A drunken hanger-on betrays his friend to the Black and Tans for twenty pounds (1935)
The Informer — his first Best Director Oscar, with Victor McLaglen winning Best Actor.
Film · Hollywood
John Ford
1894–1973 · American
Classical Hollywood; the western
John Ford directed some 140 films over half a century and holds the record of four Academy Awards for Best Director — none of them for a western, the genre he defined. His subject was community: cavalry troops, Welsh miners, Irish villagers, families on the move, filmed against the buttes of Monument Valley. Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles both named him the greatest of American directors.
How to spot them
- ▸Monument Valley on the Utah–Arizona border, used as the landscape of the whole American west
- ▸A doorway framing the shot, with the hero outside the community looking in
- ▸A stock company of players — John Wayne, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Harry Carey Jr — and a dance, a funeral or a hymn in almost every film
- ▸Irish-American sentiment, hard drinking, and a brawl played for comedy
- ▸An eyepatch, a pipe, and a refusal to explain anything to interviewers
Key films
The Ringo Kid rides with a drunken doctor, a banker and a gambler through Apache country (1939)
Stagecoach — it made John Wayne a star and was the first of his films shot in Monument Valley.
An Okie family driven off the land by the Dust Bowl heads west to California (1940)
The Grapes of Wrath — from Steinbeck, photographed by Gregg Toland; his second directing Oscar.
A Welsh coal village remembered by the boy who grew up in it, with a slag heap swallowing the hillside (1941)
How Green Was My Valley — it beat Citizen Kane to Best Picture and won him his third directing Oscar.
A tubercular dentist, a marshal tipping back on the porch, and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1946)
My Darling Clementine — Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp, Victor Mature as Doc Holliday.
An American boxer returns to County Mayo and is dragged across the fields in a fight over his wife's dowry (1952)
The Quiet Man — his fourth and last directing Oscar, shot in Cong, County Mayo.
Ethan Edwards spends five years hunting the niece taken by Comanches, and the last shot is a closing door (1956)
The Searchers — routinely voted the greatest western ever made.
A senator admits he did not fire the shot that made his career, and a newspaperman prefers the legend (1962)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance — James Stewart, John Wayne and Lee Marvin, shot in black and white on a backlot.
Quick-fire facts
- •Born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, on 1 February 1894, the youngest of eleven children of Irish immigrants; died in Palm Desert on 31 August 1973
- •His record of four Academy Awards for Best Director has never been matched
- •He directed John Wayne in more than twenty films and gave him his breakthrough starring role
- •The cavalry trilogy is Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950)
- •He headed the photographic unit of the US Navy in the Second World War and was wounded filming The Battle of Midway (1942), which won an Academy Award for documentary
- •He was the first recipient of the AFI Life Achievement Award, in 1973, presented shortly before his death
- •Orson Welles said he prepared for Citizen Kane by watching Stagecoach some forty times, and named his three favourite directors as 'John Ford, John Ford and John Ford'
- •The Searchers, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley are all in the US National Film Registry
- •At a hostile 1950 Directors Guild meeting he faced down Cecil B. DeMille with the words 'My name's John Ford. I make westerns.'
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Richard Franklin, Senses of Cinema — Great Directors: John Ford
- Scott Eyman — Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford