Searching For John Ford.(Review)

by Joseph McBride. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001. 838 pp., illus, Hardcover: $40.00

Only sixty pages longer than his other lengthy biography, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (1992), Joseph McBride's Searching For John Ford is, in fact, a very different sort of book, and not only because the size and importance of Ford's work is considerably greater. The earlier volume--a devastating act of demystification that sought to dismantle not only a populist hero, but also the national mythology that virtually willed him into existence--made the value of Capra's films appear almost secondary. It was suggested, moreover, by Gilberto Perez that McBride even seemed to gloat over the failure of Capra's farm--that the author's apparent animus toward his subject spilled over into his cultural critique. For me, the self-deluding aspects of Capracorn--in contradistinction to the erotic splendors of Capra's best Thirties work-- made such a relentless assault on the mythology both useful and necessary.

One might argue that Ford's career, by contrast, is much too varied and complex to suit any such monolithic agenda, moral or otherwise. McBride's desire to keep certain questions about the filmmaker open is evident in the book's title, and in an overall tendency to avoid pat explanations. A couple of years ago, the Japanese film critic Shigehiko Hasumi made the provocative suggestion to me that Ford's films seem to grow out of a trauma of some kind, making his work ripe for psychoanalysis. Perhaps that's too simple a skeleton key to apply to such a huge filmography, yet the conflicts and contradictions running through the Fordian oeuvre are hard to deny--as are the almost equally constant (and therefore telling) denials of artistic intent and solitude. Far from being a happy family man, Ford seemed 'at home' mainly while drinking with members of his stock company, and McBride depicts him as a profoundly lonely person whose acts of bullying sadism against his cronies reflected various fears and feelings of in adequacy.

McBride's book finds these conflicts, contradictions, and denials everywhere, and the graceful way he integrates his sense of the life with his critical reading of the films is this biography's soundest achievement. This achieves a certain apotheosis in the following two sentences, found on page 303--perhaps the most useful thumbnail account of Ford's art that we have: "The cherishing of a momentary image, immutable in its delicacy and precision of framing, begins to assume obsessive proportions as shot after shot rolls inexorably

away. It is as if the very perfection of the image is the cause of its transience."

Most previous writing on Ford has been hamstrung by opting for either ideological attack or ideological defense and then becoming entrenched in that one-eyed position. McBride, by refreshing contrast, has the good sense to perceive that The Searchers is a racist film that also has profound and objective things to say about racism--sometimes in alternation and sometimes even simultaneously. (Much the same applies to the similarly obsessed William Faulkner; it's astonishing to reflect that only three years separate Sartoris from Light in August--just as the crude comic use of a squaw named Look in The Searchers exists alongside the highly complex and nuanced treatment of John Wayne's Ethan Edwards.)

It's significant that Ford assigned Duke Morrison--the future John Wayne, then working as Ford's prop man--the job of Stepin Fetchit's dresser on Salute, a 1929 feature shot in Annapolis, and that Ford saw to it that the black actor stayed in the commandant's guest house. Furthermore, according to McBride, "It's no exaggeration to say that Woody Strode, another black actor, was the last great love of John Ford's life" thirty-odd years later. But it's no less significant that Ford was probably antiSemitic and, according to McBride, bore some ...