John Ford

John Ford was born John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the youngest surviving child of Irish immigrants John Augustine Feeney and Barbara Curran, who had come to America from County Galway ^[1]. His father ran saloons in Portland, Maine, and the family belonged to the city's tight Irish Catholic community, an inheritance that colored Ford's films for the rest of his life.

He grew up in Portland and attended Portland High School, where he played football well enough to earn the nickname "Bull" Feeney ^[2]. A bout of diphtheria as a boy kept him out of school for a year, and he spent much of that time reading. After graduating in 1914, he briefly considered the United States Naval Academy but failed to gain admission.

The decisive pull came from his older brother Francis, who had gone west, taken the stage name Francis Ford, and become a successful actor and director at Universal. In the summer of 1914 the twenty-year-old followed him to California, adopting the surname Ford and starting at the bottom of the movie business as a laborer, prop man, stuntman, and occasional actor ^[1].

Ford learned filmmaking by doing nearly every job on his brother's sets, including riding as one of the hooded horsemen in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, by his own account ^[2]. Universal gave him his first directing assignment in 1917 with the short western The Tornado, in which he also starred. He was twenty-three.

Between 1917 and 1921 he turned out dozens of westerns at Universal, many of them starring Harry Carey, a partnership that taught Ford economy of storytelling and the value of a strong, quiet leading man ^[3]. In 1921 he moved to the Fox Film Corporation, where the budgets grew and so did his ambitions.

The silent era brought his first major successes. The Iron Horse (1924), an epic about the building of the transcontinental railroad, was shot on location in the Nevada desert under harsh conditions and became one of Fox's biggest hits of the decade ^[1]. Three Bad Men (1926) confirmed his command of large-scale western material. When sound arrived, Ford adapted quickly, and films such as Arrowsmith (1931) showed he could handle prestige literary adaptations as comfortably as outdoor action.

Any account of John Ford achievements begins with the Academy Awards: he won the Oscar for Best Director four times, for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952), a record no other director has matched ^[4]. He also won two additional Oscars for his wartime documentaries The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943).

The year 1939 marked a turning point in his career and in the history of the western. Stagecoach, shot partly in Monument Valley on the Arizona-Utah border, made a star of John Wayne and restored critical respectability to a genre then dismissed as cheap matinee fare ^[3]. Ford returned to Monument Valley again and again, in My Darling Clementine (1946), the cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), and above all The Searchers (1956), the dark story of an obsessive frontier manhunt that critics now rank among the greatest American films ^[5].

During the Second World War, Ford served as a commander in the United States Naval Reserve and headed the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services. He filmed the Battle of Midway in June 1942, was wounded by shrapnel while shooting, and later supervised camera crews recording the D-Day landings at Normandy ^[6]. He eventually rose to the rank of rear admiral in the Naval Reserve.

His later masterworks kept widening the ledger of John Ford facts. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) examined the gap between frontier myth and historical truth, while Cheyenne Autumn (1964), his last western, attempted a sympathetic portrait of Native Americans displaced by government policy ^[1].

Ford married Mary McBride Smith on July 3, 1920, and the marriage lasted until his death, surviving long separations and his periodic heavy drinking ^[1]. They had two children, Patrick and Barbara. His son Patrick worked in the film industry as a writer, and his grandson Dan Ford later wrote a biography of him drawing on family papers and taped interviews ^[2].

On set, Ford cultivated a gruff, intimidating manner, chewing on a handkerchief, wearing an eyepatch in later years, and deflecting questions about art with the flat statement that he made westerns. He worked repeatedly with a loyal informal company of actors, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara, Ward Bond, and Victor McLaglen, and shot with famous efficiency, often editing in the camera so studios could not recut his films ^[3].

Away from the studio he prized the sea. He owned a yacht, the Araner, named for the Aran Islands of his ancestral Galway, and spent long stretches aboard it with friends. His Irish identity remained central: The Quiet Man, filmed in County Mayo and Galway in 1951, was a project he had pursued for nearly two decades ^[1].

By the 1960s Ford's health was failing and the studio system that had sustained him was collapsing. His eyesight deteriorated, and his final feature, 7 Women (1966), a drama about missionaries in China, performed poorly at the box office, though its reputation has since improved among critics ^[5].

Recognition arrived in his last years. In 1973 the American Film Institute selected him as the first recipient of its Life Achievement Award, and at the ceremony President Richard Nixon presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States ^[4].

Ford had been diagnosed with cancer, and he died at his home in Palm Desert, California, on August 31, 1973, at the age of seventy-nine ^[1]. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City after a funeral attended by many of the actors and craftsmen who had worked with him for decades.

Few directors have shaped other filmmakers as deeply. Orson Welles, asked which American directors he admired, famously answered with Ford's name three times, and said he prepared for Citizen Kane by repeatedly watching Stagecoach ^[2]. Akira Kurosawa acknowledged Ford as a model, and later generations, from Steven Spielberg to Martin Scorsese, have cited his framing, his use of landscape, and his feeling for community ritual ^[5].

The Searchers in particular grew in stature after his death. It placed twelfth in the 2012 Sight and Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, the highest ranking for any western, and its influence is visible in films as different as Taxi Driver and Star Wars ^[5]. Several of his films, including Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Searchers, have been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress ^[7].

Modern assessments of any John Ford biography must also weigh criticism, particularly of his portrayal of Native Americans in the early westerns, a treatment he himself complicated in later films such as Cheyenne Autumn. What endures is a body of work, more than 140 films across silent and sound eras, that fixed the images through which much of the world still pictures American history ^[1].