Introduction
In gathering together the most comprehensive collection of John Ford’s extant silent films over a research period of more than six years, I have been able to examine the early development of the director’s style and aesthetic in a manner that had not been possible before. Previously, Ford scholars such as Joseph McBride, Tag Gallagher, Scott Eyman, Lindsay Anderson, Andrew Sarris and Peter Harry Rist had only a handful of surviving silent titles from which to make their observations regarding Ford’s silent directing career. For the first time, it is now feasible to demonstrate that the director’s silent titles contain a wealth of information regarding the development of those thematic and visual motifs that comprise the ‘Fordian sensibility’, and to illustrate quite clearly the genesis of Ford’s growth towards becoming an auteur.
It should be pointed out that the extensive research process that I undertook was not restricted purely to the collection of extant Ford silent films. I also visited as many archives and film research facilities as possible in order to collect promotional materials, articles, photographs and other related texts specific to the silent directing career of John Ford that might help shed light on the director’s evolutionary progress from a journeyman director to a filmmaker of considerable note.
One of the most interesting and exciting discoveries that has been brought to light as a result of my research is the fact that Ford’s evolution as a director and auteur can be charted through close analysis of the technological innovations of the time, an approach put forward as a tool to test the validity of the auteur theory by Edward Buscombe. Although Rist also examined the development of Ford’s visual style in the early films in his thesis, I have built on his findings by evaluating the effect that the introduction of new lighting techniques, camera mobility, lens technology, advanced set design, and of course the innovation of sound, had on Ford’s overall style.
In this concluding section, I will summarise the findings and observations made during the course of researching and writing this thesis by framing my comments within the context of the research questions posed at the beginning. I will then also make some general comments on the director’s early work that have emerged from a close reading of John Ford’s silent titles.
This work proposed the following research questions:
- How and when did Jack Ford, the man and the director, become ‘John Ford’, the brand, and the label?
- Using Ford as a case study, is it possible, through a close examination of his early silent work, to evaluate how the idea of ‘authorship’ is formed?
- To what extent do Ford’s silent films demonstrate the evolution of a personal, individual style and aesthetic, and to what extent is this aesthetic shaped by external influences such as biographical background, changes in technology, studio and institutional conventions, and surrounding cultural discourses?
The conclusions I have reached on these questions inevitably overlap at certain points, particularly as regards the first two, so I will combine my observations and summary on the evolution of Ford as a brand and using the director as a case study of authorship, before addressing the final question in detail.
Conclusions
In his essay, ‘What Is an Author?’, Foucault examines ‘how the author became individualised in a culture like ours’ (Foucault, 1984, p.101), and proposes to ‘deal solely with the relationship between text and author […] in which the text points to this “figure”’ (Foucault, 1984, p.101). Ford’s evolution from a named individual to ‘this “figure”’, a brand labelled ‘John Ford’, can be pinpointed to the year 1924, and the release, and subsequent box-office success, of The Iron Horse (1924). The director had already undergone a number of transitions in terms of his name alone, starting out as John Martin Feeney, then ‘Bull’ Feeney during his football-playing college days, before moving to Hollywood and adopting the name Jack Ford, until in 1923 he directed his first film, Cameo Kirby (1923), under the name John Ford.
My research shows that the nature of the promotional materials dating from his working career at Universal indicates a conscious attempt on behalf of the studio to heighten Ford’s profile in line with that of Harry Carey, with his name growing in prominence on publicity posters and stills from 1917 through to 1921. As indicated, however, by 1921 he was still plain Jack Ford, and nowhere near the stature of an individualised ‘name’ director at that point in time.
