Biography: Joseph McBride's weighty biography of movie legend John Ford might seem daunting at first glance, but will definitely reward those who stay the course says Stephen Dixon.
Distant long shots of riders outlined against the horizon . . . clouds scudding over Monument Valley . . . a bitter man, weary from his search, framed in a doorway . . . the trembling hands of a bereaved mother reassembling pieces of a ripped-up photograph of her smiling son. In their heartbreaking beauty and simplicity, moments like these have a timeless potency and are among the images that define the art of film.
"You say someone's called me the greatest poet of the Western saga," their creator grumbled. "I am not a poet, and I wouldn't know what a Western saga is. I would say that is horseshit."
That was a typical comment from John Ford, myth-maker. In Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers and scores of other films, he reinvented the Old West. In The Informer and The Quiet Man, he developed a whimsical version of Irishness that still reverberates all over the world. And around himself he created another myth: the grumpy, intolerant, hard-drinking old martinet who told all the goddamned intellectuals and nancy-boys who pestered him that what he did wasn't art but simply a job of work that kept the bills paid.
In his films and in his life, John Ford preferred to print the legend. Now Joseph McBride has looked behind that legend at a man so sensitive, so tender about his failures as a father and, yes, as an artist, that between movies he locked himself in his study for days, crawling into a sleeping-bag with a case of whiskey beside him, weeping and drinking himself into oblivion. When he became too ill to move, his patient wife had him admitted to hospital, burned the sleeping-bag and waited until the next time.
He was really John Feeney, from Portland, Maine; although both parents had emigrated from Spiddal, they apparently did not know each other when they lived in the Co Galway village, but met and married in the US. John was an indifferent student, mostly ignoring his lessons to draw caricatures of the teachers and cowboys and Indians inspired by the Wild West paintings of Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell, who remained strong visual influences throughout his career.
His older brother, Francis, changed his surname to Ford, became an actor and moved to Hollywood as a director in the early days of movie-making. John followed him, adopted the same surname and, by the early 1920s, had eclipsed Francis. It was in his treatment of Francis that John Ford's streak of cruelty first showed. Not content with bettering his brother - who had become quite famous - he felt the need to humiliate him, relegating him to bit parts in his own films as a doddery town drunk and the like (Francis is the old man who leaves his deathbed to hobble down the street to watch the climactic fight in The Quiet Man).
Culturally confused, trying to define Irishness and America as much for himself as for his public, in his professional life he kept everyone at arm's length by insulting and needling at every opportunity. Even John Wayne, humiliated in front of his co-workers, was reduced to tears on more than one occasion. He liked to trick actors by telling them to get drunk because they weren't needed the next day, then hauling them onto the set hungover, disorientated and malleable. Henry Brandon, who played the Indian chief Scar in The Searchers, told McBride: "At the end of the location we could all have hung John Ford, but then you go to the première and see that he's made you look greater than you've looked in your life, so you're eager to do it again. When you're working with a genius, you put up with a lot."
Orson Welles said: "John Ford was my teacher. My own style had nothing to do with his, but Stagecoach was my movie textbook. I ran it over 40 times [while preparing Citizen Kane in 1940\]. I wanted to learn how to make movies, and that's such a classically perfect one."
Ford is still criticised for the crude ethnic humour that permeates his films, and for perpetuating corny Irish stereotypes. Interestingly, McBride suggests that this stance arose not from Irish-American ignorance, but from an instinctive understanding of the Irish psyche and the belief that "stage Irish" behaviour is a legitimate method of manipulating and outwitting adversaries. He goes on to say that attacking The Quiet Man for not offering a realistic picture of Ireland misses the point; it should be seen as the romantic fantasy of a troubled man (Wayne's Sean Thornton) who is doubly an exile. Having thoroughly explored or imagined the roots of America, in his old age John Ford became a reactionary über-patriot and, alas, is still regarded as a touchstone for US conservatism: Bush's laconic observations about "the folks" he planned to deal with during the current crisis surely owe something to attitudes Ford embedded in the public consciousness during times that were essentially more innocent and spacious.
Ford was a brilliant visual artist with appalling eyesight; he was a wonderful storyteller who pretended to be illiterate. In his films, he extolled the bedrock values of family life above all else, but was an abysmal failure in his own family life. Once a defender of civil liberties, he became a crusader against the Red Menace.
At a thudding 800-plus pages, McBride's portrait of this complicated and often unhappy man seems daunting, but the text - 30 years of writing and researching, rich in anecdote and insight - will reward those who stay the course. As Ford's reputation has waxed and waned over the years, there have been many books, but McBride's, in its sheer wealth of detail, must surely be the last for some time. It is, as Martin Scorsese testifies on the cover, "an eye-opener".
Stephen Dixon is an artist and critic
Searching for John Ford: A Life. By Joseph McBride, Faber and Faber, 838pp, £25