Ctva 310. History of American Cinema: Readings Dr. John Schultheiss Department of Cinema and Television Arts

Conformity Individualism

City Small town

Present Past

Party machines Participatory democracy

Welfare state Self-help

Interdependence Independence

Mass society Communal society

Cynicism Innocence

Materialism Humanism

Sophistication Simplicity

Alienation Integration

European intellectualism Yankee common sense

Secularism Christianity

Expedience Loyalty

High art Popular entertainment

Throughout his career, Capra wrote or co-wrote his own scripts. He found writing laborious, often taking three times longer than shooting. He would rewrite any scene on the set if the script failed to ignite. Robert Riskin was his co-scenarist in the 1930s, and during their halcyon years at Columbia, they were among the best paid, most admired teams in Hollywood. Capra especially liked Riskin's bright, crackling dialogue, which is filled with surprises and charming outbursts of whimsy. They wrote in master scenes, for the director preferred selecting his camera setups only after he had seen the actors working on the set. If a performer improved on his written part, Capra willingly preserved the changes during production. The script, in short, was viewed merely as a basic guideline to what eventually went on the screen. He often disliked his scenarios midway through production, dismissing them as "drivel." For him, they were a product of intellect rather than instinct. His artistry lay with the countless gut decisions he made while shooting the script.

In selecting or inventing a story, Capra was concerned primarily with its charm, its capacity to provide "a glow of satisfaction." He called plot a "clothesline" upon which to hang individual episodes. He also referred to scenes as "beads" on the "string" of the storyline. Critic Otis Ferguson pointed out that Capra usually chose a plot with as few restrictions as possible: It has the necessary sentimental angle and forward motion, but is fairly empty of anything else. He then filled it up with situations and characters from life. "It's purely foolish to consider Capra's films in terms of what their story would look like on paper," Ferguson shrewdly observed; "a movie can be made out of anything or nothing so long as it is in the hands of the best picturemakers."

Acting is what counted most for Capra. He would often hold up production for months in order to get the performers he wanted. He believed that casting was the major determinant of characterization. Often he created characters with a specific star in mind. A number of them had their personas established by their roles in Capra's movies: Gable, Cooper, Stewart, and Jean Arthur, to name a few. Edward Arnold was his favorite villain, and he specialized in playing selfish tycoons. In the late 1930s, Cooper and Stewart accepted roles from Capra scripts unseen––the ultimate compliment for a director. He asked his leading men to wear no makeup and his leading ladies to use only what they'd wear on the street. He disliked staginess, and he asked his performers not to shout, but to speak softly and intimately, to throwaway their lines rather than hammer them home. He kept rehearsals to a minimum, fearing that the actors would tire and dissipate their freshness. He wanted them to look like "real people talking really." He insisted that it was the director's job to convince his players of the reality of their scenes. "There are no bad actors," he claimed, "only bad directors." Few filmmakers could elicit such spontaneity from their players. Capra's camera virtually caresses them. "No matter how small the roles," he has remarked, "I treat all actors as stars." His secondary performers were often praised for their individuality. He gave all of his players some unique characterization to make them seem more real. He never bothered with screen tests, preferring to trust his instincts. He interviewed every actor in his cast, including non-speaking extras. For example, Mr. Smith included 186 speaking parts, and Capra interviewed four or five players for each role.

Even Capra's detractors admitted he was a superlative stylist. He was perhaps the foremost practitioner of what scholars later referred to as the classical narrative cinema of the big studio era. He believed that technique should be unobtrusive, a servant in the presentation of characters in action. "There are no rules in filmmaking, only sins," he said, "and the cardinal sin is Dullness." Often he would improvise on the set, experimenting with various shots, angles, and lighting effects. He could afford this flexibility because he was disciplined in the preproduction phases of his work. Like his friend Howard Hawks, Capra disliked sluggish movies. As early as 1932, he increased the tempo of his films by speeding up the actors' pace 40 percent above normal. He eliminated most entrances and exits, avoided literal transitions and slow dissolves, and asked his players to overlap their lines––thus producing a sense of urgency which is seldom allowed to subside. He often used three cameras even for photographing simple scenes, to assure smooth transitions between long shots and close-ups. Using multiple cameras also yielded him considerably more footage, permitting greater creativity at the editing bench. Fearful that his sentimental scenes would degenerate into bathos, he used such understated techniques as having his characters turn their backs to the camera. In their private moments of grief, he tactfully photographs them in the dark or from behind protective obstacles. His love scenes take place in the rain or fog and are often deliberately funny.

