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Hollywood has given us no greater director than John Ford. Between 1917 and 1970, Ford directed and/or produced some 226 pictures, from short silent films to ambitious historical epics and searingly vivid combat documentaries. His major works-- such as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-- are cinematic classics. Ford's films about American history are profound explorations of the national character and the crucibles in which that character was forged. Throughout his long and prolific career, Ford became best known for redefining the Western genre, setting his dramas about pioneer life against the timeless backdrop of Monument Valley.
Ford's films earned him worldwide admiration. As a man, however he was tormented and deliberately enigmatic. He concealed his true personality from the public, presenting himself as an illiterate hack rather than as the sensitive artist his films show him to be. He shrewdly guided the careers of some of Hollywood's greatest stars, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Maureen O'Hara, and Katharine Hepburn, but he could be abusive, even sadistic, in his treatment of actors. He began his life steeped in the lore of Irish independence and progressive politics; by the end a hawkish Republican and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, he was lionized by Richard Nixon for creating films that extol the "old virtues" of heroism, duty, and patriotism. Little wonder that those who have written about Ford have either strained to reconcile the daunting paradoxes of his work and personality or avoided them entirely. They have printed the legend and ignored the facts-- or printed the facts and obscured the legend.
In its depth, originality, and insight, Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker. Encompassing and illuminating Ford's complexities and contradictions, Joseph McBride comes as close as anyone ever will to solving what Andrew Sarris called the "John Ford movie mystery." McBride traces the whole trajectory of Ford's life, from his beginning as "Bull" Feeney, the near-sighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, through to his establishment as America's most formidable and protean filmmaker. The author of critically acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg, McBride interviewed Ford in 1970 and co-wrote the seminal study John Ford with Michael Wilmington. For more than thirty years, McBride has been exploring the interconnections between Ford's inner life and his work. He interviewed more than 120 of the director's friends, relatives, collaborators, and colleagues. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford's films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands. Searching for John Ford will stand as the definitive portrait of an American genius.
- Sales Rank: #248131 in Books
- Published on: 2001-06-23
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.64" h x 2.20" w x 6.28" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 838 pages
From Publishers Weekly
After being called the "greatest poet of the Western saga," film director Ford responded, "I am not a poet, and I don't know what a Western saga is. I would say that is bullshit." Yet Ford--who made such classic westerns as Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--helped define the idea of the western as a quintessential American story for audiences around the world. This first full-length critical biography presents a complex, fascinating portrait of a troubled and conflicted artist and man. Born John Feeney, he was an Irish outsider in Yankee New England. He began working in the film industry in 1914 as a studio ditch digger, but was soon acting in films and, a few years later, directing them. By the early 1930s, he had achieved considerable artistic and commercial fame with The Informer. McBride (Frank Capra) elegantly and cogently weaves Ford's personal life into the fabric of his career. He is at his best describing how Ford's political sentiments emerged in his work (especially the antiracism of Steamboat Round the Bend and The Searchers) as well as the director's move from liberal to conservative politics during Hollywood's red-baiting years and the HUAC hearings. He gives an equally astute delineation of Ford's emotional life--a tempestuous marriage, a possible affair with Katharine Hepburn, his reputation as a tough guy and his alcoholism. Drawing upon a wealth of critical material plus more than 125 interviews with Ford's colleagues, family and friends, McBride has produced a fine, long-needed biography of a pivotal American artist.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." Ford preferred to let his work speak for itself, and his abrasive encounters with film scholars have become legendary. In fact, "Pappy" Ford, who fancied himself a journeyman director, would probably have been perplexed by these two recent additions to the rapidly growing library of Ford film criticism. Arriving hard on the heels of Scott Eyman's comprehensive Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (LJ 10/1/99), McBride's weighty tome, several decades in preparation, paints a similar portrait: Ford was an insecure alcoholic whose gruff, even sadistic treatment of family, friends, cast, and crew masked his sensitive, sentimental nature. Complex and contradictory like many of his films Ford was a man who stood up to McCarthyite blacklisters but later churned out crude propaganda in support of the Vietnam war. He celebrated tradition, family, and