John ford

John Martin Feeney (real name of the teacher) was the thirteenth child of a couple of Irish emigrants who ran a tavern. According to his birth certificate, he was born on February 1, 1894, in Cape Elizabeth, a coastal town in Maine. As a child he was a bad student, but his horn-rimmed glasses gave him such a serious look that his father always thought he would be ordained a priest. After adolescence, he grew into a tremendously strong and broad-shouldered boy, nicknamed ‘Feeney Bull’ by his football teammates. In high school he expressed a special interest in American History classes, especially when he learned of the large number of Irishmen who fought in the War of Independence. Around this time he began to develop the tough man pose, with which he tried to hide his personality as a sensitive artist. That is to say, that in essence the real Ford was like Ethan Edwards and Sean Thornton, the protagonists ofDesert Centaurs and The Quiet Man .

The young Ford took his first professional steps towards the world of advertising, but soon ended up in the Mecca of cinema. Asked in an interview by French director Jean-Luc Godard what brought him to Hollywood, Ford replied concisely: “A train.” In fact, he followed in the footsteps of his brother, Francis Ford , an actor, screenwriter and filmmaker at Universal, who gave her work on his films, sometimes as an interpreter, but also as an assistant director. In 1917, he wrote, starred in, and directed his first short, the silent western The Tornado , in which he signed himself as Jack Ford. He made such a good impression at Universal that he was soon put in charge of feature films, such as The Fightin Gringo ., the first of the more than 130 that came to shoot. It starred Harry Carey , one of the stars of the western of the silent era. During the 1920s, Ford was learning the trade, and although he still started from simple scripts, he developed his particular style, which consisted of selecting the ideal framing and letting the actors do what they did, whom he directed with great skill. ability. He was enshrined with The Iron Horse, where he narrated the difficulties that the operators had on the railway, with images close to the documentary. At that time, he met the woman of his life, Mary McBryde Smith, a young woman of Irish origin, who descended from Tomás Moro, and although they could not marry in church, since she was divorced, she would accompany him until his death. The marriage had two children, both dedicated to the cinema, since Patrick Michael became a producer of by-products of series B and Barbara an editor.

Although since the advent of sound, it is difficult to find a disappointing John Ford film, and masterpieces abound, the most important, decisive and influential period for the master was the 1930s, when cinema as we know it was taking shape. During the Great Depression, the filmmaker perfected his film language in his own films, mostly written by screenwriters Dudley Nichols and Nunnally Johnson . The lost patrol stands out , centered on the psychological pressure to which the protagonists are subjected, members of an English patrol, lost in the desert, where they are being harassed by an enemy whom they cannot see. Equally interesting is The informer, shot on sets that reconstructed the city of Dublin, in which a guy has reported to the police the leader of the Irish nationalist group from which he has been expelled. His most influential film is Stagecoach , from 1939, which forever transformed not only the western, but also action cinema. Until then, western movies were inconsequential action shows, almost always B series. But Ford narrates in the first psychological western the dramatic conflicts suffered by various characters, as realistic as they are interesting, who for various reasons coincide in a reduced diligence , bound for the city of Lordsburg. Because of his portrayal of the Ringo Kid, the man who goes to meet those who killed his family, John WayneHe became a star, and also John Ford’s fetish actor, as the director considered him “the best actor in Hollywood” and the man who best represented himself on screen. It was the first film the director shot in Monument Valley, on the Utah-Arizona border, where he returned numerous times for other shoots. There, he befriended the Navajos, whom he hired as extras, paying union-established rates. The redskins considered him an honorary member of the tribe, since he gave them work for many years, and they gave him the Indian name Natani Nez, which means “high chief.”

In Intrepid Men , based on several short plays by Eugene O’Neill , Ford also recounted the problems of many characters, in extreme situations, notably the crew of a ship loaded with munitions. Around this time he also shot Young Lincoln , with Henry Fonda playing Abraham Lincoln when he was an up-and-coming lawyer who didn’t know he would become President of the United States. The Grapes of Wrath is one of his most valuable films, as he succeeded in an unthinkable challenge for any director, succeeding with the adaptation of a masterpiece by John Steinbeck, heavyweight of American literature. It is also an atypical social drama, shot in 1940, when the consequences of the Crack of 1929 were still being felt, and the public preferred to see musicals, westerns or relaxed comedies to escape their own problems. It was also based on a successful book, this time by Richard Llewellyn , the drama How Green Was My Valley , with Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O’Hara .

