Though it's clear that both authors end up with a grudging admiration for Ford, most others will find him a monster; indeed, most of the people who knew him found him to be one. Pandro S. Berman, a producer who worked with Ford, called him "about the meanest man I ever met." To a young actress in an early film he was "an S.O.B., a demonic man. Part of his mercurial personality was to do something he knew was mean or mischievous, then try to justify it." His son Patrick probably summed Ford up best when he called him "A lousy father ... but a good movie director and a good American."

Both Eyman and McBride relate the story of a character actor named Frank Baker who came to Ford begging for money when his wife was in the hospital; Ford screamed at Baker, publicly humiliating him, and then punched him. Then he sent a man to see that Baker's hospital bills were taken care of, proving once again that sentimentality is often found on the other side of the same counterfeit coin as brutality. (It would be a more satisfying story if Baker had come back and thrown the money in Ford's face).

Ford's favorite victim was John Wayne, who knew he had no career without Ford and so endured years of being derided as a draft dodger (which he was, for all intents and purposes; though legally exempt from conscription due to his age and marital status, Wayne repeatedly found excuses not to enlist because it would have hurt his career) and being told that he "walked like a fairy." On more than one occasion, Ford actually sent the most popular male star and movie tough guy in history scurrying off the set in tears. (If you've always hated Wayne, these stories alone are worth the price of the books.)

Politically, Ford was a man of violent contradictions, with the operative word being "violent." While having the guts to make the most popular left-leaning film of pre-World War II Hollywood, "The Grapes Of Wrath," and to defy his Commie-hunting friend Cecil B. DeMille during the McCarthy era, Ford nonetheless embraced a rabid right-wing attitude in the '50s and on through the Vietnam War era.

A monster, yes, and a monster of contradictions, but a fascinating character to read about. (Will any of today's TV-raised, film school-bred directors make movies and lead lives interesting enough to inspire books like these?) McBride has had the terrible bad fortune to have been working on the same great idea at the same time as Eyman, and to have lost out in the Ford biography race by more than a year, but in truth, "Print the Legend" deserves the wider readership even if both books had been published at the same time. Eyman gets to the truth in a hurry and focuses on it; McBride, no doubt trying hard to justify the second enormous book on Ford in two years, pads.

There's an awful lot of information in "Searching For John Ford," but some of it seems quite unnecessary and some of it seems forced and rushed. "I visited Tombstone, Arizona," he tells us, "studying the actual topography of the so-called gunfight at the O.K. Corral, so I could better understand how Ford transformed the sordid real-life story of Wyatt Earp into the grandly romantic Western mythology of "My Darling Clementine." Why bother? Ford's movie isn't set in Tombstone but in Monument Valley in northern Arizona. (It must also be said that McBride botches the complex story of Earp and the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and though he lists my own book, "Inventing Wyatt Earp," in his bibliography, he does not appear to have read it.)

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