community but was a miserable failure as husband and father. As Eyman did, McBride (Frank Capra; Steven Spielberg) draws on exhaustive research and interviews, but he has the advantage of a few memorably brief meetings with the Great Man himself. Ford left an impressive if uneven body of work, and McBride does it justice, examining each film in illuminating detail. Still, although McBride's book is very deserving, public and academic libraries that cannot collect both biographies should stick to Eyman's more streamlined telling. Studlar (film and English, Univ. of Michigan) and Bernstein (film, Emory Univ.) take readers into academic territory, offering nine essays on the work plus a "dossier" of articles on the man and filmmaker. Robin Wood leads off with a classic critique, questioning whether Ford's late films measure up to his early work. Other essays discuss the role of women and religion in Ford's film universe, and the hotly disputed controversy about whether his last epic Cheyenne Autumn was a "mea culpa" for previous insensitive portrayals of the American Indian. Westerns is recommended for academic collections. Stephen F. Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Film director John Ford presents biographers a tough challenge. Colorful as his long life was, his contradictory personality, emotional reticence, and intransigence with interviewers make it unlikely that anyone will ever limn a definitive portrait of him. McBride is better qualified, however, than most of the others who have tried. He coauthored one of the first significant books on Ford in 1974 and has spent 30 years researching this one. He resists other writers' tendency to treat Ford's life and works separately, instead showing, for example, how Ford's frequent themes of family and assimilation reflect his sense of ethnic identity as the son of Irish immigrants. McBride mines the mountain of preceding Ford criticism deeply as he adds valuable insight into considerations of such classics as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man. If McBride's Ford study doesn't disclose major new information or shed much new light, as his revelatory Frank Capra (1992) did, it is still a necessity for film studies collections and a good primary biography for others. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Superb study of the ever-elusive John Ford
By Gary Mark Morris
John Ford, born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna in Cape Elizabeth, Maine in 1895, hasn't lacked for biographers since his death in 1973, but he remains an extremely difficult subject, for several reasons. One is the sheer sweep of his career, which, spanning 1917 to 1970, roughly paralleled that of American cinema itself and witnessed massive societal changes and world wars. More problematic is Ford himself, a man with a multiplicity of nicknames: Boss, Pappy, Jack. Joseph McBride, in Searching for John Ford, quotes Reverend Clayton (Ward Bond) in The Searchers telling Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) "You fit a lot of descriptions," a statement that nicely summarizes Ford's own elusiveness.
In this rock-solid, 800-plus-page biography, McBride shows that this exceptionally powerful but also deeply flawed man hid behind his films and behind a carefully constructed identity that was always in danger of cracking, and sometimes did. A sensitive, culturally literate, poetically inclined man, he pretended (in his own phrase) to be "illiterate" and called assessments of his status as the master of the western saga "horsehit." A passionate defender of family values in his films, he was also, frequently, a sadist on the set. The book shows him as a poisonous presence to actors like Jimmy Cagney (who called him "truly a nasty old man") and Henry Fonda (who may or may not have knocked him down) but particularly to his treasured stock company members Ward Bond and John Wayne. Without being overly psychoanalytical, McBride shows how Ford's personal behavior was often a projection of his anxieties. On the set of Stagecoach, he was publicly merciless to Wayne: "I really should get Gary Cooper for this part. Can't you walk, for Chrissake, instead of skipping like a goddam fairy." The irony here was that Wayne was apparently copying Ford's own much-noted "feminine" walk. The book also documents Ford's endless practical joking, much of it aimed at Bond, a rabid anticommunist whom Ford considered "stupid."
Searching for John Ford documents every phase of his life and career, from his early missteps to his canonization as one of the greatest -- and most widely influential -- directors in world cinema. The book gives what are most likely definitive answers to some nagging questions in this history, one of them Ford's alleged affair with Katherine Hepburn. McBride sifts methodically through every shred of evidence, including questionable portrayals by Hepburn biographer Barbara Leaming and Ford's grandson Dan, and a mysterious letter found among Ford's papers that purports to reproduce a conversation between Hepburn and an unidentified "Miss D" on the subject of her involvement with Ford. He makes an entirely credible case that this relationship was not physical, based on Ford's Catholic inhibitions and marriage vows. At any rate, despite Ford's wife Mary's willingness to let him have a private life outside his beloved home and marriage, alcohol had a stronger lure for him, eventually causing drastic problems on the set of such films as Mr. Roberts, which had to be finished (and perhaps was finished off) by Mervyn Leroy.
