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C H A P T E R S E V E N SEAN AND KATE Q: Then you do believe, as a director, in including your point of view in a picture about things that bother you? A: What the hell else does a man live for? FORD, INTERVIEWED BY EMANUEL ElSENBERG IN NEW THEATRE, 1936 HE INCREASINGLY PERSONAL nature of Ford's work in the mid-1930s was manifested in his growing preoccupation with Irish subject matter. As he looked more deeply within his soul and became more confident in his ability to express his feelings on screen, Ford gravitated to stories that reflected his ambivalence toward his ethnic identity, his Irish Catholicism, his guilt-ridden conflicts over money and marital fidelity, and his attempts to reconcile the demands of commercial success with artistic and political integrity. He tested his growing power within the film industry by trying to persuade reluctant studio executives to let him film three Irish projects close to his heart: his cousin Liam O'Flaherty's 1925 novel The Informer, Sean O'Casey's 1926 play The Plough and theStars, and Maurice Walsh's 1933 short story "The Quiet Man." All three projects eventually reached the screen, but each presented enormous difficulties, and Ford was unable to find backing for his film of "The Quiet Man" until the early 1950s. Ford first became acquainted with O'Flaherty when the novelist came to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter in 1932. They soon became drinking buddies. While knocking back enormous quantities of Guinness stout and Irish whiskey, Ford and the left-wing writer from the Aran Islands had many enlightening political discussions, often while sailing on the Araner. O'Flaherty reinforced Dudley Nichols's influence on the leftward development of Ford's political thinking during that period of worldwide political and economic crisis. Ford took an option on The Informer in 1933 and began pitching it to the studios. The book had been filmed in England by German-American T: S E A N A N D K A T E ^ 2 1 5 director Arthur Robison in 1929, but that version did not find an American distributor. Hollywood saw little box-office potential in O'Flaherty's unrelentingly grim story of a renegade Irish Communist named Gypo Nolan who turns in a comrade for a reward of twenty pounds during the civil war of 1921-23. Ever since his brief visit to strife-torn Ireland in 1921 to observe and support his cousin Martin Feeney's IRA activities, Ford had felt a powerful allegiance to the cause of Irish nationhood. But despite his closeness to O'Flaherty, Ford was less interested in The Informer as a vehicle for his or the novelist's political views than as a morality play about the eternal conflict between idealism and human weakness. Such a conflict was raging within Ford's dark personality during the depths of the depression, when his social conscience and growing artistic ambition were making him increasingly discontented with the strictures of the studio system. In Gypo, Ford also could see a cautionary image of his own tendency toward self-destructive and guiltridden behavior; the casting of Victor McLaglen, a larger and coarser simulacrum of Bull Feeney, reinforced the connection. O'Flaherty depicted Gypo as a furtive, isolated, and brutish figure waging an unsuccessful attempt to avoid succumbing to the dark side of human nature. The book describes him as being "like some primeval monster just risen from the slime in which all things had their origin." Before Ford finally received a green light from RKO in October 1934, The Informer was rejected by Fox, Columbia, MGM, Paramount, and Warner Bros, because of its downbeat nature and politically sensitive subject matter. But Ford claimed that the reason he had such trouble convincing a studio to let him film The Informer was that he could not find an executive who would take the time to read the book. He said he eventually succeeded only because of the intercession of an "old friend" who had read the book, Joseph P.Kennedy. The father of future president John F.Kennedy had formed RKO in 1928 with RCA president David Sarnoff to make talking pictures with the RCA Photophone sound process. According to Ford, Kennedy told RKO's staff producers that "he wanted them to get me to direct a picture. They informed Joe I didn't want to do a Western but a picture about 'a rebellion in...

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