30 Years of Brilliance: 1930-1959
John Ford, was a consummate professional, largely indifferent to the critical acclaim he began to receve late in his career. Critics have celebrated Ford for his intense picotrialism - not just of the beautiful landscapes his films made characteristic through evocative reuse (notable Arizona's Monument Valley) - but also for grouped human figures, especially posed statically and iconically. Also much praised has been Ford's ability to communicate through images rather than relying on the script, which he insisted be reduced to a bare minimum.
Working within a system where he sometimes had little choice about projects, Ford was usually able to make something interesting out of bad scripts and poorly chosen casts. relatively weak films, such as 'Mary of Scotland' in 1936, do not manifest the personality prized by auteurist critics, but they are competently mounted entertainment. At his best, Ford made some of the most memorable films Hollywood ever released. 'Young Mr. Lincoln' in 1939 shows Ford's sense of visual beauty at its most impressive, transforming a somewhat pedestrian script into a memorable hagiography.
Also in 1939, 'Stagecoach' resurrected the Western from B-programme status. The movie provided a memorable gallery of stereotypes and transformed John Wayne's good/bad guy into a national myth that Ford exploited in a series of other Westerns, such as 'Rio Grande' in 1950, before deconstructing the myth in both 'the Searchers' in 1956 and 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' in 1962, both of which expose the shallowness and, perhaps, the pathology of the loner who refuses civilized life.
Before the genre revisionists of the post-studio era, Ford had already explored the Western's ideological blind spots and exclusions. 'Sergeant Routledge' in 1960 treats racism, whereas 'Cheyenne Autumn' in 1964 takes the viewpoint of Native Americans pushed to desperation by the threat of extinction. Ford's work in the genre, however, tends to lack the moral subtlety of the 1950's adult Western at its best.
Ford's Weserns generally derive their force and vigor from the exploitation of stereotpes. 'Liberty Valance' deconstructs the myth of the good/bad guy by both endorsing it and following its tragic logic to conclusion. But by never showing the physical pain outlaw violence causes others to endure Ford fails to question its legitimacy.
Set in the U.S. Civil War, 'The Horse Soldiers' in 1959 opposes gung-ho cavalry commander Wayne, whose loyalty is to the mission, to his regimental surgeon, who sorrows over the grisly cost of war, but the philosophical debate is scarcely pursued beyond a rough and ready clash of sensibilities, to be resolved, in true Fordian fashion, by a fist fight.
Ford also had no little success as an adaptor of prestige literary properties, for which carefully designed visuals provided the proper atmosphere.In Ford's screening of John Steinbeck's 'The Grapes Of Wrath, ', the poverty and ruin of the Dust Bowl era is evoked with a canny mixture of real location shooting and carefully dressed sound stages. This exteriorizing technique, with a concomitant de-emphasizing of dialogue, is less successful in 'The Fugitive in 1947, based on Graham Greene's 'The Power and the Glory', a novel about the inner spiritual life and the inextricability of good with evil.
Best loved of Ford's films, however, were those on Celtic themes, most notably 'The Quiet Man' in 1952 and 'How Green Was My Valley' in 1941, both of which effectively evoke family and tradition, village life, and a distrust of modern ways.