The Ford of this book is a charismatic but also authoritarian figure who used his gifts in ways that can only be described as schizoid. In a remarkably brave move documented in one of the most dramatic sections of the book, he publicly excoriated red-baiter Cecil B. DeMille over demands that the directors' guild members sign a loyalty oath. But typically, the next day he sent a fawning letter of apology to DeMille. The book also reveals that when actress Anna Lee, a friend of Ford's and one of his actors, was blacklisted by mistake (there was apparently another, more left-leaning Anna Lee around), he simply made a phone call to Washington to clear things up. McBride wonders, as will the reader, how Ford could so easily cut through such a monolithic force as HUAC to spare a friend, and sees this as a typically problematic act on Ford's part, showing both his loyalty and a power he could use for his own ends.
Of course, Ford was also a heroic, larger-than-life character who generated enormous loyalty among those who worked with him, even those who were the target of his insults. His friendships were both loving and long-lasting. Claire Trevor, who worked with him on Stagecoach, recalled him as both "absolutely wonderful to me" and a master on the set, whose sometimes unsettling decisions on the set -- in this case throwing out what Trevor thought was a crucial romantic scene -- invariably improved the film. He was also capable of transformation. He railed against being called a racist, a charge leveled at him off and on throughout his career (and one that McBride explicates evenhandedly). "When I landed at Omaha Beach there were scores of black bodies lying in the sand. Then I realized that it was impossible not to consider them full-fledged American citizens."
Searching for John Ford is arguably the most rounded portrait to date of this complicated man who transformed American history into cinematic art. McBride exhaustively examined the mountain of interviews, memoirs, and analyses relating to Ford, and fortunately the book documents all of these. It also contains cogent critiques of the films themselves. McBride is especially good on the seminal Searchers, interspersing a compelling production history with analysis and irresistible anecdotes from some of its contributors. (Henry Brandon, an actor of German heritage who played Chief Scar, is particularly witty in his reminiscences.) If Ford remains an enigma at the end, it's less a criticism of this book, which is both substantive and a wonderful read, than a tribute to its subject's skill in camouflaging the depths of his personality and keeping the world safely at bay.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
"Searchin' Way Out There"...
By Michael Welch
I don't know why anyone interested in the seminal American director, John Ford, would not find this book utterly fascinating. McBride illuminates Ford's early life and the beginnings of his long career with detailed care. He explores his problematic character with skill, compassion and insight without ever being patronizing and without ever holding back about the darkest aspects of Ford's personality and behavior. For instance, McBride makes it very clear that Ford does not deserve as much credit as he usually gets for what was really an ambivalent attitude toward the notorious Hollywood "blacklist" during the anti-communist hysteria of the 1940s and '50s.
McBride's book is packed with vivid anecdotes from associates, observers of Ford and members of the legendary "Stock Company" (Harry Carey, Jr.'s stories are really wonderful!), and his own critiques of the films are sophisticated and augmented by quotes and assessments by other major "Fordians." McBride is generous with his inclusion of other critics' views and when he disagrees he himself is never mean or dismissive. His illuminations of the significance of the post-WWII western, his accounts of the intricacies of the "blacklist" and his sympathetic understanding of Ford's last films and what they represented are especially valuable.
There may indeed be other biographies just as good as McBride's but this is a captivating, comprehensive and intellectual volume for the Ford aficionado. It is immensely satisfying!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Best book on Ford to date!
By Ford Fan
Joseph McBride, proud Irishman that he is, holds a special place in the grand cinematic adventure that is John Ford's life and legacy. He is the late comer to Ford's merry troop who would go on to play a pivotal role in helping to define one of the most ineffable personalities of the twentieth century. He is also a bit of a rebel, in part I imagine because of Ford's influence. As much a rebel against the confines of narrow academic thinking as he is against the monolithic machinery of global corruption - as all great Fordian heroes are. The fact that the author is a key component of the book and the story is a big part of what makes this Ford biography so unique and intriguing. Instead of simply being a reporter feigning an inhuman objectivity, he is a true participant in the exercise and a minor player in the larger drama of Ford's life.
It is my guess that many of those who yearn for some vague misguided notion of objectivity in their reading material are, like the authors who cater to them, accustomed to the regrettable habit of lying to themselves about their own biases and the inescapable nature of human subjectivity. Only by firmly embracing and understanding our individuality do we seem capable of merging with the whole and not the other way around. Anyone who points an accusing finger at others for their left or right leaning biases, in my experience, tends to be pretty darned biased themselves in the opposite direction as those they accuse. This is why such desperation springs up surrounding their need to point out a bias in their perceived adversary's arguments - even when the people they accuse are perfectly up front about their biases in the first place!