His move to Fox was therefore astute as well as mercenary, as the director’s earnings increased by approximately $10,000 the year after he left Universal (McBride, 2003, p.130). Fox was a more eminent studio than Universal, and, as indicated in Chapter Six on the early Fox years, Ford’s work on prestige productions, such as The Village Blacksmith (1922) and Cameo Kirby (1923), provided a foundation upon which the director and the studio were able to slowly but surely strengthen his reputation both inside and outside of the industry. It is ironic that practically all of the films Ford made for Fox prior to The Iron Horse were not Westerns, apart from Three Jumps Ahead (1923) and North of Hudson Bay (1924), both with cowboy star Tom Mix, but seemingly inevitable that the catalyst for the director’s metamorphosis from man to brand should be a super-Western. As demonstrated via the inclusion of studio promotional materials from the 1920s, Ford eventually shared the heightened profiles of other name directors of the time such as Frank Borzage and Raoul Walsh. The beginning of his journey from an anonymous director for hire to that of a fully branded name, both in terms of Ford the man and Ford the label, can therefore be dated to the year 1924.
In examining the auteur theory through a case study of Ford’s early work, the conclusion is that the evolution of John Ford’s reputation from the ‘man’ to the ‘brand’ develops in parallel along with the advancement of his perceived status as an auteur. In accordance with certain aspects of Foucault’s theory on authorship, Ford is defined as a figure that is seen to guarantee a set of cultural values specific to the author in question. This work also demonstrates that authorship, in film at any rate, is a construction formed through a confluence of a number of factors: studio marketing, choice of genre, the external validation of a director’s work through non-studio texts, public appeal and box-office success, along with the consistent reference to themes and patterns in a filmmaker’s work that are of personal interest to the individual director.
The originality of the thesis lies primarily in its approach towards emphasising that the ‘Fordian sensibility’ is created through a combination of Ford as a label or brand, which in turn encompasses Ford’s distinctive approach to genre, and the evolution of a style that is recognisable to the spectator. The motifs most constantly associated with Ford in academic scholarship are the primary antimonies of East versus West, and civilisation versus wilderness, as defined by Peter Wollen; and Scott Eyman and Peter Duncan’s list of themes incorporating community, nostalgia for the South, disintegration of family and outsider as man of action. The thesis demonstrates that these motifs, along with the theme of class and certain visual motifs that I have identified in the earlier films, such as low-angle action shots and figures overwhelmed by landscape, are all present and identifiable right from the outset of Ford’s directing career. As we would expect, these motifs evolve, develop, and mature over time until they reach their most sophisticated form in the later sound films.
When examining the thematic motifs Ford interrogates in his early work, we must also consider to what extent Ford himself knowingly contributed towards the creation of his own ‘author-function’, or brand. This conclusion suggests that, in emphasising certain motifs that were personal to himself and his history, such as family, religion and ritual, the director consciously contributed towards the construction of his own authorial style in the early years, as much as he contributed towards the public perception of ’John Ford’ in his later years. For example, this work shows that the mother-love films in particular were a victim not only of audience apathy but also, in Ford’s case, the director’s somewhat ambivalent attitude towards the power of the matriarch in his own family. Other themes such as ethnicity and class slowly make their way towards the foreground of Ford’s work, along with the visual motifs of landscape and wilderness, all of which eventually claim permanent residence in his films.
This is of course by no means the end of the process that created ‘John Ford’. In his later years Ford perpetuated the myth that he was born in Ireland, consciously reinforcing the popular impression of himself as an immigrant, and projecting the persona of a bad-tempered, irascible director who gave short shrift to critics who attempted to impose their own reading or analysis upon his work. This in itself is evidence of a conscious awareness of how Ford himself wanted to be viewed by the general public. In reality, Ford had a sense of who he was, and how those who knew the real John Ford, as well as the brand ‘John Ford’, regarded him. As the actress Carroll Baker recounts, ‘I told Mr Ford I wanted to wear my hair down for Cheyenne Autumn (1964) […] like the women in Ingmar Bergman’s films. […] As I was leaving [Ford] said, “Oh, Ingmar Bergman – you mean the fella that called me the greatest director in the world?”’ (in Bogdanovich, 1978, p.18).
