I

JOHN FORD AS AN IRISH AUTHOR

Previous page: John Ford in uniform, World War II. (Lilly Library)

 

 

‘My name is John Ford; I am a director of Westerns’: thus Ford presented himself – famously, sham-modestly, and misleadingly.1

The occasion on which he first deployed the formulation is crucial. The date was 22 October 1951, at a Screen Directors Guild Meeting in the Beverley Hills Hotel. The organization, like the country as a whole, had been in crisis for several years over the hunt for Communist Party members obedient to Moscow. Cecil B. DeMille wanted the Guild to compel each of its members to take a loyalty oath to the United States of America.2 By this means he also hoped to reduce the power and influence of directors of foreign birth, people like the German-born Billy Wilder and William Wyler and the Italian-born Frank Capra – men with ‘accents’, as DeMille framed the category of un-Americanness. If directors refused to take the oath, then they would be blacklisted by Hollywood producers, who had by 1951 been well and truly terrified by Joseph McCarthy’s House of Un-American Activities Committee in the US House of Representatives.

John Ford and Merian Cooper (his producer and partner in Argosy Pictures) were indignant at the thought of being subjected to any loyalty test except one administered by the US government. Surely no one had a right to question their patriotism. Cooper, producer of King Kong in 1933, had become a brigadier general in the army; Ford had climbed to the rank of admiral in the navy while running the photographic unit of the intelligence service in every major theatre of World War II. He had been awarded the Purple Heart for an arm wound received in the Battle of Midway.3 Yet the loyalty-oath issue went deeper than questions of service to country. It also went deeper than party politics. Both Ford and Cooper were Republicans, just like DeMille, who advocated the oath, and like Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the current Guild president, who opposed it. Certainly, matters of professional formation were involved: ‘We organized this guild to protect ourselves against producers,’ Ford reminded his colleagues. An oath would require the surrender of a degree of professional freedom. Beyond national service, party politics, or profession, however, the issue raised questions of ethnicity in an American’s artistic identity, and that is why Ford opened his remarks by saying who he was.

Among the 298 delegates in the Crystal Ballroom, there can hardly have been one that did not know that the six-foot tall, stooped and slack-jowled man wearing an eye-patch and baseball cap went by the name of John Ford and that he had directed Westerns, scores of them. In the world of movie-makers, he was as quintessential an American figure as Buffalo Bill. By 1951 he had been in Hollywood for 37 years and had made 118 movies. In December 1935, he was one of the twelve who founded the Screen Directors Guild. The modesty of his self-introduction was fake modesty, a rhetorical irony to undercut DeMille’s pomposity. Because DeMille had been the first director to make a full-length movie in Hollywood (The Squaw Man, 1914), and because he subsequently made many high-grossing epic spectaculars (The King of Kings, 1927; Cleopatra, 1934), this son of English immigrant theatre people had come to regard himself as old stock, a native aristocrat.4 Ford countered by staking his claim to the one uniquely American genre, the Western, more or less as if he had said, ‘My name’s Hancock, John Hancock, and I wrote the Declaration of Independence.’

It was a strong opening, and after some further remarks, half-belligerent (‘I don’t like C.B. DeMille’) and half-friendly (‘but I admire him’), and with very little further eloquence or argumentation, Ford proposed that the motion for an oath be dropped, the current board of directors be asked to resign, and the meeting adjourned. DeMille ‘shrivelled and shrank’ as Ford spoke.5 He knew he had been trumped by another patriot patriarch.

Ford would have been entitled to introduce himself quite differently. He might, for instance, have said, ‘I am a director of Shirley Temple movies,’ for he had made Wee Willie Winkie (1937) for Twentieth Century Fox and later cast the actress as an adult in a Western, Fort Apache (1948). That would be a twisted take on his filmography, but it would not have been unreasonable for him to have said, ‘I am a director of films about Lincoln and Lincoln’s America.’ Ford’s series of Southern and Midwestern films starring Will Rogers (Dr Bull, 1933; Judge Priest, 1934; Steamboat Round the Bend, 1935), his two films about the life of Lincoln (Prisoner of Shark Island, 1936; The Young Mr Lincoln, 1939), his other American historical films starring Henry Fonda, whether in 1776 Massachusetts (Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939), 1881 Tombstone (My Darling Clementine, 1946) or Dustbowl Oklahoma and Depression California (The Grapes of Wrath, 1940), creatively defined an American fair-minded, homespun, democratic individualism in an array of geographical and historical settings. His ability to create a historical screen poetry was seized upon by producer Winfield Sheehan of Fox Studios, and adeptly developed by Darryl Zanuck when he took over the amalgamated Twentieth Century Fox Studios in 1935.