Capra regarded editing as the most enjoyable part of filmmaking. The British critic Graham Greene considered him a director of genius, who could edit as brilliantly as Eisenstein. Greene was dazzled by Capra's extraordinary shifts in tone, ranging from despair to hilarity to rapturous lyricism even within a single sequence. Many of his movies contain set pieces within the story, and he punctuates these vignettes with sudden explosions of close-ups and witty juxtapositions. Unlike his friend Eisenstein, however, Capra never displays his editing virtuosity for its own sake: Like every other technique, it's subordinated to the needs of the characters in action––the cardinal commandment of classical cutting. The final third of Mr. Smith is confined to a single setting, yet the sequence is never static, thanks to Capra's dynamic cutting and counterpointing. In this movie as in others, he employed the concept of a "reactive character," who guides the viewer's response to the action, a technique he probably derived from Lubitsch. For example, if the hero says or does something which might otherwise seem ambiguous, a cutaway to a sympathetic observer's reaction in effect determines how the audience will respond. This technique is especially crucial in sentimental speeches, when an audience is likely to snigger at the hero's naiveté. The same principle is applied when the reactive character frowns at the remarks of an unsympathetic character. In this way, Capra could manipulate the emotional crosscurrents of his scenes with considerable command.

Even more than most directors of his era, he was a stout believer in previewing a movie before releasing it to the public. Too nervous to trust his judgments at the screening, he tape-recorded the audience's responses. He then reedited the film according to the duration of the taped laughs. He sometimes repeated this procedure with six or seven audiences before he felt confident of his final version. He believed that the dividing line between the ridiculous and the sublime––a line his movies tread precariously––is vague and imprecise to an individual, no matter how receptive. The larger the audience, the more sensitive the response. He cared about what the critics said of his movies, but he trusted only in the public's response: "I'd read what the gods wrote, but I would listen to what the mortals said. After all, there were more of us."

Capra tends to suffer from the same vices as Griffith and Ford, who had similar sensibilities. Capra's lesser films are often maudlin in their sentiment. When the acting is weak––as in A Pocketful of Miracles––all that remains are the mechanical contrivances; without an animating spirit, the archetypes become stereotypes. The gassy philosophizing of Lost Horizon (1937) appealed strongly to contemporary audiences, but present-day viewers are likely to find the movie pretentious and arty. Significantly, it's not a comedy, and Capra is seldom at his best outside the comic range. Capra is also inclined to take cheap shots at easy targets: snooty society folk, intellectuals, shyster lawyers, and of course that indispensable figure, the tycoon.

––John Ford

From 1920 to 1935, Ford was contracted to the Fox Film Corporation. When it merged with 20th Century Films in 1935, with Darryl F. Zanuck as head, Ford remained with the new company for over a decade. (He also free-lanced during this period, mostly at RKO.) Zanuck, one of the most intelligent of the Hollywood moguls, shared many of Ford's patriotic and Populist sentiments especially his pro-military sympathies and his social consciousness. Among the movies that Zanuck produced for Ford at 20th Century-Fox were Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Tobacco Road (1941), and How Green Was My Valley (1941).

The early controversy surrounding Ford criticism centered on the problem of genre. Since the western had never been an important genre in either drama or literature, many commentators, steeped in the critical traditions of these older and more prestigious arts, looked upon the cinematic western as a cliché. But the problem is more complex. In the first place, the western is a relatively recent subspecies of the epic, a genre that enjoys considerable literary prestige. Briefly, the epic is a narrative form which celebrates a historic and/or mythic subject. Generally epics deal with larger-than-life heroes, who embody the highest ideals (but seldom the shortcomings or vices) of a given nation, culture, or religious group. Most epics are psychologically naive, for sweeping events tend to take precedence over nuances of character. Stylistically, epics are elevated, sincere, and lyrical in their fervor. The narrative events of most epics synthesize a cultural epoch. Bold stirring clashes––often of a military nature––tend to predominate. Great epics are usually produced during periods of ascending power and represent the triumph of a given civilization over its adversaries. Many of Ford's westerns, for example, deal with the conquering of the Indian nations of the American West.

