off anger against “incompetent” actors. James Cagney recalled Ford as a “nasty old man.” When Ford met the great French director, Jean Renoir, Ford greeted him warmly, took him aside and told him in French, as if passing on a little-known but crucial truth: “Actors are crap.” Without liquor on the set, Ford grew irritable and it galled him that he needed pampered actors in order to get financing for his pictures. Well, they would not be pampered on HIS set.

In 1920, John Ford married Mary McBryde Smith. Ford was not easy to live with, and his wife hated his cigars. In the 1930’s, Ford bought Mary a Rolls-Royce, and had it delivered to the house, with a fur coat in the back seat and a note that said “This ought to hold you for a while.” Ford himself never drove the Rolls. Mary had strictly forbidden him to smoke in the Rolls, and John Ford figured: ‘What good is a car you can’t smoke in?’

Ford had a long string of affairs because he was lonely and needed to know that he could get a woman. But he never seemed fully in love with any woman. He was a workaholic who went on drunken binges between pictures. Ford bought a yacht, the Araner, and would go out on the boat to drink and brood. Ford felt the Araner was essential to keeping his sanity in Hollywood, and kept trying to deduct it as a business expense. The IRS didn’t see it that way, and various IRS agents were met with vintage John Ford outbursts, Ford at his most cantankerous. Ford seemed afraid of anyone really getting to know his sensitive heart. So he played the crusty, hard-drinking Irishman.

Between 1910–1930, Hollywood cranked out movies at great speed. John Ford made 10 films in 1917, 8 films in 1918 and 15 more films in 1919. No special effort was made to preserve them, and most of them have been lost. Almost every silent film John Ford directed has been lost. They were popular entertainments; not “art.”

But John Ford WAS a great artist; more than any other single director, he created the American western, the visual grammar of the storytelling. If you see a western movie, or a suspense thriller with a “long shot” of the characters moving through harshly beautiful terrain as evocative music plays, that scene has been influenced by the films of John Ford. The making of westerns suited Ford for several reasons. As ”B” pictures, they got little interference from the studios. The director worked quickly, on a low budget, and made his own decisions. Ford liked and needed that freedom.

But western movies were also a natural for John Ford because they made heroes of men who worked outdoors, disliked authority figures, hated to be controlled, and fought to keep what was theirs. Ford identified with the leading men of his westerns.

In the 1920’s, the western movie genre almost died. Very few of the better writers, actors or directors wanted to make westerns. Many moviegoers found them corny. Westerners in the ‘20’s, were especially embarrassed by westerns, by the impression they gave that people in Arizona and Colorado traveled on horseback and went around dodging Indians and shooting at intruders with six-guns. Those in the rural west wanted people in New York and Los Angeles to know: ‘We’re up-to-date out here. We have cars, too.’ But westerns came out from time to time, and with John Ford leading the way, the quality of these films rose and they regained a mass audience.

John Ford demanded a lot from his cast and crew — and he got it, and managed to put it on the screen. Ford might wait patiently through a series of mistakes by actors or crew — or fly into a rage after a minor error. He would humiliate an actor or, more rarely, a member of the crew. Ford often asked a sudden question — ‘What did you just do, right there? Why did you do it that way?’ If the person didn’t give a quick, direct reply, Ford might growl: “Don’t give me the story of your life! Just answer the question.”

But when you worked on a John Ford picture, you always knew you were doing something important, and working with a master. Ford had a genius for knowing how to film the way people moved, the poetry in a man riding a horse, the subtle light effects near sundown.

Many people stuck with John Ford for years. He had his own informal stock company of actors, including John Wayne and Henry Fonda, Harry Carey, Sr., Maureen O’Hara, Ben Johnson, and Ward Bond. Ford developed a shorthand for directing his regulars, which allowed him to shoot scenes quickly. He didn’t believe in rehearsals and once said, “If you get the first or second take, there’s a sparkle, an uncertainty about it…”

Danny Borzage was a man John Ford met in 1924, while doing a picture called “The Iron Horse.” Danny’s brother, Frank Borzage, a well-known director, was working on the same lot. Danny auditioned for John Ford, who asked him his name. When Ford heard the name “Borzage” he asked, “Y’any relation to Frank Borzage?”