Despite Ford having made his last full-length feature film as far back as 1966, it is significant that his legacy continues to endure, and that the director’s work and recognisably ‘Fordian’ components of style are still referenced within contemporary culture. For example, the main character of the Stephen King novel, 11.22.63, published in 2011, adopts a disguise that brings to mind ‘an outlaw in a John Ford western’ (King, 2011, p.559). A NASA scientist remarked in an interview that pictures of the landscape of Mars beamed back to earth ‘reminded him of “something out of a John Ford movie”, referring to the director of such cowboy classis as Stagecoach’ (Whipple, 2012, p.14). Filmmakers such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and John Milius, all quote or reference Ford in their own work. For example, as Arthur Eckstein points out, ‘In the original Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), George Lucas has Luke Skywalker discover the destruction of his foster parents’ home in scenes that – shot-for-shot – pay homage to Martin Pauley’s horror at the destruction of his foster family in The Searchers (1956)’ (Eckstein and Lehman, 2004, p.45). My thesis contributes towards the understanding of the importance of Ford as a recognisable name and brand, and emphasises the popularity and relevance of a director who continues to be name-checked and referenced cinematically over the four decades since his death in 1973.
In reaching my conclusions on the last research question dealing with the external factors that shaped John Ford’s style and aesthetic, it is necessary to look at all of the influences covered in the main chapters of the thesis separately.
Other artists
Chapters Four, Five, and Seven demonstrate that there were four main individuals who influenced Ford’s work more than any other in the years 1917 to 1930, the result of which is palpably discernible in the films he produced throughout this period. The first of these was Ford’s older brother, Francis. The thesis reveals that reference to themes such as burial as ritual, and civilisation versus wilderness, can be linked in the work of John Ford back to the films of his older sibling. My research also indicates that Ford adopts other aspects of his brother’s aesthetic in his own work, including the visual motif of figures filmed against the horizon, and the constant reference to Abraham Lincoln which pervades his films.
As a number of Ford scholars have pointed out, D.W. Griffith became a defining influence on Ford and practically every other director who followed in his footsteps. However, the textual analysis of Ford’s extant silent titles reveals that the influence of Griffith on the young director’s visual style dissipates from about the mid-1920s onwards. It is suggested that Ford’s intuition in adopting aspects of the visual, rather than the thematic, components of Griffith’s style ensured that the young director maintained an individual approach to cinematic expression, gradually developing his own distinctive aesthetic and technique. A close look at Ford’s late 1920s Fox titles shows how Ford’s admiration for F.W. Murnau is reflected in the director’s adoption of a more mobile and fluid movement of the camera, as witnessed in Four Sons (1928) and Hangman’s House (1928). The use of visual examples in Chapter Seven discloses that Murnau’s expressionistic mise-en-scène is also apparent in these films. Although Ford’s penchant for long takes and the moving camera would soon disappear from his work, he would continue to occasionally utilise Murnau’s style of lighting and use of shadows in his later sound films.
My research clarifies, however, that Harry Carey was the single most important influence on Ford during the early years. The director’s close personal and professional association with Carey was instrumental in Ford working almost exclusively within the Western genre for the four years he was employed by Universal. The close textual analysis of the extant Ford / Carey Universal titles, as referenced in Chapter Five, shows a definite evolutionary shift in the persona of Cheyenne Harry from that of a ‘good bad man’ character as a seeker of domestication and a settled life, to a character that would eventually personify the Fordian protagonist as an outsider and a man of action, albeit one who still yearns for home. In doing so the thesis also reveals the direct link between Cheyenne Harry and later Fordian figures such as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (1946), Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956) and Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance(1962). Ford’s films with Carey indicate a move towards foregrounding the main character as more of an outsider than an established member of the community, at the same time marginalising the then generic romantic subplot. This shift in narrative focus becomes a mainstay of Ford’s later work, highlighting the director’s empathy for borderline characters on the fringes of society.