I remember the first time I picked up a book on film criticism. I barrowed it from a friend who was in film school and when I was finished reading it I asked him why the conjecture in the book was presented as if it were fact. I was admittedly, somewhat off put by the lack of qualifying openers like "I feel..." or "I believe..." or "perhaps..." My friend informed me that this is simply how film criticism is done and that the assumption is implicit that such declarative statements are to be taken as the author's conclusions and personal point of view and nothing more. Being new to such rampant editorializing, I was a both disturbed and intrigued. I questioned the validity of the approach, fearing it might tempt critics and theorists to commit heinous acts of intellectual hubris but I was also impressed by the speed, boldness and brevity with which unencumbered interpretations and theories could be more easily made.
Only years later would I come to recognize how crucial it is for an author to build his or her confidence enough to truly express their most deeply held personal views no matter how controversial they may be. The same could be said of musicians such as John Coltrane who would never have flourished had he confined his explorations to a tepid, hesitant or apologetic approach. Taking a strong stance, come what may, so long as it is tempered by humility, is what ultimately constitutes the essence and integrity of an author's writing.
When authors bring their entire lifetime of experiences to bear in their work they are far more likely to truly contribute something of value rather than just take up time and space in our already cluttered global psyche. It's hard enough to face the rebuttals and complaints of those who will reject ones work once it is finished. An author who begins to fear those objections before they've even formulated their arguments is in danger of loosing their nerve and playing it safe. To find ones voice and use it to speak with wisdom and authority a good writer works tirelessly to know them first and foremost. The attitudes of their toughest critics can therefore only play a tangential part while writing or it would lead to self-censorship, which works to everyone's disadvantage.
I would think that any reasonably astute right leaning personality, or any genuinely curious centrist would applaud McBride's being so upfront about himself and his views. Of course, there will always be some cranky finger pointing types who are never satisfied, both when one encrypts their politics the way Ford did, or when one wear them on their sleeve the way someone like Paul Robeson did. I understand, that this is supposed to be a review of Searching For John Ford, but these issues are important and I'm getting to that. All of this is just my way of conveying that it is my biased and unfettered opinion that Ford, himself, wise man and scoundrel that he was, loves this book, wherever he is, specifically because Joe was brave enough to be frank, honest, sincere and to put himself squarely in the picture. I'm reminded that one of Ford's messages to himself and to all of us was the gutturally intoned "Get out of that shadow, dude."
One thing that remains as clear as day about Searching For John Ford is that it is a tremendous labor of love. That is an important distinction to make in that the motives and level of reverence between authors writing for their own purposes rather than as a job are very different - particularly in the amount of time dedicated to the task. Ford's claim of being a working director doing a job of work was a total con. He said it because he and everyone else knew that the opposite was true. Everyone knew that he'd probably rather sip bear from a hammock on his boat than go out and shoot pictures the way someone else wanted him to shoot them and that he had spent his entire career trying to get as close to full autonomy as he could.
By treating his book, not as a job of work but as one of the central achievements of his own personal cinematic journey McBride takes full autonomy of his life and this utterly ambitious biography. What this entails is an attention to detail and a dedication to the subject that very few could imagine let alone match. It means pulling together a mountain of material that takes years to sift through and dedicating more time than any sane person would in order to become truly immersed in Ford's world. What McBride did was to distill an ocean of facts and other people's thoughts, observations and theories into his own remarkable elixir of truth.
His was an extremely brave and intensely personal process that only the best authors and documentarians embrace. It is an approach akin to communing not only intellectually but also spiritually (and this case artistically) with ones subject matter. McBride adopted Ford as his true mentor, learned all he could and then attempted flight by trying his hand at telling the masters own story. The result is what every Ford lover was waiting for; an account of Ford's life told in a Fordian style by an unhesitating Ford disciple willing to genuinely throw himself into the task by taking the time to do it right.
To achieve this herculean task, McBride had to wrap his mind around every word ever written about Ford or uttered by Ford or anyone who knew him. That is the painstaking task of great scholarship as well as biographically inspired art. The incredible breadth of sources found in this book, like all great biographies and bio-pics, is what shows the extent to which McBride has become one with his subject. His energy went into methodically selecting the most definitive and revealing details from the entire archive of Ford material to tell us the most compellingly honest and true to form version of Ford's story that he could.
