FORD, JOHN

John Ford (Febrary 1, 1894–August 31, 1973), motion-picture director, was born John Martin Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to first-generation Irish Catholic immigrants. He spent his childhood in Portland, Maine, and in July 1914 he followed his older brother Francis, a movie actor and director, to California. There he began working in silent films as a crew member, stuntman, actor, and, from 1917 on, director. Until the start of the Depression, he was best known as a director of westerns, for Universal through 1921 and for Fox thereafter. The Iron Horse (1924) was his most famous western during the silent era. Between 1930 and 1941, Ford directed thirty-one films in a number of genres for a variety of studios, often working with screenwriter Dudley Nichols. His reputation and confidence grew after he was awarded an Oscar for best direction for The Informer (1935), an honor he also received for Grapes of Wrath in 1940 and for How Green Was My Valley in 1941.

Although Ford's political views evolved throughout his life, the progressive and antifascist political climate in Hollywood in the late 1930s and the influence of liberal screenwriters with whom he worked (such as Nichols) helped move his political views further left during the Depression than at any other time of his life. During that period he joined several leftist organizations, including the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, the Motion Picture Artists Committee to Aid Republican Spain, and the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League.

Two of Ford's films in particular bear the imprint of this political climate. In Ford's first western of the 1930s, Stagecoach (1939), the most sympathetically portrayed characters are the escaped convict Ringo, the prostitute Dallas, and the drunken Doc Boone, and the chief antagonist is the banker Gatewood. In line with Roosevelt's New Deal coalition, the common people are celebrated while greedy elites are scorned. Grapes of Wrath (1940), the adaptation of John Steinbeck's celebrated 1939 novel about Oklahoma farmers displaced by the Dust Bowl and seeking a new life in California, likewise drew a sympathetic portrait of the Joad family, who struggle to survive in a system stacked against them, even if Ford softened the novel's dark ending by concluding with Ma Joad's optimistic speech about the endurance of the common people.

In 1939 Ford fed the growing American nationalism on the eve of World War II with two historical films, Drums along the Mohawk and Young Mr. Lincoln. His final film before the U. S. entered World War II, How Green Was My Valley (1941), nostalgically portrayed a Welsh coal-mining family from the adult point of view of the family's youngest son. Together, these three films foreshadowed Ford's evolution from leftist politics to concerns of patriotism, national myths, and memory that would preoccupy him in his films of the next decade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford. 1999.

Ford, Dan. Pappy: The Life of John Ford. 1979.

Gallagher, Tag. John Ford: The Man and His Films. 1986.

John Ford Papers. Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.

McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford. 2001.

Studlar, Gaylyn, and Matthew Bernstein, eds. John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era. 2001.