Biographical
As pointed out in the earlier chapters, Ford was incorporating aspects of the biographical into his work at a very early point in his career. Ford’s ethnicity and family background are a constant, and his Irishness and religious upbringing are repeatedly referenced in his work. The close analysis presented in Chapter Six and Chapter Seven of the 1920s titles that Ford directed at Fox, such as The Shamrock Handicap (1926), The Iron Horse (1924), 3 Bad Men (1926), Mother Machree (1928), Hangman’s House (1928), and Riley the Cop (1928), indicate Ford’s growing zeal for integrating Irish characters into all of the genres in which he was required to work. The director’s empathy for the immigrant experience of the Irish, informed by the experiences of his own parents, can be detected in The Shamrock Handicap (1926) and Mother Machree (1928) in particular, leading to the conclusion that Irishness inhabits the director’s work as a recurring ‘Fordian motif’ as much as family, community, and ritual. The early twentieth-century migrant experience is depicted in The Shamrock Handicap (1926) and Mother Machree (1928), and it is a subject also touched upon in The Iron Horse (1924).
The presence of these thematic motifs in Ford’s films is perhaps inevitable. However, although it is unsurprising that the director expressed aspects of his own life in his chosen medium, my research indicates that Ford referenced these personal motifs an inordinate number of times throughout his early work, more so than would be expected in such a young director at that point in his career. This work proposes that the constant presence of family and community in Ford’s silent films, depicted either literally, as in Straight Shooting (1927), or figuratively, as in Upstream (1927), is directly linked to Ford’s own personal background as the youngest surviving child of a large family.
The director’s screen families invariably revolve around a strong and caring matriarchal figure. The mothers in his films represent the emotional core of the family group, and they usually suffer accordingly, as depicted in Mother Machree (1928) and Four Sons (1928). Ford’s families disintegrate and fracture, usually through the pressure of outside factors such as war or conflict within the community, and are eventually reunited again, but rarely as a complete unit. It is also apparent that he favours the matriarch above all other members of the group. McBride points out that Ford’s ‘habit of sentimentalising mothers in his movies […] should be a tip-off that beneath that overabundance of feeling, some forbidden emotions may be lurking’ (McBride, 2003, p.45). This wariness towards his own mother, along with the forbidden emotions that McBride speaks of, may also go some way to explain why Ford abandoned the mother-love genre for a less emotionally complicated approach. His later work still featured the mother figure but the matriarchal protagonists in these films tend to offer unequivocal love with no strings attached. As my research indicates, the continued emphasis on the central role of the matriarch within the family would suggest that this motif is not so much a consequence of studio convention, but is more a corollary of the director’s relationship with his own mother.
The close reading of Ford’s early work, as afforded through the collection of his extant silent films gathered together for this thesis, indicates that other sub-themes grouped under the motif of family, notably the destruction of the family group, can be detected in the director’s work practically from the beginning of his filmmaking career. I suggest in my research that Ford’s obsession with the workings of the family group can be traced to the complexity of his relationship with his siblings and parents, his mother in particular. He felt he was the ‘baby’ or the ‘cudjeen’ (McBride, 2003, p.38) of the family, a position in the communal group that traditionally invites more love and attention than other members of the family. The underlying theme of family that Ford therefore actually promotes in his films is the transient nature of the social group, one in which members leave and join at a moment’s notice. In the films of John Ford, a family is never always totally complete. It is just a shelter in which those protagonists who live on the fringes of society occasionally take refuge, whether it is Cheyenne Harry in Straight Shooting (1917), Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940) or Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956).
As for religion, it has been demonstrated that the director’s representation of this theme in his early films evolves in a manner dependent upon the genre in which it is referenced. For example, Ford’s Westerns, such as The Scarlet Drop(1918) and 3 Bad Men (1926), tend to emphasise a more old-fashioned depiction of piety within the community. On the other hand, the Irish films, such as The Shamrock Handicap (1926), and Mother Machree (1928), stress the observance of ritual and the subservience of his protagonists towards the Catholic Church. My close textual analysis of the more contemporary-themed films, such as The Blue Eagle (1926) and Hangman’s House (1928), reveals Ford’s tendency to elaborate on the status of the holy man as a beacon of morality within the social group. The research carried out on the subject of religion, and particularly Catholicism, in Ford’s work, shows that it is integral to understanding the nature of Ford as a director, as well as defining the relationship in his work between his own personal interests and the objective concerns of genre.