One may find it hard not to agree with many of McBride's conclusions, not because he doesn't add to the noise by including alternative viewpoints, but because he touches upon such fundamental truths and astutely made observations that so many Ford writers have missed. There have been a great many books on Ford and we did not need one more general overview of his life nor another academically inclined, purely aesthetic discussion of his films. What we needed was exactly what Searching For John Ford delivers, a staunchly individualized point of view as close to, or in keeping with, Ford's own point of view as is humanly possible. Only Searching For John Ford achieves, through McBride's tireless work, the feat of assimilating Ford, the man, into the history and the world that he was such a monumental part of.
Artistically combining the intimate with the historical was what many agree was Ford's greatest skill and McBride attempts to apply that same approach to his biography with stunning success. Because the most difficult part in understanding Ford may not have been understanding the man himself as much as the context of his work and the far reaching ramifications of his directorial statement and artistic legacy. The globally impacting aspects of Ford's influence provide a key to understanding recent world history and are possibly more useful to understanding Ford than the personal details of his life. Examining the social, historical, political, philosophical and symbolic meaning of Ford's life can also go a long way in helping us understand ourselves as humans. Comprehending what Ford was attempting to convey, like him or not, may be central to our understanding of what it is not only to be an American, but also to be a conscientious citizen of the word. What we need, therefore, are hundreds of Joseph McBride's out there passionately helping us to see the forest for the trees.
There were arguably few people on the planet as aware of the ramifications of being captured on film than John Ford. This acute awareness meant that any time a camera was pointed at him he was determined to turn in a solid performance containing the same subtle elegance as those that unfolded in his films. In his big scene with Fonda in The American West of John Ford, the great director does McBride a tremendous honor by bringing him up as a topic of conversation while speaking to a man who had become an old adversary. It is interesting to note that Ford does not really return Fonda's hug despite his wonderfully welcoming greeting of "Henraaaaay!" Ford must have known Fonda would be kissing ass and trying to make nice after their falling out, so to break the ice he told the story of meeting McBride. In doing so he provided Fonda, and the camera with a bit of meat to chew on rather than just making wisecracks. He seems to have brought McBride up almost as a riddle for Fonda (and us) to unravel.
I even think it is possible that Ford was making reference not to Joe's lack of transparency and proper understanding of Ford's personality and quirks but of Fonda's and thereby hinting at the reason for their falling out during Mr. Roberts. If there was one thing Ford did not do well it was forget a grudge and it was also just like him to find cryptic ways of making reference to a person's perceived transgressions while simultaneously opening his heart wide to them. Further evidence of this in The American West of John Ford can be found when Pappy off handedly asks Wayne, "are you still trying to impress me with your expertise" which may have been a cloaked reference to Wayne's perennially tentative aspirations as a director.
The "legend" that Ford gave birth to in that Fonda clip is that he "didn't tell McBride anything" while the "fact" that Ford also like to "print" is that McBride was also being initiated into the Ford family in that very moment in the best possible way. Ford, lest we forget, put all of his favorite actors through a similar ordeal, a trial by fire so to speak. Once initiates went through this hazing and proved their loyalty by forgiving him for it, he loved them for life. Admittedly I don't think it hurt that McBride was Irish. Being a new recruit to Ford's battalion of allies as well as Irish simply gave McBride a little leg up, but he was still going to get his ass handed to him like all the rest. So Ford was simply putting McBride (and Fonda for that matter) through the paces and drilling him esoterically in order to help him become a good soldier in the fight against all of the absurdities of civilization and in support of all that is just and humane.
And so, having become a good soldier, McBride dared to go where no other critic would tread, deep into the shadowy underbelly of Ford's life, relationships and deeper meaning to find out what Ford may have wanted somebody to tell the world in part, perhaps, because he couldn't possibly do it himself. No great director seems very inclined to point out the significance of his or her own work. Instead, they would rather their work be endlessly debated, with each person pulling out their own meaning while critics haggle rigorously enough for new generations to sit up and take notice.
In order to uncover new material from such well-traveled terrain, McBride had to dig deep within his own power of deduction, analysis, intuition, knowledge of history and metaphysical awareness. He had to force himself to draw his best conclusions from the mysterious clues Ford conspicuously left behind. The great director's life and body of work has become an epic puzzle that we will endlessly discuss and debate and renewed efforts at understanding will always be needed and appreciated. One of the biggest pieces of that puzzle is, of course, Ford's relationship to John Wayne and to comprehend even part of the complexity of their friendship some context may be of help.
