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CHAPTER FIVE: Directed by John Ford
- University Press of Mississippi
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C H A P T E R F I V E DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD There was a youngfellow named FORD Who put all his troupers aboard He took all those green faces To God's great OPEN SPACES To make a bigfeature—OH LORD. THE IRON HORSE LOCATION NEWSPAPER, PUBLISHED ON A TRAIN EN ROUTE TO NEVADA, DECEMBER 31,1923 SEEMED TObe foundering throughout much of the 1920s. In hisper1 sonal life, it was a time of emotional confusion, when he seemed beset by conflicting pressures he barely understood. Creatively, that period was among the most uneven of Ford's career, a time of widely divergent subject matter and sometimes bizarre stylistic experimentation. For all its turmoil, however, it was a creative and necessary process. He was an ambitious man in search of his own identity. With the rediscovery in recent years of several Ford silent films previously thought lost, some unexpected facets of his developing artistic personality have been revealed. But Andrew Sarris s observation in his seminal 1968 survey The American Cinema still seems judicious: "If John Ford had died or retired at the end of 1929, he would have deserved at most a footnote in film history. The Iron Horse [1924] and Four Sons [1928] attracted some attention in their time . . . [and] Ford's technical competence has been established even at this early stage in his career, but up to 1929he cannot be considered one of the major artists of the medium. His personal vision has not been developed to the level of a Lubitsch or a Lang at this stage of film history." After his fertile apprenticeship within a narrow generic range at Universal, the early twenties at Fox saw Ford accepting the role of a complaisantjourneyman director, directing a wide variety of mostly impersonal projects undertaken to shore up his standing in the industry.With the collapse of his brother Franks career serving as a sobering warning of what might happen if he tried to buck the system, Jack was at his most pliable and self-effacing from this period into the h 1 3 6 ^ S E A R C H I N G F O R J O H N F O R D early thirties. He was able to make a few films that broke new ground and fired his imagination, and he learned how to imbue even the humblest, most hackneyed script with specialqualities of craftsmanship, warmth, and humor. But for the most part, he was out to prove that he was reliable and versatile, a man of all genres who could be handed a script the day before shooting and yet make something slick and professional out of it. He succeeded all too well in those limited ambitions, necessaryas they might have been to advance his career. To reward Ford for signing his long-term contract, Fox offered him a trip overseas. What he secretly had in mind was no vacation, but an extraordinary and dangerous adventure. Before departing, he cranked out a pair of melodramas starring Shirley Mason, Jackie (about a Russian ballet dancer in London) and Little Miss Smiles (about a Jewish family living in a New York tenement). It's hard to imagine Ford could have done much with such uncongenial material asJackie, but he may have been able to work some of his own complex feelings about the American "melting pot" experience into Little Miss Smiles. Despite its hackneyed plot, the film offered "pathos and comedy, realistic people and places," noted Exhibitors' Trade Review. But Ford was already becoming impatient with artificial stories, slickly detached craftsmanship, and secondhand emotional experiences. It was time to rediscover who he really was. in November 1921, Ford left on a trip to Ireland. It was his first pilgrimage since boyhood to the country he considered his true homeland. Ireland had become a battleground in the intervening years. Ford had missed most of the Irish war for independence, but the momentous historical events taking place in the land of his parents' birth had roused his deepest ethnic allegiances. The rebellion was sparked by the abortive Easter rising in 1916, the proclamation of an Irish republic, and the subsequent executions of fifteen rebel leaders. The night before his execution, Fenian leader Tom Clarke told his wife that "between this moment and freedom, Ireland will go through hell." Since 1919, the Irish Republican Army, led by their daring commandant, Michael Collins, had been conducting a guerrilla war against the British occupying forces...