The thesis establishes that the major Fordian theme of ritual, and the associated sub-themes of communal eating, funerals, and music, are all present in Ford’s silent work. They may not be fully evolved from the outset but the fact of their presence at such an early stage in the director’s work shows that Ford was already exploring patterns and motifs that would serve to underpin his directorial style. Even when working in a silent medium, Ford demonstrates his ability to define character through music, invoking camaraderie and the common purpose of community.
On the subject of class, Ford attempted through interviews to establish his credentials as one of the proletariat. Numerous biographers such as Joseph McBride, Scott Eyman and Andrew Davis record that Ford appeared to have enjoyed a fairly well-nourished upbringing, but that does not necessarily preclude membership of the working class. My research suggests that Ford’s interest in the plight of the disenfranchised is not so much a matter of personal biographical experience, but more a reflection of the director’s individual politics.
Peter Bogdanovich suggests that ‘it would be instructive (in fact schools might do well making it a regular course) to run Ford’s films about the United States in historical chronology – because he has told the American saga in human terms and made it come alive’ (Bogdanovich, 1978, p.22). John Ford’s predilection for American history and the settling of the West grows from a mere hint of interest in Universal films such as The Scarlet Drop (1918), to a full-blown celebration of frontier life in The Iron Horse(1924) and 3 Bad Men (1926). Along the way, as shown, his early films reference the American Civil War, the building of the railroads and the inevitable displacement of the Native American. My research also shows that Ford acknowledges the Irish Republican struggle in Hangman’s House (1928), albeit superficially, and the First World War in both The Blue Eagle (1926) and Four Sons (1928).
Ford’s regard for the military obviously has its beginnings in his silent work, but a close look at the extant silent titles shows that this is not really apparent in the director’s films until the mid-1920s. After The Blue Eagle (1926), Ford’s admiration for the army and the navy becomes more overt, with the following films Four Sons (1928), Salute (1929) and Men Without Women (1930) setting the foundation for later military titles such as The Lost Patrol (1934), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), and of course the notable cavalry trilogy of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950). All of the early pre-1930 films mentioned touch in one way or another upon the rituals associated with military life, such as marching, traditional music and patriotism. The caveat to this is of course the prejudice Ford displays towards the actions of the Union army during the American Civil War, and the thesis describes examples of the director’s overt preference for the Confederate military and their ‘civilised’ conduct in matters of warfare. As Cowie notes, ‘Ford was intrigued less by the war as such than by its aftermath – the convulsive effect on survivors of both North and South [and] the nostalgia for some elusive graciousness of life in the antebellum South’ (Cowie, 2004, p.17).
Institutional
It would be almost impossible for Ford’s style not to have been forged and influenced in some way by working within the institutional factors that prevailed inside the Hollywood studio system. Out of all of the influences inherent within an industrialised approach to filmmaking, the thesis highlights two factors in particular that continued to help shape Ford’s work throughout his career. The first is genre, in which Ford indulged his passion for the Western in his early apprenticeship at Universal. It is an interest that was fortuitously in tune with the demands of both the studio and the public. Conversely, as pointed out, during his early career at Fox, over half of the films Ford made between 1920 and 1930 dealt with more contemporary themes in terms of narrative content. This suggests a specific policy by the Fox Corporation to concentrate on material felt to be more relevant to the audiences of the time. When Ford and the studio turned their attention to the past, the films tended to possess a more epic quality than the modern-day titles. Indeed, the super-Western The Iron Horse (1924), 3 Bad Men (1926), and Ford’s World War I film, Four Sons (1928), were more like road show event features than the standard fare usually on offer to the public during the 1920s. The the thesis concludes that Ford’s focus on contemporary subject matter while based at Fox was therefore shaped more by the studio than by the director’s own personal interests and taste.