For example it is instructive to consider that Wayne's mother Molly, was merciless in her abuse toward Wayne as well as Wayne's father. And for some inexplicable reason both of them took it lying down. Thankfully Wayne did, thanks in part to Ford's influence, transcend much of the damage done by his disturbed and fanatically right wing mother who was never satisfied with Wayne even after he was a world famous movie star. She never stopped looking down at her son as well as the entire world around her and her dreams of grandeur seemed to be a central part of Wayne's conflicted psyche.
As Rand Roberts and James Olson point out: "Unlike his father, Wayne fulfilled his mother's dreams of success, and she never forgave him for it. She refused to acknowledge his accomplishments or praise his achievements, rejecting his attempts to demonstrate his love. In Molly's eyes even his spectacular success was only a prelude to his ultimate failure. Until it came-as she was certain it would-she would continue to remind Duke, as he was later called, that he was nothing special." When "...Mary St. John, Wayne's longtime private secretary, went up to Molly when Duke left the room and said, "Don't you think you could be a little nicer to him sometimes?" Molly curtly replied, "I don't give a damn about him." "... Molly did not like Marion, and he, even in his childhood, knew it... Her chilly disdain was the great mystery of his life-unfathomable, inexplicable, and undeserved. He spent many decades trying to please her, but Molly would not be pleased."
So Wayne tried tirelessly and in complete futility to please a woman who one can almost imagine some of Ford's most deluded and loveless characters being based upon. Strangely, it even seems as if The Informer was based upon the real life experiences of Wayne's great, great grandfather whether it truly was or not. It stands to reason that Molly must have hated Ford for his socialist leanings (which Wayne also shared in his early years), his Catholicism (the Wayne's were part of the wave of scotch Irish Presbyterian migrants who helped the British kill and displace the natives in Ireland before coming to America) and for the fact that Ford turned the son she swore would be a failure into a stunning success. Yet despite Ford's deeply meaningful influence on the young Marion Morrison, the mental power Molly had over Wayne was so strong and so destructive, that in the end her influence almost managed to topple the icon and turn him into the same sad caricature that she herself had always been. I say almost because I believe that despite Wayne's political and personal transgressions, which Ford shared in his own more abbreviated way, that the man and his core values transcend his mistakes - just like Ford. My guess, from his book, is that McBride shares this view.
So in this respect I think that McBride truly loves Wayne in a way that Wayne's own mother never could. It's reasonable even healthy for McBride to be somewhat disappointed by the fact that Wayne allowed himself to eventually be sucked up into Molly's cut-throat world view which also meant rejecting some of Ford's humanistic and inclusive brand of morality. Wayne may have mistakenly and tragically rebelled against Ford in his late life in lieu of rejecting his own mother's corrupting influence. Only facing his mother's flaws honestly and directly would have allowed Wayne to legitimately accept and forgive her as a person. Doing so, rather than storing up all of Molly's hatred in an unconscious part of his mind, might have helped him to become a more self-actualized individual. Such an awakened John Wayne would have resembled the elevated role models he often portrayed such as, Rusty, Kirby or Nathan rather than the more conflicted ones that came closer to home such as Tom, Ethan and Spig. Wings of Eagles might even be seen portraying Wayne's inner demons as much as Spig Wead's. The clue for this may have been the fact that Ford included an unflattering portrait of himself (in the body of Ward Bond of all people) to even the score a bit. Ford's comment that he didn't want to make the picture but didn't want anyone else to make it either almost sounds like he is talking about a film on Wayne who clearly loomed much larger in his life than Wead. To me, Dan Daily in that film seems to represent Ford and his eager energetic attempts to help Wead recover from his physical injury could be seen as Ford's similar attempts to help Wayne recover from his psychic ones. This analogy loomed very large in my mind during that strangely conspicuous shot of Dan Daily tossing his cigar out of the porthole in disgust as Wayne departs the ship without saying goodbye. This after Daily's harsh rebuke "come visit a guy sometime will ya?" which could indicate that when Ford was down in the dumps from his own psychic baggage Wayne was simply too selfish to return the favor.