Walt Whitman modified the concept of the epic by insisting that each individual, each blade of grass, is the true hero of a democratic civilization, a belief that Ford shared. Both artists idolized Abraham Lincoln, but they viewed him as "the common man raised to the highest," to use Whitman's egalitarian phrase. Like any other genre, the epic isn't necessarily a mode of intrinsic artistic excellence. There are more examples of bad epics than good, but since these inferior works have been lost or neglected over the centuries, the term epic (like tragedy) tends to connote an innate dignity to many ahistorical commentators. Because westerns were produced with staggering frequency during Ford's era, many viewers were aesthetically desensitized by the artistic vulgarity of most of these works. In a sense, they poisoned people's responses to westerns of genuine artistry. Like any other genre, in short, there are good westerns and bad.

The principal myth underlying virtually all westerns was first enunciated by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. Turner's thesis was that the great western frontier was finally closed, sealing off America's most pervasive symbol of freedom, innocence, and refuge. Such scholarly works as Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land have demonstrated how Americans viewed the frontier as a Promised Land, a Garden of Eden, free from the rigidities and repressive traditions of the eastern "established" states. Because of its comprehensive range and its innate potential for dramatic conflict, filmmakers have repeatedly turned to the western genre to explore America's historical conflicts of value.

West East

Wilderness Civilization

Individualism Community

Self-interest Social Welfare

Anarchy Law and Order

Private honor Institutional justice

Nature Culture

Pragmatism Idealism

Agrarianism Industrialism

Future Past

Experience Knowledge

American European

The western is perhaps the most prominent example of America's nostalgia for the innocence and excitement of the past. Not surprisingly, Ford's movies are filled with flashbacks and verbal reminiscences. No other American director was so obsessed with the past. Most westerns take place between the years 1865 and 1890, the Golden Age of westward expansion. This was a period in American history when options for the future still seemed open, and the phrase Manifest Destiny was employed to justify the "obvious" and "God-ordained" role of American pioneers to take over and dominate the western wilderness.

Like the early dime novels which featured such dashing heroes as Deadwood Dick and Buffalo Bill, the earliest movie westerns consisted largely of clichés, and characters were manufactured by rote formula. The western hero was virile, brave, and forthright. His adversaries––the "savages" and "outlaws"––were cruel, devious, and depraved. But as Robert Warshow pointed out in his influential essay, "The Westerner," the cinematic western came into the realm of serious art only when the hero's moral code, without ceasing to be compelling and romantic, is also seen to be ambiguous, darkening his morality and saving him from being childishly simple-minded. John Ford was among the first to handle the western with this requisite degree of ambiguity and complexity.

As John Cawelti has pointed out in his important study, The Six-Gun Mystique, the most popular western plot deals with the conflict between the eastern pioneers and the savage inhabitants of the western frontier. These antagonistic forces are generally evenly matched. A third force, the western hero, is needed to tip the balance. Divided in his sentiments, he must decide whether to side with the forces of the civilized community, which may destroy or at least confine him, or to allow the renegades and Indians (whose values are not unlike his own) to destroy the community. The western hero is usually a man of violence himself, but by directing his violence against the enemies of the community, he is morally vindicated and in most cases honored as a model of social commitment. Generally such an action on the part of the hero involves some sacrifice of his personal code. In Ford's westerns especially, self-sacrifice to a communal cause is the highest form of heroism. In his later works, the hero sometimes sacrifices himself to a cause he doesn't really believe in.

Over the years, an increased erosion of confidence became apparent in Ford's attitude toward these three forces. In his earlier westerns, like Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and especially the unabashedly optimistic Wagon Master (1950), the director's sympathies are strongly weighted in favor of the community. The tone of these works is predominantly lyrical, at times soaring with rapturous nationalism. The heroes identify more overtly with the community than those of the later westerns. They also tend to be relatively static in terms of character development, undergoing little internal change. The dramatic tension is created externally, by pitting two forces in a conventional confrontation, usually in the form of a shootout. These earlier works are more concerned with extolling the American Dream and America's legendary heroes than with portraying the actual texture of frontier existence. The idealization is a deliberate attempt to give patriotic myths precedence over literal history. Corruption in these movies is generally treated as an excess of individualism, the result of social irresponsibility, and especially, greed. More than any other classical American filmmaker, Ford is skeptical of individualism. He often treats it as a form of selfishness in his movies. Above all, the family––the minimal communal unit––is given precedence over any single individual.