The second major Hollywood studio influence on Ford’s work emerges from the policy of hiring a stock company. It has been demonstrated quite clearly that the director’s employment of trusted actors gave Ford the opportunity to practise a type of cinematic shorthand in which certain characters are instantly recognisable and familiar to the spectator almost from the start of the narrative. The screen personas of actors such as Harry Carey, J. Farrell McDonald and George O’Brien are as familiar in the early films as John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and Victor McLaglen are in the later years.
Cultural
Regarding Ford’s attitude towards the depiction of ethnic minorities in his early films, my research suggests that the director was prepared to play to a contemporary audience who were content with dominant stereotypes of the time. The standard portrayal of African American characters in the 1920s veered towards the lower end of the social scale, and most black actors were confined to playing menial lackeys or low paid helpers. It is also evident, however, that on occasion Ford rises above the simplistic stereotypical depiction of minority groups as portrayed in his very early Universal films, and progresses towards a more enlightened representation of both Native and black Americans in particular. Although Ford’s depiction of African Americans is still considered questionable to this day, the research suggests that the director at least attempted in early films, such as The Shamrock Handicap (1926), to invest his black figures with an element of character and personality that was lacking previously both in his own work and in the standard studio fare of the time. It has been proven that, on occasion, Ford did push at the boundaries and restrictions of a studio system that repressed a more enlightened representation of African Americans.
Closely aligned to the portrayal of black Americans in Ford’s films is the director’s enthusiasm, as highlighted in the previous chapters, to depict and explore the Civil War in his early films, along with his obvious admiration for the South. There is an obvious contradiction at work here. Ford himself does not seem to debate or question the values of a community founded on the principle of slavery – despite the fact that he is clearly aware of slavery, as demonstrated in a number of his later sound films, such as Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). How is it that the director can admire the cultured aspects of Southern society, yet ignore the treatment of black Americans by the very society that he admires?
One conclusion to consider is that Ford’s apparent refusal to blame the South for slavery is indicative of a society reluctant to own up to the failings of its own past, and Ford’s place within that system. There is now a suggestion that the pressure to repress the history of slavery was the result of a broader collective social amnesia, rather than a trend specific to Hollywood and the entertainment industry alone. The disinclination for white American society to face up to its own past is highlighted by David Von Drehle who, writing on the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, states that, in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, ‘people were eager to forget [that] Americans both Southern and Northern flocked to minstrel shows and snapped up happy slave stories. Whites were not ready to deal with the humanity and needs of freed slaves, and these entertainments assured them there was no need to’ (Drehle, 2011, p.35). Drehle maintains that ‘by the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg [1913] it was nearly impossible to know from the commemoration why the war had happened and who had won. […] Historians [only] began to break the grip of forgetfulness after World War II, as the civil rights movement restarted the march towards equality’ (Drehle, 2011, p.36). Ford’s reticence to fully engage with the questionable past of America may therefore be more to do with the prevailing attitude of a white society not yet prepared to face the consequences of the past, rather than a personal choice by the director to avoid the subject of slavery altogether in his work.
It should be pointed out that there is no evidence from any of Ford’s biographers to suggest that he was himself racist, rather than simply shaped by the dominant social values of the time. In a recent interview Tag Gallagher comes to the director’s defence by stating that ‘Ford is virtually the only filmmaker in Hollywood between the wars who exposes and denounces racism’ (D’Angela, 2010, p.1).
With reference to the depiction of Native Americans in Ford’s early films, the thesis suggests that 3 Bad Men (1926) contains the beginnings of what would eventually become a more informative and sensitive portrayal of this ethnic group in Ford’s later work. The Universal films are more stereotypical in their approach to Native Americans onscreen, and right up until the Fox titles, North of Hudson Bay (1923) and The Iron Horse (1924), the research reveals that Ford is still rendering these characters as ciphers and figures of fun. A couple of years later, with 3 Bad Men (1926), there is a clear evolution in the way that the Native American is now cast as the silent victim of progression, foreshadowing a change in the way Ford portrayed America’s indigenous inhabitants in later films such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Searchers (1956), and, of course, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).