Although Ford had a reputation for treating actors harshly on set, accentuating his tough-guy pose, and becoming a dictator, the truth is that he maintained great friendships with many of them. Unlike other directors, Ford used to work with the same actors, to whom he always knew how to give that character that suited them. Regulars of his films are called ‘John Ford’s Stable Company’, a term normally used in the theatre. Those who have enjoyed more than one Ford film will have noticed that the supporting cast are almost always the same: his brother Francis Ford, Ward Bond , Ken Curtis , Victor McLaglen , Mae Marsh , Woody Strodeand some more, while he also repeated with some of the main actors, such as Henry Fonda, who starred in nine of his films, and especially John Wayne, present in twenty films, the first as an extra.

The Irish roots of the creative filmmaker explain the theme of his work, which always revolves around loyalty, camaraderie, family and above all tradition. Journalists and authors who have written about Ford have always thought that he was conservative, from the Republican party, especially since his best friends, John Wayne, James Stewartand Ward Bond were. However, his relatives have declared many times that this is completely false, since he declared himself a liberal activist. On one occasion he overheard a conversation between John Wayne and Victor McLaglen, who were highly critical of Roosevelt, during a break from filming. He did not hesitate to rebuke them: “All of you have earned your money during the Roosevelt era.” From that moment on, Wayne, who was very fond of his teacher, decided to avoid politics when she was with him.

During World War II, Hollywood also collaborated in the fight against the Nazis, mainly by producing war propaganda. The best directors of the moment are recruited by the army, among them John Ford, who reached the rank of major, dedicating himself to documentaries about the navy, while Colonel Frank Capra shot about the infantry and Major William Wyler did the same with the army. from air.

At the end of the war, Ford continued to reap successes, such as Passion of the Strong , The Three Godfathers , Mogambo , The Quiet Man and The Fugitive , but both he and other illustrious directors of his generation were displaced by new talents, members of the Lost Generation: Elia Kazan , Billy Wilder , John Huston . Ford knew how to capture better than anyone else on the screen what the great pioneers who advanced the cinema felt when they were replaced by intellectuals, in films such as The Invincible Legion (which makes up the trilogy of the cavalry, with Fort Apacheand Río Grande ) where a captain about to retire prevents the advance of the Indians, thanks to his seniority. In Desert Centaurs , weathered ex-military man Ethan Edwards has a hard time fitting into post-war society, and the woman he was in love with chose to marry her brother, a more homely man. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (for whom he signs these lines the greatest masterpiece among Ford’s great masterpieces), Tom Doniphon, John Wayne’s character, is an abrupt hero, essential to pacify the city, which has been left behind. displaced by the arrival of progress, by a society that needs men like Ransom (James Stewart).

Although John Ford was never as popular with the general public as Alfred Hitchcock , his films always succeeded at the box office, due to their quality, and because they starred actors like John Wayne, who was a great star. He is mostly remembered for his westerns ( Two Ride Together , Mission of the Daring , Caravan of Peace , His episode of How the West Was Won ). In reality, he cultivated disparate genres such as drama ( The Last Hurray , An Hourly Murder ), comedy ( The Irishman’s Tavern ), dramatic comedy ( The Quiet Man , Tales from Ireland ,The tobacco route ), the biopic ( Written under the sun , Cradle of heroes ), adventure films ( Mogambo , Wild hearts ) and he lavished himself on war films ( They were not essential , Layover in Hawaii , The price of glory , The Battle of Midway). They say that when he was shooting one of his films he had to undergo cataract surgery. But his passion for the cinema was so great that he took off the bandage prematurely, to resume shooting early, disobeying the doctor’s warnings. In the end he ended up losing sight in one eye, which explains his characteristic patch. In any case, the veracity of this anecdote has not been proven, since John Ford himself enjoyed misleading his biographers by inventing contradictory information about his life.

At the end of his career, Ford was concerned by some critics who had accused him, sometimes without having seen his work, of being racist and sexist. Perhaps this explains films like The Black Sergeant , starring an African-American unjustly court-martialed accused of two murders and a rape, The Great Combat , where he reflected the injustices committed against the Cheyennes, mistreated and condemned to live in misery on a reservation in Oklahoma, and Seven Women , about a group of missionaries in Manchuria, during the Sino-Mongolian war. The filmmaker died of stomach cancer on August 31, 1973, when the cinema was completely transformed.