Ford minimizes the negative effects of the westward expansion in most of these earlier works. Particularly open to criticism is his casual imperialism toward the Indian nations, whose cultures were destroyed by the encroachments of the white victors. Even in these earlier movies, however, Ford's treatment of Indians is more respectful than virtually anything that can be found in the works of his less sensitive contemporaries. Indians are almost always portrayed as heroic adversaries, as courageous as they are dangerous. Furthermore, Ford knew and respected their culture. In private life he championed their cause, long before it became fashionable to do so. He also went out of his way to give them employment as extras in his movies, in some cases rescuing them from desperate poverty.

As the director grew older, his vision––like Whitman's––became increasingly melancholy, dark, and even disillusioned. Social injustices are not so easily glossed over, especially in such works as The Searchers (1956), Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Two Rode Together (1961), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In the bitter Cheyenne Autumn (1964), the Indians are portrayed as the civilized force, and most of the whites are the savages. In part, this change was inevitable, both socially and artistically. Beginning in the early 1950s, a number of filmmakers began to exploit the western as a vehicle for social protest, emphasizing America's violent heritage and bigotry toward unassimilated minorities, particularly Negroes. Such pro-Indian (and by implication, anti-white) westerns as Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow (1950) and Samuel Fuller's Run of the Arrow (1956) nurtured the embryonic civil rights movement, which like the new breed of "anti-western," was to expose the soft underbelly of the American Dream.

An important source of irony in most westerns derives from the fact that the audience knows that eventually progress and civilization triumphed over the forces of lawlessness. But in the 1960s particularly, Americans were growing increasingly disillusioned with the presumed benefits of progress. Many artists, reflecting this dissatisfaction, began searching for new myths or redefining old ones in order to explore the moral inconsistencies of America's past. Sam Peckinpah was perhaps the most successful film artist to reexamine traditional myths in this way, and his westerns vividly confirmed the once-startling pronouncement of black militant Stokely Carmichael: "Violence is as American as apple pie."

But the precedent had already been established––in the final works of John Ford. His later westerns are set in an era closer to the neurotic, un-heroic twentieth century. Confinement and delimitation characterize these films, not the spaciousness and freedom which typify his earlier westerns. There is an atmosphere of loss in many of these movies, a sense of failure. The heroes are no longer necessarily models of behavior. They view the values of the community with skepticism and sometimes contempt, even though they may finally make extraordinary sacrifices for it. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the protagonist dies a pauper's death, virtually unnoticed and unmourned, though it was he who made the establishment of the community possible, a cause he intuitively sensed was against his own interest. Always sympathetic to outcasts, Ford's compassion for minority figures became more apparent in these later works. Mexicans, Negroes, and Indians figure more prominently, though they are often sentimentalized.

Even in his silent westerns, Ford emphasized the epic grandeur of the American landscape. The Great Plains, the lofty regality of the Rockies, and especially the arid, inhospitable deserts of the West, are exploited as heroic obstacles to be overcome by the pioneers streaming in from the East. The fragile communities are tenuously linked by trails at first, then by coach, and finally––in the later stages of civilization––by the railroad, which connects East with West. Ford's most famous natural landmark is Monument Valley. Located on the Arizona-Utah state line within the Navajo Indian Reservation, it consists of a vast desert plain almost totally devoid of vegetation. The terrain is periodically interrupted by majestically towering buttes and mesas, which were created by centuries of erosion. Ford photographed its primordial mystery lovingly, with its ever-shifting colors, its shadows, and its merciless sun.

Violence in Ford's films is usually underplayed. Seldom does he dwell over gory details, and even in his westerns he never lingers over shootouts, preferring instead to execute them with efficient dispatch. What Ford dwells on most lovingly is the community––its institutions and its spiritual solidarity. Four social institutions are glorified with compulsive regularity: the family, the military, the church, and the saloon. (Social drinking is almost always viewed as a positive value in his movies.) The director also loved to portray community rituals: His films are filled with weddings, funerals, public addresses, dedication ceremonies, dinner scenes, drinking bouts, farewell scenes, and amiable brawls. Many of these rituals are accompanied by two favorite songs, "Red River Valley" and the hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River."