As pointed out in Chapter Six and Chapter Seven, the appearance of other ethnicities such as Italians and Germans in the mid to late-1920s films at Fox indicates Ford’s interest in the multi-cultural aspect of American society. Nearly all of his later films feature a plethora of ethnic groups, irrespective of genre, with Swedish and Irish characters populating the Westerns for example, alongside the Native and black American figures. Ethnicity is a cornerstone of the ‘Fordian sensibility’, grounding Ford’s films in a historically realistic world where not all of the characters are white and Anglo-Saxon.
Although the cultural motif of civilisation versus wilderness is entrenched almost from the beginning in Ford’s work, it is implied that there remains a tangible element of scepticism in his cinematic representation of the East and modernity. This ambiguity in the director’s work is difficult to reconcile, unless his pronounced nostalgia for an earlier, less complicated time, is taken into account. Many of the director’s films inhabit the space between the post-civilisation of the West, and a pre-modern society before significant technological advancement. Films such as Just Pals (1920), Lightnin’ (1925) and The Shamrock Handicap (1926) reflect a simpler and more innocent time, in which civilisation reigns along with ritual and communal ceremony. Corruption and lawlessness are ever present of course, but the protagonists of these films are content to live a simple life, unencumbered by a need to totally embrace the fast moving industrialisation that threatens to eventually overwhelm their lives. For example, the move towards a more sympathetic attitude to Native Americans indicates that Ford questions the benefits of civilisation when it subsumes a way of life more in tune with the wilderness; in his later work he confronts the sense of what is lost through the imposition of a supposedly more-enlightened society. David Thomson makes a similar observation, suggesting that ‘history for Ford is the terrible obstacle of a man who refused to face modern times’ (Thomson, 2008a, p.520).
When considering the mise-en-scène of Ford’s early films, the influence of nineteenth-century artists and photographers on the director cannot be underestimated. Apart from the imagery reminiscent of Remington, Russell and Schreyvogel that permeates his early Westerns, Larry May suggests that ‘Ford […] transferred into movies some of the principles of modern art [as well], particularly multiple spaces and scenes photographed within a flat picture plane that suggested that the world was less a transparent set of truths than a work of art made by human effort’ (May, 2002, p.145). The numerous examples in Chapter Five and Chapter Six of how Ford’s early work mirrored the images of some of these key artists demonstrate quite clearly the impact of the imagery captured by these painters and photographers upon the mise-en-scèneof Ford’s films. This work shows that his passion for the artists of the old West also helped to shape the twin Fordian themes of landscape and wilderness, and his guiding notion of landscape as character. These motifs would continue to evolve throughout the director’s silent period, and successfully make the transition into his sound work.
Technological
Edward Buscombe contends that ‘the test of a theory is whether it produces new knowledge’ (Buscombe, 1993, p.32); this work has achieved that end by combining an auteurist study of Ford’s silent films with a consideration of the effect that social factors such as technological innovation had upon the director’s early body of work. When Ford began his film making career in 1917, the camera equipment on offer to the film industry was very basic in terms of design and functionality. By the end of the silent period, cameras had necessarily become more sophisticated in order to cater to the rigours of capturing both picture and sound simultaneously. In the interim, Ford took it upon himself to introduce more mobility to the mise-en-scène of his work, evolving from the crude attempts at capturing moving action in his early Universal Westerns through to the choreographed long takes of later silent films such as 3 Bad Men (1926) and Four Sons (1928). Although Ford eventually dropped the long take and overt mobility of the camera in his later work, there is still an evolution in the director’s style from 1917 to 1930 that cannot be dismissed purely in terms of the cinematic experimentation of a young filmmaker.
The research presented in Chapter Five indicates Ford’s ability at a very early point in his career to work within the constraints imposed by primitive filmmaking conditions. The early set design as seen in Straight Shooting (1917) suggests that one of the most enduring of Fordian motifs – figures framed in a doorway – may have resulted purely from a utilitarian requirement to place the actors in a more prominently lit area of the set due to lack of light. Using visual examples from Ford’s early Universal Westerns, the thesis also shows how the visual motif of figures silhouetted against the landscape evolves in conjunction with development in lens technology.