“Yes.”

“Whyn’t you say so?”

“’Cause I didn’t want the job on his account.”

Here was a man who thought like John Ford.

Ford told Danny: “You go over and tell Frank Borzage his brother has a job.”

And for every John Ford picture from 1924 to 1971, Danny Borzage was there on the set, playing “Bringing in the Sheaves” and “Greensleeves” and “Red River Valley” on the accordion. Borzage kept John Ford company, and set the mood. Borzage would have a theme song for each of the major characters in a film, and play it on his accordion when they arrived on the set.

Ford didn’t use storyboards, or cling to the script. He kept an idea of the film in his head, and didn’t shoot much more film than he meant to use. There was little for his film editor to do. Ford was adamant that he had no artistic pretensions. He’d say, “The only thing I always had was an eye for composition.” He’d decided that to be openly artistic made a man vulnerable to scorn and abuse.

People who met John Ford and thought of him only as a director of shoot-’em-ups were often taken aback by how much he knew about history, literature and politics. Ford read widely, and remembered what he read. He wasn’t averse to matching wits against other people, and his conversations were competitive.

Always interested in ships, in 1930 he made a film called “Men Without Women,” about 14 men trapped on a submarine. But the only subject other than westerns that Ford tried to take on directly was the way the Irish felt about Americans — and the way Irish-Americans felt about Ireland.

In 1935, Ford made “The Informer” — a powerful film about an Irishman, Gypo Nolan, who informs on his best friend. In order to raise 20 pounds for his passage to the United States, Gypo reveals to the British that his friend belongs to the outlaw Irish Republican Army. Nolan has that betrayal on his conscience until it half-destroys him. The film has no humor, but it’s solidly constructed, the acting and camera work are excellent and it earned Ford his first Academy Award for Best Director.

To Ford’s annoyance, the public talked much more about Victor McLaglen, who played Gypo Nolan and won the Best Actor Award. Ford kept McLaglen off-balance during the filming, repeatedly changing the shooting schedule. At least once, he sent McLaglen off to a bar, rehearsed the rest of the company, got the sound and lighting people ready, then gleefully called McLaglen back and made him shoot a scene while tipsy. At the end of the take, he told McLaglen, pure scorn in his voice, “Why don’t you learn your goddamn lines?” But in the movie, as Ford suspected, McLaglen’s genuine fumbling came off better than an acted version of it would have.

From 1939–1941, Ford went on an amazing streak, directing “Stagecoach,” “Drums Along the Mohawk,” and then “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) and “How Green Was My Valley” (1941). “Stagecoach” revived the genre of the western. It was a film about a stagecoach full of misfits who cross New Mexico Territory in the 1880’s and are attacked by the Apaches. Ford put a great chase in it, and staged the most dramatic scenes in Monument Valley, along the Arizona-Utah border. The view south from Utah toward Arizona, with majestic buttes filling the screen, was quietly thrilling, and Ford returned to Monument Valley again and again in his films.

Monument Valley was 100% Navajo land, enclosed in a Navajo reservation, and Ford always respected Native Americans. It bothered him that in westerns, the cowboys and the cavalry won almost all the battles. The Navajo had been ravaged by the Great Depression, and in 1938 many of them were desperately poor. Ford hired all the Navajo he could for the cast and crew of “Stagecoach,” and hired other Navajo as interpreters. (He told people he needed Navajo interpreters to make damn sure the Navajo knew what he was yelling at them.)

A decade later, in 1949, Ford made “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” in Monument Valley, and spend $152,000 dollars there, when the Navajo were hurting financially and culturally. In time, they took him, informally, into the Navajo tribe.

