John Ford: The Last Roundup

John Ford directed something like 100 films of all varieties over a 50-year career, but he is best known for his westerns: movies like Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine set the Western archetype for a couple of generations of filmmakers and filmgoers alike. Yet as the Cinematheque Ontario retrospective that starts tonight makes clear, Ford’s time as a vital force in the art of cinema has long passed. Cinematheque should call this series “The Last Roundup”—it’ll be difficult to see the need for anyone doing another Ford tribute any time soon.

Unlike, say, Orson Welles, whose still-inspiring career was on display in the Cinematheque series immediately preceding this one, the work of John Ford has become largely irrelevant to contemporary cinema. All the usual film-society suspects—Welles, Renoir, Ray (Nicholas and Satyajit), Fuller, Antonioni... even Robert Bresson—all have their disciples. But nobody wants to make movies like John Ford any more.

This should not come as too much of a surprise: we are even farther in years from 1956’s The Searchers —the film generally acclaimed as Ford’s greatest—than The Searchers was from the invention of the feature film. Ford was lionized by the French critics in the 50’s, the majority of the academic debate over him took place 35 years ago, and his critical reputation peaked about the time of his death in 1973. Cinema has evolved in the meantime: Nobody has written a serious theoretical piece on Ford in 20 years. The man is now a subject for the biographers, not the theorists; and his movies are now museum pieces from the days when dinosaurs ruled the west.

Some of the artifacts have held up better than others. When Ford had a good script, he made a good movie. The Searchers, The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath (both 1940); Wagon Master (1950)... these are all good films; capable of being enjoyably absorbed as the heirlooms they are. They are movies that display the virtues for which he has been justly praised: a great cinematic eye and an invisible, self-effacing visual style.

The Grapes of Wrath and The Searchers especially stand out: Grapes for a sense of conscience largely absent from the rest of Ford’s work; The Searchers because it actually is the way your fond childhood memories of the other Ford westerns feel. Both are for the most part also blessedly free of the self-indulgence and sentimental gas about cavalry and frontier life that mars so many of the rest of his movies—they offer us Ford without embarrassment.

Time has unfortunately made embarrassment the dominant response to far to too much of what remains. The man who could make Henry Fonda look beautiful just walking up a street in My Darling Clementine could rarely make John Wayne sound comfortable speaking English. His sentimentalism in Young Mr. Lincoln is almost alarming—the movie feels something like a Frank Capra life of Christ, and is so full of icons that the editors of Cahiers du Cinema were able to invent structuralist analysis on the basis of that movie alone.

In his westerns he was prone to repeat himself shamelessly: Watch too many in a row and you begin to believe that there is a lost tribe of actors wandering in circles around Monument Valley. His racism hardly seems an issue any more: what sticks in your craw now is the absurd way he always has his Indians fall off their horses when they get shot. The relationships between his leading men and women (for example, Henry Fonda and Cathy Downs in My Darling Clementine, or John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara in just about anything) make Popeye and Olive Oyl look like Tracy and Hepburn.

When Ford was coasting, which was often, the blarney-and-bullshit can become almost insufferable. (A hint: if you see Andy Devine’s or Victor McLaglen’s name in the credits, you’re likely in for trouble.) Rio Grande—the third in Ford’s “cavalry trilogy” has its first moment of real drama about 80 minutes in. Until then, it’s cavalry life as a bunch of yuks between good ol’ boys, interrupted by the occasional visit from a woman nobody knows how to react to. If Rio Grande is anything to go by, Ford’s view of the history of the west is one long, awkward look back at his own adolescence.

All of this reaches some kind of zenith in 1952’s The Quiet Man, in which John Wayne plays a boxer who returns to Ireland, ultimately to do battle with Victor McLaglen (drunk, yet again) for the hand of Maureen O’ Hara. The Quiet Man is all faith-and-begoria and calcified blarney; surely the most outrageous movie ever to win its maker an Oscar for Best Director. (Ford won four of them in all.)

The lingering image from an extended encounter with the work of John Ford is a feeling of a real, natural talent done in by indiscipline and questionable taste. When directing the right script he was capable of what felt like an elegant, plainspoken honesty which admirers like Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray were able to bring even more effectively to their own films.

When left to his own whims, Ford inevitably leaned on the cliché—cliché’s which have been deemed excusable by his admirers because he invented them. But critic David Thomson has put this notion of inventing the cliché in it’s proper perspective: “Sheer longevity made Ford a major director.”

The elevation of Ford to the pantheon of cinema’s master directors has been a historical peccadillo that did neither him nor his audiences any favors. Perhaps it’s now time we relieved Ford of the responsibility that comes with being called a great filmmaker, and took what the man said about himself more seriously. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ford claimed that “...the only thing I always had was an eye for composition. But I never thought about what I was doing in terms of art or anything like that. To me it was always a job of work—which I enjoyed immensely—and that's it.”

In a 1973 tribute to Ford, Indian filmmaking legend Satyajit Ray tells the story of the 1958 meeting between Ford and the much younger British director Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was showing Ford a copy of Every Day Except Christmas, his documentary mood-piece on the behind-the-scenes action at the Covent Garden Market. After watching silently for half an hour, Ford finally turned to Anderson and said, “when are we going to see those Goddamn vegetables?”

It’s a phrase that makes a good epitaph. It cuts through the academic double-talk and sums up the real virtues of the filmmaker: John Ford was the guy who gave us the vegetables.

Published in the Globe and Mail, 2000