“The first thing that happened when you got a job with John Ford was that everyone told you legendary stories about him,” the screenwriter recalls. Winston Miller who wrote for him hell callFor example.
LEGEND SEAL
It was often the famous story of a producer complaining to him that the director was five pages behind schedule, after which Ford would tear exactly five pages out of the script, hand them to the heartbroken producer, and say to him, “Now we’re right on time.” again.” Obviously, not all the stories about John Ford are true, and the main reason is that many of them were spread by himself. Ford liked to tell stories; whether they were true or false did not matter much. He told people the most grotesque fantasies with the clean face of a sincere man.He claimed that his father came to America to fight in the Civil War in the first place, when his father arrived in America only seven years after the last battle of Appomattox.Ford was the man who told stories for the sake of telling stories — to entertain your audience, of course, but mostly to entertain yourself. It is no coincidence that one of the most beautiful biographies written about John Ford is Print legend which in turn comes from the famous joke of one of his cult films (The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance): When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
END OF AN EPOCH
Fifty years have passed since the death of this huge monument of directing art, but it seems even more. He was born in 1894 and given the name John Martin Feeney. Ford directed more than 140 films in his unparalleled career, including such undisputed masterpieces as red shadows (1939) Rage (1940) quiet man (1952) and wild trails (1956) and four Oscars. Long before his death on August 31, 1973, Ford assumed the role of a pivotal point, not unlike the foothills of Monument Valley, his favorite location for filming. In the words of another great director, Peter Bogdanovich (who dedicated a documentary and a wonderful book of interviews to him), the golden age of Hollywood ended with the 1962 release of the melancholic film The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance, another milestone in an unrepeatable career: “When this train leaves, I thought: this is really the end of Ford,” he told writer Peter Biskind, referring to the frame that ends the film. “And Ford’s demise really marked the end of that era.” And it doesn’t matter that Ford then lived another 11 years and made four more films.
FORD’S THOUSAND FACES
Ford was a well-known romantic, cultured and educated (although he liked to portray himself as a rude, self-made man). He often claimed to have been born in Ireland, in particular, he said that he was born in a pub, not in Maine, and that he was christened Sean Aloysius O’Fine in 1895. He took his stage name from his older brother Francis Ford, who preceded him in Hollywood as an actor and director, but claimed to have stolen it from a car brand so that his involvement in movies would not disgrace his family. Ford was also a man of controversy. From a soul divided in two. On the one hand, his heart beat for the American homeland, but he never forgot that he was an Irish-American Catholic and therefore belonged to a despised minority who considered themselves cast out of utopia. Thus, when it came to the conflicts between the American cavalry and the Indians in his great post-war Westerns, Ford did not openly take sides, as if he seemed to consider any persecuted group an honorary Irishman. See, for example, Welsh miners united by grief in How green was my valley.
Arriving in Hollywood in 1914, Ford quickly mastered all aspects of the art of cinema. He became a prolific director of films, most of which were westerns. When he led iron Horse by 1924 he was already an important figure and was easily approaching sound. Although rarely free from the commercial constraints of the studio system, it flourished for over 50 years. The main problem of a director in Hollywood has always been how to make a film that you want, with other people’s money. Presenting oneself as an artist was fatal, as Sternberg and Wells, among others, discovered. Ford, who had great practical sense and extraordinary insight, understood that the best way to succeed was to assume the pose of a hard-working commercial carpenter who happened to work in the movie business. And yet, as another famous biographer Joseph McBride wrote in the book Looking for John Ford: A Life: “Ford is the closest equivalent to a homegrown Shakespeare. He told American national history on screen with an epic vision spanning almost two centuries, from the Revolutionary War to the Vietnam War. While Ford’s vision of America is deeply patriotic, it does. not shy away from addressing the tragic failures of the country, the times when we fell short of our ideals. Whatever events she describes, Ford’s natural devotion is always associated with the spirit of ordinary American people.
A DANGEROUS PERSON
However, Ford was an unhappy and often dangerous man. He was an alcoholic who often had to be hospitalized after drinking alcohol. He treated his wife and children abominably, but built a film family of actors, technicians, and assistants, so much so that he was called Daddy, Daddy. He was rude, cruel and manipulative, which his talent can neither justify nor soften. Generosity alternated with terrible meanness. Care John Wayne as if he were her own son and turned him into a star, but often humiliated him on the set, joking that he dodged the call to war. In his films, ambition and success—as opposed to duty and stoic service—are viewed with suspicion. His politics, in his personal life and in films, is a mass of contradictions. He opposed the blacklist and refused to meet with Senator Joseph McCarthy, but he was a leading member of the far-right Film Alliance for American Ideals.
HORIZONS OF GLORY
The complex man behind an outstanding director. Even about his dying words, there are different versions. Someone claims that he read a passage from the prayer: “Holy Mary, Mother of God.” Others swear he said distantly, “Now somebody give me a cigar.” A third option, of course more suggestive and cinephilic, is that he briefly yelled, “Cut!” (the word translated into Italian as “stop”, which is used when the director puts a point in the frame). In all cases, half a century after his death, the whole aura of his greatness is preserved. So much so that many insiders call him the most important director of all time. And yet receive a heartfelt tribute from another of the greatest directors in history: Steven Spielberg which completes his autobiographical Fabelmans making his alter ego aspiring director teach an extraordinary lesson in the concept of perspective, vision, artistic expression: “You mustn’t forget that. When the horizon is down, it’s interesting. When the horizon is up, it’s interesting. Interesting. When the horizon gets in the way, that’s boring shit. Now good luck.” Ford was the man who forever rewrote the horizons of cinematic storytelling. Cut!