Happy Birthday: John Ford (1894–1973)

John Ford (1894–1973)

Born: February 1, 1894 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, USA
Died: August 31, 1973 (age 79) in Palm Desert, California, USA

For a director there are commercial rules that it is necessary to obey. In our profession, an artistic failure is nothing; a commercial failure is a sentence. The secret is to make films that please the public and also allow the director to reveal his personality.

[on John Wayne] Duke is the best actor in Hollywood.

As a beauty, Dolores del Rio is in a class with [Greta Garbo]. Then she opens her mouth and becomes Minnie Mouse.

My name is John Ford and I make Westerns.

[1967] I am a liberal Democrat and a rebel.

The Informer 1935 dir. John Ford Cast Victor McLaglen Heather Angel

Young Mr. Lincoln 1939 dir. Ford Starring Henry Fonda Alice Brady

How Green Was My Valley 1941 dir. Ford Starring Walter Pidgeon Maureen O’Hara

The Quiet Man 1952 dir. Ford starring John Wayne Maureen O’Hara

The Long Gray Line 1955 dir. Ford Starring Tyrone Power Maureen O’Hara

The Searchers 1956 dir. Ford Starring John Wayne Vera Miles

Stagecoach 1939 dir. John Ford Starring John Wayne Claire Trevor

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962 dir. Ford starring James Stewart John Wayne

THE GRAPES OF WRATH 1940 dir. John Ford Stars: Henry Fonda Jane Darwell

John Ford was one of the first and maybe the best at playing the singular individual against the vastness of nature, and in so doing laid the ground work for the modern epic. Other director’s are probably more known for that particular style of filmmaking–David Lean certainly explored further into what an epic could do–but there would have been no David Lean without John Ford.

Like Chaplin and Hitchock, Ford started out in the silent’s, transporting the ability to tell a story in purely visual terms into the age of sound (and eventually color and cinemascope) without losing his own personal voice. And like Hitchcok, Ford was a specialist. He made the western what is and was.

It’s hard to remember, today, just how big the Western was in its heyday. In the 1950s if you were going to make a new TV show, it was probably going to be a western. While superhero comics languished, western comics rode on. And ever year, any studio worth its salt was making sure it had a slate full of western’s.

And Ford was its master. “Stage Coach” “The Searchers” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” Even people who didn’t make western’s the way Ford did often made them in spite of the way he made them. If you made a Western, John Ford was your starting point.

But he was certainly capable of other things. His adaptation of “The Grapes of Wrath” is as good as any western he ever made. There are similarities of course, but that might be less because he turned everything into a western as it is that he found the innate humanity in all of his stories, and it is that which made all of his films so good.

Even decades after his preferred genre has fallen from the pedestal it once sat on, John Ford still remains.

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