Hawks on Hawks

25. John Ford

137 25 John Ford What do you think you have in common with John Ford? Well, a great deal. He was a good director when I started, and I copied him every time I could. It’s just as if you were a writer, you would read Hemingway and Faulkner and John Dos Passos and Willa Cather and a lot of people like that. We were very good friends. I don’t think I’ve done nearly as good a job as Ford has on some things. I think he’s got the greatest vision for a tableau, a long shot, of any man. One of my favorite pictures of all time is The Quiet Man, which I think was just a beautiful picture. Ford, oh, he’s done some things that are just fabulous. And he was the first man to do them. Every time I run into a scene that I think Ford does very well, I stop things and think, “What would he have done there?” And then I go ahead and do it, because he gets more use out of a bad sky—he goes right on shooting whether the weather’s bad or good, and he gets fabulous effects. I was making a picture with Wayne, Red River. We had a burial scene. And the cameraman [Russell Harlan] said, “We better hurry, there’s a cloud coming across that mountain right behind.” So I said to Wayne, “Now, look, you go out there—if you forget your lines, just say anything, keep talking until I tell you to come on in. We’ll make the sound afterwards.” And I waited until the cloud got near, thought of Ford, and started the scene. Then we started the burial service, and the cloud passed right over the whole scene. I told Jack, I said, “Hey, I’ve made one almost as good as you can do—you better go and see it.” Is there anything you think you can do better than Ford? Oh, I think I couldn’t do his brand of humor. His brand of humor was kind of a bucolic travesty of an Irishman, kind of overdrawn characters . I certainly know that I made better comedies than he did. But I don’t think I made better westerns. I don’t think Red River is better than his westerns. He’s a great storyteller. We always used to talk about the differ- Hawks on Hawks 138 ences between the way we did scenes. He’d tell me what things he stole from me, and I’d tell him what things I stole from him, but we did them so differently that it didn’t make any difference whether we stole them. He said if he had a scene that he didn’t think was good enough, he’d do it in a long shot rather than try to punch it up. If I’ve got a scene like that I just try to do it as quick as I can. I don’t think we worked very much the same. I told him he was corny. He said, “Well, you’re so damned sarcastic .” Jack was quite a guy. I saw more of him than anybody, almost, in his last few months because I’d just drop over to the house. He spent most of his time looking at old, old westerns on television—you know, those cheap westerns that were made in about a week. And he was still bright; he kept his senses. The last time I went out to see him, he said goodbye Ford directing The Long Voyage Home in 1940. A scene from The Quiet Man, which Hawks calls “one of my favorite pictures of all time,” with Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. “Hey, I’ve made one almost as good as you can do”: a burial scene from Red River, with Wayne, Brennan, and Mickey Kuhn (left to right). Hawks on Hawks 140 to me. I walked out and stopped to speak to his daughter, and he yelled, “Is Howard gone yet?” She said no. “I want to see him!” He said, “I want to say goodbye to you.” I said goodbye. He yelled again, “Is he still there?” And he said, “I want to say goodbye to you.” So I called Duke Wayne and said, “Duke, you’d better get down here. I think he...