Ford's plots are often deliberately structured to provide ample leeway for the exploration of such community rituals. To be sure, some of his movies, like The Informer (1935) and The Searchers, are tightly plotted, with hardly any slackening of the narrative thrust. But most of his works are more leisurely structured, and even his westerns––ordinarily an action-oriented genre––are among the loosest of the American cinema. Often Ford introduces a dramatic conflict early in the film, then suspends it until the concluding scenes, when the issue is finally resolved. In Stagecoach, for instance, the threat of an Indian attack is brought up almost immediately, but not until near the end of the movie does the threat actually erupt. The middle portions of the film are devoted to a study of the interrelationships among the characters. A number of movies have very little plot at all: How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable (1945), and The Last Hurrah (1958), among others, are a series of loosely related vignettes. Of course when the occasion demanded, Ford could direct an action sequence with commanding power, but for the most part his heart lay with the quieter, less theatrical episodes.

Orson Welles once referred to Ford as a great poet and comedian. Often he's both at the same time, as in My Darling Clementine. Ostensibly the film deals with the Wyatt Earp story, but Ford uses this mythical material as a pretext for exploring the coming of civilization to a rough frontier community. The arrival of Boston-bred Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs) to Tombstone represents an elusive, oddly moving experience for Wyatt (Henry Fonda). Tremulous and awed, he gawks at her as she delicately descends the stagecoach. He offers to carry her luggage inside the hotel, where his two brothers watch in dumbfounded amazement: Clearly Wyatt has never behaved like this before. One of the funniest episodes takes place later in the movie, after the marshal has begun to fall in love. Unable to keep his mind clear of Tombstone's fair visitor, Wyatt ambles over to the bar, where Mac, the polite middle-aged bartender is standing. With a sigh, the moonstruck marshal asks, "Mac, you ever been in love?" Mac replies matter of factly, "No, I've been a bartender all my life." Pure Ford.

The heart of the film, and one of the most brilliant sequences the director ever created, is the famous Sunday morning church episode. Wyatt is in the barbershop, where he has just received the deluxe treatment, complete with a heavy dosing of flowery cologne. His brothers join him under the covered promenade of the main street, where they watch the graceful procession of buggies filled with townspeople in their best finery. One brother remarks that he can almost smell flowers in bloom. "That's me," Wyatt mutters brusquely. The elderly deacon (Russell Simpson, a Ford regular) stops his wagon and invites the Earps to join the celebration. The floor of the first church in town has been completed, and the community plans to commemorate the event with a dance. Wyatt's brothers respectfully decline, leaving him alone to daydream. Stationed outside the door of the hotel, he occupies an ideal vantage point for meeting the lady of his reveries. Soon she comes out, and after remarking that she can almost smell flowers in bloom, she asks him where all the buggies are going. Amused and touched by his shyness, Clementine hints that she would like to join the celebration. The two walk solemnly toward the church to the stately accompaniment of "Shall We Gather at the River." When they arrive, Wyatt is too reserved to do anything but look. Once again she's forced to resort to gentle hints. Finally he musters enough nerve to ask her to dance, and the townspeople instinctively clear some space for them. Beginning stiffly and with comical formality, Wyatt takes his frail partner in his arms. When the fiddles switch to a more sprightly pace, the two fall in with the music and execute a lively polka. Near the conclusion of the sequence, Ford moves his camera up and back, to a distant long-shot range: While the dancers revel joyfully below, their thumping feet resounding on the crude planks of the church floor, the American flag flutters high above them in an image of piercing majesty.

Ford was politically conservative and Populist in his sympathies. Characteristically, when he adapted John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, he cut out most of the Marxist analysis of the original, focusing instead on the personal and familial aspects of the material. In the novel, the exploited Okies are helpless pawns in a vast impersonal social machine. In the movie the members of the Joad family are more resiliant: They may be down, but they're never out. In the final scene, which takes place on the road––they've just accepted a twenty-day job as fruit pickers––Pa Joad (Russell Simpson) admits to his wife (Jane Darwell) that for a while he thought the family was finished. Ma Joad answers, "I know. That's what makes us tough. Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good, an' they die out. But we keep a-comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever Pa, 'cause we're the people." The final image of the film follows: a thrilling extreme long shot, in which the fragile Joad vehicle merges imperceptibly with a procession of other dilapidated trucks and autos, forming an unbroken river of traffic––a visual tribute to the invincibility of the human spirit.

