1917: The Tornado (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role); The Trail of Hate (may have been directed by Francis Ford); The Scrapper (+scenarist/scriptwriter, role); The Soul Herder; Cheyenne's Pal (+story); Straight Shooting; TheSecret Man; A Marked Man (+story); Bucking Broadway. 1918: The Phantom Riders; Wild Woman; Thieves' Gold; The Scarlet Drop (+story); Hell Bent (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter); A Woman's Fool; Three Mounted Men. 1919: Roped; The Fighting Brothers; A Fight for Love; By Indian Post; The Rustlers; Bare Fists; Gun Law; The Gun Packer (The Gun Pusher); Riders of Vengeance (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter); The Last Outlaw; The Outcasts of Poker Flat; The Ace of the Saddle; The Rider of the Law; A Gun Fightin' Gentleman (+co-story); Marked Men. 1920: The Prince of Avenue A; The Girl in Number 29; Hitchin' Posts; Just Pals; The Big Punch (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter). 1921: The Freeze Out; Desperate Trails; Action; Sure Fire; Jackie. 1922: The Wallop; Little Miss Smiles; The Village Blacksmith; Silver Wings (Carewe) (director prologue only). 1923: The Face on the Barroom Floor; Three Jumps Ahead (+scenarist/scriptwriter); Cameo Kirby; North of Hudson Bay; Hoodman Blind. 1924: The Iron Horse; Hearts of Oak. 1925: Lightnin'; Kentucky Pride; The Fighting Heart; Thank You. 1926: The Shamrock Handicap; Three Bad Men; The Blue Eagle. 1927: Upstream. 1928: Mother Machree; Four Sons; Hangman's House; Napoleon's Barber; Riley the Cop. 1929: Strong Boy; Salute; The Black Watch. 1930: Men Without Women (+co-story); Born Reckless; Up the River (+co-scenarist/scriptwriter, uncredited). 1931: Seas Beneath; The Brat; Arrowsmith; Flesh. 1933: Pilgrimage; Dr. Bull. 1934: The Lost Patrol; The World Moves On; Judge Priest. 1935: The Whole Town's Talking; The Informer; Steamboat Round the Bend. 1936: The Prisoner of Shark Island; Mary of Scotland; The Plough and the Stars. 1937: Wee Willie Winkie; The Hurricane. 1938: Four Men and a Prayer; Submarine Patrol. 1939: Stagecoach; Drums Along the Mohawk; Young Mr. Lincoln. 1940: The Grapes of Wrath; The Long Voyage Home. 1941: Tobacco Road; Sex Hygiene; How Green Was My Valley. 1942: The Battle of Midway (+co-cinematographer); Torpedo Squadron. 1943: December Seventh (co-director); We Sail at Midnight. 1945: They Were Expendable. 1946: My Darling Cl?mentine. 1947: The Fugitive (+co-producer). 1948: Fort Apache (+co-producer); Three Godfathers (+co-producer). 1949: She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (+co-producer). 1950: When Willie Comes Marching Home; Wagonmaster (+co-producer); Rio Grande (+co-producer). 1951: This Is Korea!. 1952: What Price Glory; The Quiet Man (+co-producer). 1953: The Sun Shines Bright; Mogambo. 1955: The Long Gray Line; Mister Roberts (co-director); Rookie of the Year (episode for Screen Directors Playhouse TV series); The Bamboo Cross (episode for Fireside Theater TV series). 1956: The Searchers. 1957: The Wings of Eagles; The Rising of the Moon. 1958: The Last Hurrah. 1959: Gideon of Scotland Yard (Gideon's Day); Korea; The Horse Soldiers. 1960: The Colter Craven Story (episode for Wagon Train TV series); Sergeant Rutledge. 1961: Two Rode Together. 1962: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; Flashing Spikes (episode for Alcoa Premiere TV series); How the West Was Won (directed ?The Civil War? segment). 1963: Donovan's Reef (+producer). 1964: Cheyenne Autumn. 1965: Young Cassidy (+co-director). 1966: Seven Women. 1970: Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend.
1914: Lucille Love, the Girl of Mystery (fifteen-episode serial) (Francis Ford) (role); The Mysterious Rose (Francis Ford) (role). 1915: The Birth of a Nation (Griffith) (role); Three Bad Men and a Girl (Francis Ford) (role); The Hidden City (Francis Ford) (role); The Doorway of Destruction (Francis Ford) (assistant director, role); The Broken Coin (twenty-two-episode serial) (Francis Ford) (role). 1916: The Lumber Yard Gang (Francis Ford) (role); Peg o' the Ring (fifteen-episode serial) (Francis Ford and Jacques Jaccard) (role); Chicken-Hearted Jim (Francis Ford) (role); The Bandit's Wager (Francis Ford) (role). 1929: Big Time (Kenneth Hawks) (role as himself). 1971: Vietnam! Vietnam! (Beck, for USIA) (executive producer).
Joined brother Francis (director for Universal) in Hollywood, 1914; actor, stuntman and special effects man for Universal, 1914-17; assumes name "Jack Ford," 1916; contract director for Universal, 1917-21; signed to Fox Film Corp., 1921; began collaboration with screenwriter Dudley Nichols on Men without Women, 1930; assembled film crew that became Field Photographic Branch of U.S. Office of Strategic Services, 1940.
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Oscar for Best Director, and Best Direction Award, New York Film Critics, for The Informer, 1935; Best Direction Award, New York Film Critics, for Stagecoach, 1939; Oscar for Best Director, for Grapes of Wrath, 1940; Oscar for Best Director and Best Direction Award, New York Film Critics, for How Green Was My Valley, 1941; Oscar for Best Documentary, for Battle of Midway, 1942; Legion of Merit and Purple Heart; Annual Award, Directors Guild of America, 1952; Grand Lion Award, Venice Festival, 1971; Lifetime Achievement Award, American Film Institute, 1973.
