"Searching for John Ford" by Joseph McBride

New biographies tell of the director who loved Katharine Hepburn, drove John Wayne to tears and made Stalin applaud.

By Allen Barra

Jul 31, 2001 | John Ford is to America what Rudyard Kipling is to England: a constant reminder of our past sins and triumphs, a consummate craftsman and professional hack, a flag-waver who keeps nudging us, if not about the white man's burden, then at least about our responsibilities as the masters of Manifest Destiny. George Orwell wrote that Kipling produced "good bad poems ... capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them." Orwell could have been writing about Ford's films. I once asked the director Jim Sheridan what it was like to grow up in Ireland and watch "The Quiet Man" on TV.

"My family would gather round the TV," said Sheridan, "and watch. We couldn't watch the bloody thing without cringing." So what was the verdict? He shrugged. "We cringed. And we watched."

I can't think of a more appropriate reaction to Ford's oeuvre. How can an intelligent person be expected to react to the thick, rich blend of sentimentality, brutality, chauvinism and homilies in Ford's films -- including, among the major titles, "The Informer," "Drums Along The Mohawk," "Young Mr. Lincoln," "Stagecoach," "How Green Was My Valley," "My Darling Clementine," "They Were Expendable," "Fort Apache," "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon," "The Searchers" and, of course, "The Quiet Man" -- without cringing at least a little? Yet I don't know how 20th century film can be studied without putting Ford up front. Who else could qualify as nostalgic poster boy for the Republican Party while also having been the favorite filmmaker of Joseph Stalin? How is it possible for us not to respond to the man that Orson Welles considered our greatest director?

John Martin Feeney -- he later claimed to have been born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna in order to seem even more Irish, as if that were necessary -- was born in Maine in 1895. A liar of insane proportion, he padded his bio with an imaginary high school diploma as well as college educations from schools he never attended, and he claimed to have gone on spy missions for the Irish Republican Army and the U.S. government -- stories that contained more fiction than his films. Ford broke into the movies in the silent era when many directors (William Desmond, Allan Dwan, William Wellman, Raoul Walsh) were Irish, but as Scott Eyman puts it, Ford was "the only one to play the professional Irishman." It was a role that lasted a lifetime.

That lifetime has now filled two massive volumes: Eyman's "Print the Legend" (originally published to great critical acclaim by Simon & Schuster two years ago and now available in paperback) and Joseph McBride's "Searching For John Ford," just out from St. Martin's Press. Both succeed as biography and criticism better than any book that has preceded them, but unfortunately they also contain much of the same information regarding Ford's life and loves. (Both, for example, examine Ford's legendary infatuation with the young Katharine Hepburn, and both shy away from actually declaring it a physical relationship). Eyman and McBride will tell you pretty much all you could want to know about the man, and both will make you glad you never had to work for him.

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