Few directors commanded as much respect as Ford within the film industry. He was the Grand Old Man––eccentric, unconventional, stubbornly independent. His movies usually made money, and they were often praised by critics as well. Although he had made his share of commercial potboilers in his early years, he had paid his proverbial dues. From the mid-1930s until the end of his career, many of his films were regarded as prestige projects, the kind of movies only top-echelon directors could command. Unimpressed by front office minions, he was an old pro, and he knew what he was worth. Although he was authoritarian and paternalistic on the set, he despised these qualities in others, especially producers and their flunkeys. He treated them with utmost contempt and rudeness. When such functionaries dared to show up on his set––a rare occurrence––Ford went out of his way to humiliate them publicly. Peter Bogdanovich relates how one foolhardy soul was sent by his boss to speed up production, which had fallen about eight pages (roughly one day's shooting) behind schedule. Ford picked up the script and tore out eight pages. "You can tell your boss we're back on schedule now," he sneered. The intruder never returned, nor did the director ever shoot the offending eight pages.

Ford believed that a filmmaker was more like an architect than a novelist. The director can be creative within certain limits, but essentially he is a coordinator of the individual contributions of others. Next to cinematographers, he believed that writers were the director's most important collaborators. Working closely and in advance with his scenarists, he also liked to have them on the set for last-minute changes. He often wrote and rewrote lines himself. Though he seldom bothered to take any formal credit for his contributions to the script, he was especially effective in breaking up solemn scenes with a comic piece of dialogue. He regarded comedy as his forte. He affected a disdain for intellectuals but was in fact a knowledgeable historian, especially sophisticated in his grasp of the American Civil War period––an invaluable asset for an artist of Ford's nationalistic temperament. He often incorporated this knowledge into his scripts. Twenty-four of his movies were written by Frank S. Nugent and Dudley Nichols, his favorite writers and two of the most literate men in the film industry. Nunally Johnson and Lamar Trotti also wrote a number of Ford's works. These four were among the most respected scenarists in Hollywood, and Ford was frankly envied by other directors for his exceptionally well-crafted scripts.

"There's no such thing as a good script really," he once remarked; "scripts are dialogue, and I don't like all that talk. I've always tried to get things across visually." His films are usually best when dialogue is kept to a minimum, as in most of Nugent's scripts. When talk takes precedence, the results can seem didactic and excessively literary. In Talking Pictures, critic Richard Corliss is especially harsh on the scripts of Nichols for these failings. At his best, Ford reveals character through actions and gesture rather than dialogue. His outdoor stories are generally superior because there are not so many opportunities for extended conversations. His most admired films are constructed around simple, lean scripts, with an emphasis on behavior. Movies like Wagon Master, The Quiet Man (1952), and The Searchers might be described as literarily neutral: What makes them impressive is the way in which the screenplays are executed, not the quality of the writing as writing. On the other hand, when literary values predominate, Ford's visual style is often reined in, and the results are often dull movies like Sergeant Rutledge (script by Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah).

Ford preferred working with an informal company of regulars who appeared in film after film. Among these were the character actors Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Ben Johnson, John Qualen, Mildred Natwick, John Carradine, Harry Carey, Jr., and Thomas Mitchell. They were generally cast to type. As several commentators have pointed out, their reappearance in Ford's movies lends them a sense of continuity, as we watch them growing old and mellow, passing on traditions that were passed on to them in the earlier films. His favorite leading lady was the Irish beauty Maureen O'Hara, who was often paired with John Wayne, perhaps most memorably in the Irish comedy, The Quiet Man.

The director was somewhat sadistic in his relationship with actors. Even established stars, like Henry Fonda and James Stewart, who were grudgingly fond of the old man (Ford seems never to have been young), felt the sting of his ridicule on more than one occasion. He needled John Wayne mercilessly, referring to him as a "big oaf," among other colorful epithets. Wayne endured these insults with extraordinary good grace, for he loved the old curmudgeon as few others could. Ford's fellow Irish-American, James Cagney, was less generous. After the director had instructed him to perform a dangerous and gratuitous action, an observer wondered aloud why Ford would risk his star's safety in so pointless a manner. "Because he's got the Irish disease," Cagney muttered, "malice."

Ford's tactics might have been his way of humbling his stars to establish who's boss on the set. But––more charitably––the director might have used these devious stratagems as a way of exposing an actor's vulnerabilities on camera, vulnerabilities a star might otherwise conceal for fear that he'd be considered unmanly or less virile. The director preferred a certain edginess in his performers, believing that too much ease drained a scene of its humanity. He would sometimes encourage his players to improvise their dialogue to prevent their performances from getting too precise. Even when actors bungled a scene, Ford often retained their clumsiness as an aspect of characterization. "I don't want it to look perfect––like a circus," he growled when an actor asked to repeat a scene in order to improve upon it.