But Molly was not the only force pulling Wayne and for that matter Ward Bond in such a self-destructive direction. There were other factors such as alcoholism, and the rapid shift to the right, which so militarized the country as we were pushed toward cultural and spiritual oblivion by the military industrial complex that Eisenhower spoke so eloquently of in his farewell address. Add to that the increasing power of actors in Hollywood and the corrupting influence of wealth and power and you have a perfect cocktail of seductive and mind altering delusions. These forces would combine to undermine Wayne's ability to remain as clear headed, universally compassionate, broadly aware, reciprocal and conscientious as Ford was.
To understand Ford and Wayne as men, it stands to reason that one must first come to terms with their alcoholism, perhaps in ways that they themselves never could. This disease, with it's mysterious neurological side effects that seem to increase it's victims deepest insecurities, must have caused their relationship a good deal of trouble. For as splendid as it may have seemed on the outside, there must have been several traces of dysfunctional codependence lingering between them on the inside. This might have translated into many of the tug-of-war dramas that should have played out between Wayne and his mother, had he been brave enough to stand up to her, instead transpiring between he and Ford - his surrogate father. In that respect, Wayne may have inadvertently chosen the wrong parental figure to rebel against since he was clearly not one for introspection and his mother had no real talent or skills to compete against.
To Wayne's credit however, Ford was the parental figure in that dichotomy and as such, he really should have known better than to take it personally, particularly since he was such an elevated soul on so many other levels. Even though this may be easier said than done, Ford's great tragedy might in fact be that he didn't make a better role model. There may even be a very deep lesson for all liberal or humanistic thinkers who will never be seen as viable leaders, with all of their moral superiority, until they are willing to live up to their own high-minded standards. Ford, as a man, often failed in this respect and his saving grace was that he allowed his characters and certainly films to succeed where he failed. The characters Wayne and Fonda often depicted could rise above the world around them achieving a kind of moral success despite their flaws and the limitations of the world. Meanwhile the actors themselves, like Ford to a large extent, failed as men, despite their great success as artists.
Othello's comfort to the point of arrogance in his position as supreme leader of his domain in Shakespeare's famous play, and the hypocrisy and insensitivity that this represented to Iago, may have ultimately led to his own undoing. Ford's years of cocky, alcohol soaked blundering was perhaps such a foul influence on Wayne, that the apprentice's political and professional rejection of Ford, (while remaining absolutely loyal and loving) could have been a kind of divine pay back that neither of them could help but to feed into and play out over the course of their lives.
This doesn't mean they didn't love each other - it just means that they might not have been nearly as close as they could have been and should have been in their later years. Had they cleaned themselves up, their closeness to each other would likely have grown in leaps and bounds. Instead of such a sober and honest relationship emerging as it might have, there was instead an unspoken, smoldering, competitive even adversarial and hierarchical dual between them that took place over many decades. And when Wayne finally surpassed Ford in wealth, power and sway in Hollywood, it was naturally time for his silent revenge - a trait he no doubt learned from his master who exacted the same revenge on Harry Carey Sr. among others. So Wayne's failure to rise to Ford's defense in those waning years, when the old man needed him most, is in many ways far sadder and unexpected to me than his more probable participation in the HUAC debacle.
Perhaps the strangest, most shocking and tragic aspect of Ford's late career is the fact that his artistic and emotional son, John Wayne, did not do everything in his power to make sure Pappy could keep making movies the way he saw fit until his dying day. That Ford would never have asked Wayne for such an intervention is clear. Even Wayne's assistance in getting Herbert Yates to produce The Quiet Man was only grudgingly accepted, as if he would have preferred the help had come from anyone but Wayne. In order for Duke to evolve into such a position of authority over his mentor would have meant humbly cajoling Ford into accepting such an arrangement as an ongoing production deal with Batjac. But it was not to happen and instead Wayne went the opposite direction by working with director's whose subservience was assured. Artistically and ethically this made very little sense but emotionally it must have felt like the only option since by leaving Ford to fend for himself, Wayne was also relegating his best friend to a position of symbolic subservience for the first time in their relationship. Wayne's insecurities and need to finally feel like the one with all the power, the alpha male, the person holding all the cards, just like his mother, sadly prevailed.
So it is very understandable that McBride chooses to do Ford's bidding in the sense that he gives expression to the grievances that Ford would not, nor could not have uttered a word about. Yes, for most of their relationship Ford was in the position of the parent and role model and should have presented a better guide for his most dedicated protégé. Ford's dysfunctional relationship to his wife and kids are evidence enough of his not being at peace with himself nor his drinking. Ford remained with a woman who tried beyond reason to dominate and feel superior to him in ways very much akin to Molly's tactically applied mental gymnastics. Ford also allowed his biological son to become spoiled and then resented him for it illustrating his egos inability to take responsibility for his own transgressions.