“Stagecoach” was the movie that made John Wayne an A-list actor. Wayne played The Ringo Kid. Ford wanted Wayne for the part, but tried to conceal his fondness for him, growling at Wayne, ridiculing him. Everyone said John Wayne had the best walk in Hollywood, a rolling, long-legged strut, but on “Stagecoach” Ford kept barking at John Wayne: “Can’t you walk without skipping like a goddamn fairy!” He repeatedly told Wayne he should have gotten Gary Cooper to play Wayne’s part.

“The Grapes of Wrath” found the visual poetry and near-spiritual tone to match John Steinbeck’s classic novel of the trial of plain folks uprooted from Oklahoma and sent west in the Depression. Ford credited Gregg Toland for its cinematography. Ford would say it’s easy to film beautiful things and make them look beautiful, but that Toland found beauty in common things. Ford also felt there was something Irish about the story — people thrown off their land, forced to wander the roads. The movie has a marvelous restraint in the way it shows both the vulnerability and the heroism of the Joad family on their journey.

Then, in 1942, John Ford went off to war, making documentaries. The kid who couldn’t get into the Naval Academy ended up at Midway, at D-Day, in Burma and Yugoslavia — not facing the same dangers that frontline troops did, but in far more in danger than directors sitting around Hollywood. Ford’s description of his wartime work? “I was a coward.”

John Ford wore a black eye patch and had a big voice and a jaunty walk. He rejected all attempts by producers to control him. Part of the reason Ford shot so many films “on location” was that he knew the producers, studio executives, journalists and publicists were unlikely to find him when he was off in Monument Valley.

When Sam Goldwyn visited a John Ford set and told Ford he’d fallen a day behind schedule, Ford asked Goldwyn, ‘Sam, how many script pages do you think I should shoot each day?’

Goldwyn said, “About five.”

So John Ford tore five pages out of the script and said with a sneer: “Okay, now we’re on schedule.”

When producers or scriptwriters arrived on a John Ford set, Ford might ask them: “Don’t you have an office?” If a determined executive ignored the hint, Ford might point out the man to his cast and crew: “We have a visitor from the HIGHER ECHELONS. Take a good look — you won’t be seeing him again.” Ford also relished rejecting the advances of journalists, publicists, would-be biographers and adoring fans.

In 1952, Ford made a film in Technicolor called “The Quiet Man.” He made it for a small studio, Republic, as part of a package deal after he’d promised them a western. The film is a comedy-drama about an Irish-American from Pittsburgh, played by John Wayne, who returns to Ireland to claim some family land, and falls in love with a feisty Irish woman. Republic executives panned the name “The Quiet Man” and suggested others. Ford told the executives their titles were lousy, and called the film “The Quiet Man.” It won him his fourth and last Best Director award, and was the only Academy Award any Republic picture ever won.

In 1836, in a Comanche raid in Texas, a nine-year-old white girl, Cynthia Ann Parker, was abducted. “Rescued” by whites when she was 33, Parker was regretful. She considered herself a Comanche, and missed the culture and the sons she’d raised as Comanches. This story became the basis for one of John Ford’s famous western, “The Searchers.” Ford challenged the prevailing western myths, and prodded John Wayne to play an avenging character dangerously out of control, a man so obsessed with the “rape” of the white girl by “savage Indians” that he wants to kill the girl, as well as her rapists. He knows some Comanche language and cultural ideas, and wants to shoot the eyes out of a dead Comanche to ruin his afterlife.

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962) was Ford’s last great film. Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne played two very different men who set the western town of Shinbone on its way to respectability. One of them killed the local psychopath, and you think it was the Stewart character until the end of the story when you find out it was Wayne.

During the filming of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” John Ford was raking John Wayne over the coals. Jimmy Stewart, with his ‘Aw Shucks’ personality and natural grace, almost managed to avoid barbs from the great director. But one day, in the last two weeks of the shoot, they were filming the funeral scene of John Wayne’s character. Woody Strode, a black actor, was wearing old man makeup, and John Ford had supervised the makeup job himself. Ford came over and asked Jimmy Stewart what he thought of Strode’s makeup. Jimmy Stewart said “Well… It’s a little Uncle Remus, isn’t it?”