Ford's two favorite leading men were Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Fonda is the gentler of the two, dreamy, poetic, and soft-spoken. His range is also broader: He can play the pragmatic idealist in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) as well as the hardassed professional soldier in Fort Apache (1948). He's seldom aggressive, and in some cases he's even shy, but there's never a lack of confidence beneath his surface reserve. He can get most jobs done with casual competence and certainly with no fanfare, which he despises. He's sensitive and intelligent, and he doesn't hide either characteristic behind a macho façade. Whatever the role, there's always a countrified sincerity and decency in Fonda, and Ford exploited these qualities intelligently.

The Wayne character is more volatile. Chary of his personal honor and dignity, he can intimidate by his sheer massive presence. A man of few words and fewer pretensions, he usually does what he says he'll do, and does it forcefully. In the later movies he plays paternalistic figures, chivalrous to the ladies, though generally ill at ease in their presence. His voice is matter-of-factly wooden, and he defiantly refuses to tone it up. He doesn't walk so much as lumber, with a swagger that became a trademark. Beneath the brusqueness, however, is a mysterious vulnerability. No one was as skillful as Ford in bringing out Wayne's loneliness and isolation, his capacity to suffer without making a federal case out of it. More than any other Ford protagonist, the Wayne character is a tragic loser: At the end of most of the films, he's defeated, excluded, or even killed in defense of a larger cause.

Ford's artistic shortcomings have been severely censured by critic Michael Dempsey and others. Like Griffith, Ford was a romantic conservative. His greatest strengths as well as his failures can be attributed to this characteristic. Even some of his best works are flawed by his sentimentality and his endorsement of the most platitudinous hokum concerning family, country, and God. His worship of the past borders on the reactionary: Seldom does Ford exhibit any curiosity about the future or show any enthusiasm for new ideas. With the exception of Griffith, no major American director was so cloying in his veneration for authority figures and women. Dempsey has deplored what he calls Ford's Victorian "pedestalism." His ingenues are often saccharine abstractions, enacted by simpering starlets. Ford's Mother Earth figures have also been criticized as clichés. For the most part, they exist to service their menfolk––to fuss over them, humor them, and bury them like good grieving widows. The love relationships in most of the director's movies are scrupulously chaste: Sex wouldn't dare rear its head in so wholesome an environment.

Though Ford's comedy is often appealing, especially when underplayed, he occasionally pushed his humorous scenes into farce. Actors mug, grimace, and overact so broadly that these boisterous interludes threaten to snap some of his movies in two. The brawling, drinking Irishman, often played by McLaglen, is an especially offensive comic fixture. The director was also guilty of some disastrous miscasting, as in Cheyenne Autumn, in which the principal Indian characters are played by slick Hollywood pros, like Sal Mineo and Ricardo Montalban. The trite performances more than anything else ruin this otherwise noble effort. Even Ford's best movies, like The Searchers, are marred by box office concessions. Natalie Wood plays a young woman who has lived most of her life with a savage tribe of Indians, yet she looks remarkably glamorous withal. Allowing his leading ladies to violate the authenticity of a period with incongruously modern coiffures and makeup is another recurrent shortcoming. Perhaps Ford tried to resist some of these compromises: "I can fight like hell," he once complained, "but I always lost." Yet for a director of his enormous prestige within the industry, these lapses of taste were surprisingly frequent.

Ford is one of the few American directors who demonstrated a consistent interest in, and respect for, old people. In movies like The Last Hurrah and How Green Was My Valley, in which older characters are played by such gifted performers as Spencer Tracy, Donald Crisp, and Sara Allgood, the portrayals are among the most memorable elements of the films. But without tough, disciplined performers, older characters tend to slip into doddering stereotypes. Authority figures, especially fathers, military leaders, and clergymen, are often portrayed with Jehovah-like infallibility. Conversely, his young people are presented as warm-hearted but oafish louts, totally inept compared to their wiser elders.