Sean Aloysius O'Feeney (or John Augustine Feeney) in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, 1 February 1895.
Portland High School, Maine; University of Maine, 1913 or 1914 (for three weeks).
Lieutenant-Commander, U.S. Marine Corps, 1942-45 (wounded at Battle of Midway); in U.S. Naval Reserve, given rank of Admiral by President Nixon.
Married Mary McBryde Smith, 1920, one son, one daughter.
In Palm Desert, California, 31 August 1973.
John Ford has no peers in the annals of cinema. This is not to place him above criticism, merely above comparison. His faults were unique, as was his art, which he pursued with a single-minded and single-hearted stubbornness for sixty years and 112 films. Ford grew up with the American cinema. That he should have begun his career as an extra in the Ku Klux Klan sequences of The Birth of a Nation and ended it supervising the documentary Vietnam! Vietnam! conveys the remarkable breadth of his contribution to film, and the narrowness of its concerns.
Ford's subject was his life and his times. Immigrant, Catholic, Republican, he spoke for the generations that created the modern United States between the Civil and Great Wars. 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, with practical, patriotic, and devout qualities. Ford portrayed the society Whitman celebrated as "something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of night and day."
Mythologizing the armed services and the church as paradigms of structural integrity, Ford adapts their rules to his private world. All may speak in Ford's films, but when divine order is invoked, the faithful fall silent, to fight and die as decreed by a general, a president, or some other member of a God-anointed elite.
In Ford's hierarchy, Native and African Americans share the lowest rung, women the next. Businessmen, uniformly corrupt in his world, hover below the honest and unimaginative citizenry of the United States. Above them are Ford's elite, within which members of the armed forces occupy a privileged position. In authority over them is an officer class of career military men and priests, culminating in a few near-saintly figures of which Abraham Lincoln is the most notable, while over all rules a retributory, partial, and jealous God.
The consistency of Ford's work lies in his fidelity to the morality implicit in this structure. Mary of Scotland s Mary Queen of Scots, the retiring Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and outgoing mayor Frank Skeffington in The Last Hurrah all face the decline in their powers with a moral strength drawn from a belief in the essential order of their lives. Mary goes triumphantly to the scaffold, affirming Catholicism and the divine right of kings. Duty to his companions of the 7th Cavalry transcending all, Brittles returns to rejoin them in danger. Skeffington prefers to lose rather than succumb to modern vote-getting devices such as television.
"I make westerns," Ford announced on one well-publicized occasion. Like most of his generalizations, it was untrue. Only a third of his films are westerns, and of those a number are rural comedies with perfunctory frontier settings: Doctor Bull, Judge Priest, Steamboat Round the Bend, The Sun Shines Bright. Many of his family films, like Four Men and a Prayer and Pilgrimage, belong with the stories of military life, of which he made a score. A disciple of the U.S. Navy, from which he retired with the emeritus rank of Rear Admiral, Ford found in its command structure a perfect metaphor for moral order. In They Were Expendable, he chose to falsify every fact of the Pacific War to celebrate the moral superiority of men trained in its rigid disciplines-men who obey, affirm, keep faith.
Acts, not words, convey the truths of men's lives; public affirmations of this dictum dominate Ford's films. Dances and fights signify in their vigor a powerful sense of community; singing and eating and getting drunk together are the great acts of Fordian union. A film like The Searchers, perhaps his masterpiece, makes clear its care for family life and tradition in a series of significant actions that need no words. Ward Bond turns away from the revelation of a woman's love for her brother-in-law, exposed in her reverent handling of his cloak; his turn away is the instinctive act of a natural gentleman. Barred from the family life which his anger and independence make alien to his character, John Wayne clutches his arm in a gesture borrowed from Ford's first star, Harry Carey; in a memorable final image, the door closes on him, a symbol of the rejection of the eternal clan-less wanderer.
Ford spent his filmmaking years in a cloud of critical misunderstanding, with each new film unfavorably compared to earlier works. The Iron Horse established him as an epic westerner in the mold of Raoul Walsh, The Informer as a Langian master of expressionism, the cavalry pictures as Honest John Ford, a New England primitive whose work, in Lindsay Anderson's words, was ?unsophisticated and direct.? When, in his last decades of work, he returned to reexamine earlier films in a series of revealing remakes, the skeptical saw not a moving reiteration of values but a decline into self-plagiarism. Yet it is The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which he deals with the issues raised in Stagecoach, showing his beloved populist west destroyed by law and literacy, that stands today among his most important films.
Belligerent, grandiose, deceitful, and arrogant in real life, Ford seldom let these traits spill over into his films. They express at their best a guarded serenity, a skeptical satisfaction in the beauty of the American landscape, muted always by an understanding of the dangers implicit in the land, and a sense of the responsibility of all men to protect the common heritage. In every Ford film there is a gun behind the door, a conviction behind the joke, a challenge in every toast. Ford belongs in the tradition of American narrative art where telling a story and drawing a moral are twin aspects of public utterance. He saw that we live in history, and that history embodies lessons we must learn. When Fordian man speaks, the audience is meant to listen-and listen all the harder for the restraint and circumspection of the man who speaks. One hears the authentic Fordian voice nowhere more powerfully than in Ward Bond's preamble to the celebrating enlisted men in They Were Expendable as they toast the retirement of a comrade. ?I'm not going to make a speech,? he states. "I've just got something to say."-JOHN BAXTER