But despite these struggles, which most of us experience on one level or another, Ford, unlike anyone else, was also the Shakespeare of our time. Wayne would have done us all a great service by recognizing the significance of this truth and rising above the fray. Had he taken the lead in that respect, my rising above the ego battles, he would have indeed come into his own by teaching Ford the lesson that Ford tried to teach everyone but couldn't teach himself. Had Wayne made sure that Ford could keep working, even if that only meant one or two more films, he would have done himself a big favor both artistically and karmically. He would have also benefitted by not mistakenly rejecting the tremendous values that Ford had at least partially instilled in him over their decades. That rejection essentially meant adopting much of the misguided selfishness and political ruthlessness that his mother exhibited as well as the many other social climbing people in his life that resembled her.
In the end, however I imagine the influence on Wayne's life was a pretty even split and ultimately, over time, Ford probably had a far greater influence. If he hadn't Wayne would have no doubt wound up more like Ronald Reagan both as a man and as an actor. We are more likely to remember Wayne for the roles he played for Ford and the plethora of ways he emulated or WAS those characters in real life. We are also just as likely to forget, through the test of time, the roles he played for himself under the banner of his own production company.
It is always interesting to consider an actor's politics in relationship to the roles they play and even more interesting to try to somehow separate the actors as people from their parts. Ford was very good at getting conservative actors to turn in stunningly humane performances even in left leaning roles that should have gone against their grain. The best example has to be John Carradine, who arguably achieved his best performance in The Grapes of Wrath despite it being the one role that was the least in keeping with who Carradine was in his own head. Yet, weather the lanky arch conservative star of B-movies liked it or not, Casey's pathos was entirely in keeping with who Carradine was deep down in his soul; a good, if often hopelessly misguided man. The same could be said of Wayne.
It was perhaps Ford's ability to effortlessly merge the best that both the left and right had to offer that made his world so inclusive and gave it such breadth and scope. It was Ford's dabbling in socialist as well as libertarian ideals (not to mention several other varieties) that made him what he ultimately was - a man who adored the radical extremes of integrity and loathed the cowardly conformism of opportunistic crowd pleasing centrists.
Ford could perhaps be called a centrist, but only in the best sense of the word. He could almost be called a radical centrist in that he is symbolically linked to other male cultural bridge-building luminaries of his period such as Tolstoy, Gandhi, Ellington, and King. They were all men who represented an elevated balance between all of the various spectrums, ethnicity, gender, politics and cosmology being just a few. They were radical centrists in their fervent desire to avoid every rushing to the center for personal gain alone. The non-radical centrists of history are those who embody a corporate or institutional aesthetic exemplified by a complete absence of values, which is falsely portrayed as the quintessence of balance.
What this means is that Ford is in fact a socialist hero but he is a libertarian hero as well. His fans throughout several generations inhabiting all levels of the economic ladder seem to attest to this. Wayne did not achieve the same brilliant balancing act as Ford, in this respect and considering that Ford helped turn Wayne into such a gargantuan public icon emulated by millions, McBride's (and Ford's) frustration is perfectly understandable. This doesn't make McBride a died-in-the-wool leftist any more than it makes him a Wayne hater. What it makes him is someone who understands what Ford was trying to achieve in his films and in the world for that matter, far better than almost anyone else. At times McBride might even come close to understanding aspects of Ford's life even better and with more objectivity, than the man himself.
In his near flawless and refreshingly opinionated book McBride acknowledges and even celebrates his own strong identity and well considered leanings rather than keeping his prejudices closeted. He chose to do with Ford's life what Ford did in his career of portraying life itself - he printed both the fact and the legend and showed that they are far from mutually exclusive.
Joe is also far more up front about his interpretations of Ford's world and our world than Ford ever was and as a scholarly writer this makes a world of sense. In applying such a dedicated and obsessively personal approach to telling the story of Ford's life, McBride manages to create the penultimate biography of John Ford. Not the one the academic community may have wanted, nor the one the military cabals and forces of corruption on both sides of the fence may have wanted, but perhaps the one Ford himself would have wanted - even if he never would have admitted it.
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