Ford's working methods and his technical expertise were legendary. He was much admired for his flexibility, economy, and simplicity. A believer in preplanning, he could sometimes shoot a movie in three weeks––after six months of careful research. He never bothered with camera directions in his scripts, for he had all the setups in his head or knew instinctively where to place the camera for a shot. Cinematographers expressed amazement at how he always chose the best setup, even though he seldom looked through the viewfinder. He usually shot only one take and almost never more than two. Even action shots were rarely rehearsed in advance. Technical complications were discussed with the appropriate crew members and actors, then shot in a single take.

"The best things in movies happen by accident," Ford insisted. He was an expert improviser, and if he or his cameraman happened to see a special kind of light, an interesting cloud formation, or an impending storm, they would set up their camera on the spot and adapt a scene to fit the fortuitous circumstances of the locale. Although he complained mightily about the way studio cutters ruined his footage, Ford's custom of editing in the camera usually offered little choice in the way his shots could be assembled. He seldom shot any coverage material. During one project, he debated with himself concerning a close-up, which he didn't think would be necessary. "If I make a close-up," he reasoned, "somebody will want to use it." He decided not to shoot one. Producers were usually unable to recut his films, a shrewd maneuver that Hitchcock also employed to keep busy fingers away from his footage. Ford was usually under schedule and under budget, two incalculable virtues, especially during the cost-conscious period after the decline of the studio system in the 1950s.

"We've had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren't," Ford admitted. "But it's good for the country to have heroes to look up to." In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the West is conquered not by the virtues of civilization (represented by the James Stewart character) but by the crude force of the western hero (represented by the John Wayne character). The outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) is gunned down in the dark, an appropriate medium for the birth of a myth, for the dark obscures facts. When Stewart finally confesses to a newspaper editor that he was falsely credited with killing Valance, the editor replies, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend." In his earlier westerns, Ford also printed the legend. But as he grew older, he grew more ironic. Characteristically, in this film he offers both the legend and the fact, insisting on the validity of each.

Above all, Ford’s arrestingly poetic images are what provide the films with their emotional richness. He is a master of the subtle nuances of lighting. His movies are filled with arches, windows, and doorways in which the light source radiates from the center of the image, and the edges are sealed off by the surrounding darkness. He often groups his characters standing in shadows and semi-silhouette, lending them a tender, ghostly effect. His sunsets and sunrises are among the most ravishing ever photographed, particularly those of Monument Valley. Many of his westerns feature shots of long columns of mounted troops or wagon trains strung out like fragile beads on a string. Some of his finest shots feature the slanted lights of the late afternoon, when the shadows of his characters are elongated in streams along the ground.

Ford is a master of the classical style. His movies are edited at a tempo that is smooth and fluid, yet unhurried and rather grand. His compositions and framing techniques are usually formally balanced, lending the images an epic dignity, especially in group shots. Traveling shots are rare, generally used when a threatening force disrupts the tranquil stability of the characters' world, as in the comic brawl at the conclusion of The Quiet Man or the famous Indian pursuit sequence of Stagecoach, in which the camera speeds alongside the careening coach as its horses desperately strain to outpace the pursuing warriors. Most of Ford's communal scenes are photographed with a stationary camera, for a stable image suggests a stable universe.

Though Ford used many close-ups in his indoor dramas, in his outdoor movies he avoided them. The characters are most meaningfully defined by their juxtaposition with their environment. His landscapes are usually shot in deep focus, with delicate filters emphasizing the cloud formations above the terrain. Many shots are taken from a slightly low angle to underline the heroic qualities of the pilgrims. Generally Ford kept his horizons low, especially in his extreme long shots, in which the specklike pioneers or soldiers seem almost in danger of slipping off the bottom of the frame, so precarious is their position in comparison to the vast skies that threaten to overwhelm them from above.

In 1973, at the age of seventy-nine, John Ford died of cancer. Shortly before, he was selected by the American Film Institute to be the first recipient of the Life Achievement Award for contributions to the American cinema. The televised ceremony was attended by the President of the United States. The choice was apt. Like his literary counterpart, Whitman, this great national poet sang of America and its people with a lyric sincerity that has never been surpassed. Other epic filmmakers, like Sergei Eisenstein and Akira Kurosawa, admitted a major indeptedness to Ford's work. Less obviously, he has also influenced Ingmar Bergman, who considers Ford a towering figure. The French filmmakers who began as critics at Cahiers du Cinéma were ardent Ford enthusiasts. When asked what he studied in order to learn the art of the movies, Orson Welles replied, ''The old masters. By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."