My research proposes that the occasional advances in film stock and tinting were not as influential as lighting and set design. More sophisticated lighting techniques brought clarity to Ford’s mise-en-scène that was previously absent. However, it was the coming of sound that had the most effect on the director’s sensibility. As detailed in Chapter Seven, the era of sound finally enabled Ford to expand the motif of music in his films from a silent image of someone singing, accompanied by a title card of music, to a more immediately powerful combination of the visual and the aural.
As also covered in detail in Chapter Seven, the introduction of sound enabled Ford to instil the mise-en-scène of military tradition and ritual, such as soldiers marching off to war or the pure celebration of martial music, with an aural motif that accentuates his admiration and patriotic pride for the armed forces. The introduction of sound effects allows the director to infuse his work with an element of reality that he had been unable to express in his earlier films. The tolling of a church bell, the murmuring of a crowd, and the laughter of children add a further element of verisimilitude for the spectator; a dimension that was only occasionally provided previously through the accompaniment of live music. Obviously this is not unique purely to the films directed by John Ford. What cannot be disputed, however, is that, when faced with the opportunity to introduce spoken dialogue in his work for the first time, it is notable that the words, uttered by a dying soldier in Four Sons, should be devoted to that most Fordian of characters, the mother figure. The innovation of sound underscores a sensibility that had already evolved, or would continue to evolve, in many of the director’s later films.
This approach to authorship, tracing back the motifs and themes from more familiar work to pre-sound titles, could readily be applied to the oeuvre of other key filmmakers who began their careers during the silent period, such as Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Alan Dwan, Raoul Walsh, and Frank Borzage.
General Conclusions
A close reading of all of Ford’s extant films leaves the viewer with a sense that the director longs for a past that may never have actually existed, a past that he mourns for from the outset of his career. He signals this by depicting history as he would have wished it to be, with the lost cause of the South, for example, portrayed in a noble and perhaps naïve light, out of keeping with contemporary audience sensibilities. This does not mean that the films of John Ford should be consigned purely to the past both in terms of content and sentiment. On the contrary, a detailed analysis of Ford’s work indicates a vision of America’s past that questions the oppressive tenet of Manifest Destiny upon which the country was established. This may go some way to explaining why my own personal response to viewing Ford’s films, and I include both his silent and sound work in this observation, invokes a nostalgic yearning for a more simplified way of life, even if this vision of a simpler life is purely a cinematic construct that reflects the director’s own personal vision.
Though I have adopted a measured and objective academic approach to viewing and analysing John Ford’s films, it cannot be denied that, more often than not, the director’s preference for those themes grounded in his own life and personal experience initiate more sympathy and recognition in my reaction to his work than any other aspect of the ‘Fordian sensibility’. It is the personal characteristics of this auteur’s work – those which clearly express the visions, beliefs and memories of John Ford, the man beneath the brand – that continue to speak to me most powerfully
Afterword
Since I began this thesis back in 2006, materials relating to two of Ford’s silent films have been discovered; a complete copy of Upstream (1927) and the trailer for Strong Boy (1929), his last totally silent film. Other films associated with Ford such as The Battle of Bull Run (Francis Ford, 1913), and The Bandit’s Wager (Francis Ford, 1916), have also come to light over the last six years. The inaugural Irish Film and Television Academy (IFTA) symposium on John Ford was held in Dublin in June 2012, at which both The Iron Horse (1924) and Upstream (1927) were shown to the attendant audience. This event, coupled with the continuing possibility that more of Ford’s previously presumed to be lost silent films may still come to light, should ensure that interest in the director’s early work will continue to prevail in the near future. This means that my work will not be the final and definitive statement regarding John Ford’s transition from journeyman director to becoming ‘John Ford’. In fact, it may just be the beginning.
Steve Mayhew 