Ford didn’t like that at all, and though Stewart tried to backtrack and say it looked just fine, Ford quickly gathered the whole troupe around. “One of the players seems to have an objection. One of the players here doesn’t seem to like Uncle Remus.” As Stewart tried to smooth things over, Ford said, “As a matter of fact, I’m not at all sure he even likes Negroes!” One of Ford’s veteran crew members sidled up to Jimmy Stewart and said, “Ya thought you were going to make it through, didn’t ya?” John Wayne had never looked happier and told Stewart, “Welcome to the club.”

Lee Marvin, who played in several John Ford films, recalled Ford as a tough Irish intellect, which Marvin said is about the hardest thing to be, because you have all the Irish demons, the pugnaciousness and the love of liquor, but also the intelligence to see them, and to look down on those demons, to know that you’re capable of much better.

Ford called Lee Marvin and invited him to do a film called “Donovan’s Reef.” Shooting would be in Hawaii. Marvin said “It sounds good. Send me the script, and I’ll read it and let you know.” Ford said: ‘Don’t read the script, just do it.’

Marvin said, “Well, it’s kind of my practice to read a script before I agree…” To which Ford replied, “Don’t you want to spend eight weeks in Hawaii this summer?”

Lee Marvin agreed, and in Hawaii was struck by how happy John Ford was, how much more relaxed he seemed than on other pictures. It was as if Ford felt himself getting older and was saying goodbye to the Pacific Ocean, and to his boat, by way of an eight-week goodbye party with friends. Marvin realized, with some emotion, that he must be one of John Ford’s friends. He certainly hadn’t known that from the way Ford had treated him on the set of “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Rod Taylor, a young actor who met John Ford in 1965, had the strong sense that though Ford’s image as an uncultured craftsman had begun as a protective facade, it had become something Ford truly believed. Reporters would ask: “How did you shoot this film?” and Ford would reply: “With a camera.” When people asked him “When did you first get interested in movies as a boy? Ford would say: “I’m not interested now. It’s a way of making a living.”

In 1970, Joseph McBride meant to write an admiring biography of Ford, and tried to interview him, but found him curt and dismissive: “Everybody asks the same questions, all you people. And I’m sick and tired of trying to answer them, because I don’t know the answers. I’m just a hard-nosed, hardworking… ex-director, and I’m trying to retire gracefully.”

The critic and filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich adored Ford’s work, and badgered Harold Hayes of Esquire magazine until Hayes agreed to let Bogdanovich write an article for Esquire about Ford’s making of the film “Cheyenne Autumn.” Though “Cheyenne Autumn” has some lovely moments, it’s not one of Ford’s better films. But Bogdanovich latched on to the idea that it was John Ford’s epic farewell to the west and to the western movie, and an elegy to the Native American tribes that had once lived there. Bogdanovich felt the great director was feeling somber about the history of the West, and finally putting his sadness on the screen — but John Ford discouraged any talk along those lines.

In 1973, John Ford said in an interview with Walter Wagner: “You say someone’s called me ‘the greatest poet of the western saga.’ I am not a poet, and I don’t know what a ‘western saga’ is. I would say that is horseshit.” He also said “Making a movie is not hard work. You can make it hard work if you want to. Now, I’m retired, and I get correspondence and phone calls from all over the world. I can’t keep up with it… I’d like to take a vacation and make a picture.”

The last months of his life were sad ones. His prodigious memory failed him and he went blind. John Ford died on August 31, 1973, in Palm Desert, California. The newspapers in Rome gave his death more attention that those in New York or Los Angeles. Yugoslavian TV had a two-hour tribute to Ford but there was nothing comparable on American TV. And in its long tradition of obtuse, well-meaning obituaries, the New York Times treated “The Informer” as Ford’s masterpiece, all but ignoring his gorgeous, iconic westerns.