In light of his achievements within the studio system, Ford could have simply said to his colleagues in the Screen Directors Guild, ‘I am a successful money director,’ for he had done the work assigned to him by Sam Goldwyn, RKO, Fox and Twentieth Century Fox through several decades, always on schedule and within budget, winning four Academy Awards, and with very few losing propositions, whether the movies were Westerns, war movies, Americana, historical costume dramas (Mary of Scotland, 1936) or Shirley Temple vehicles.

Finally, to bring into discussion the aspect of his artistic identity that will be examined at length here, John Ford was a director of art films of Irish interest. But, although he was at work on his fifth such project at that moment (The Quiet Man, 1952), an ethnic self-presentation would hardly have suited his purpose at the Screen Directors Guild meeting in 1951.

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Nor would it have been, when replying to DeMille’s nativist arguments, appropriate for Ford to introduce himself by saying, ‘My real name is Sean Martin Aloysius O’Feeney.’ In 1894 those were the names given the thirteenth child of John Feeney, an immigrant bootlegger and saloon-keeper. Ford was not ashamed of this Irish background. Far from it. He told friends to call him ‘Sean’, not John. No one could have known John Ford for long without learning that his father came from the village of Spiddal outside Galway on the west coast of Ireland, and his mother’s people from the Aran Islands, off that same coast and within sight of Spiddal.

Although by 1951 Ford had made only three or four short visits to Ireland, in conversation he made much of his familiarity with the country. He arrived for the first time in Spiddal on a four-day visit to Ireland in December 1921, during a truce in the War of Independence. In Connemara Ford evidently met Michael Thornton, an IRA cousin on the run from the British army. Could a wealthy relative like himself have refused to contribute some cash to the cause? Subsequently, Ford anecdotally ballooned his brief sympathetic association with Michael Thornton into active service in the fighting.6

John Ford with his cousins in their Spiddal cottage, either in 1951 or 1955. Ford’s son Pat is third from left. (Lilly Library)

At a Hollywood party he would announce, ‘I’m an Irish rebel, freedom fighter. Bet you didn’t know that.’7 On movie sets Ford sometimes even pretended to fluency in the Irish language by mixing gibberish with the few catch-phrases he remembered from childhood (Maureen O’Hara, who had some school Irish, was induced into conspiring in the hoax).8 The fantasy element in Ford’s ego-identification as Irish is nicely symbolized by the sailboat he purchased in 1934, thereafter the central vehicle of his recreation. He named the hundred-foot ketch Araner, after the islands from which his mother’s people came. The boat and its name highlighted both the continuity between John Ford and his pre-Famine Irish forebears, and his distance from them in the splendid Californian triumph at which their descendant had arrived.9 That there was an element of fantasy in Ford’s Irishness does not mean that it was unreal or unimportant to his identity. It suggests the opposite: that his Irishness was a wish in need of fulfilment, a gap in his American identity that had to be filled.

Like many other Americans, Ford required an ethnic personality profile as an intermediary between the abstract individualism of the capitalist metropolis and the nation state. The pressures upon first-generation immigrants to adapt to the language, the ethnically mixed churches, the secular public education, and the mobile employment markets of America were immense. Emigrate or starve had been the dilemma in their home countries, and integrate or starve was often their only choice in America. The ideology of the United States aimed to create national solidarity among immigrants by means of a theory of the equality of each citizen – at least each non-African, non-Asian and non-Hispanic citizen – at the level of individuality, which implied the surrender of group loyalties to one’s community of descent and a promise of blind justice on the part of the state with respect to hierarchies of groups.

The huge waves of immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of Germans, Irish, Italians and Russian Jews, raised fears during World War I of their ‘100 per cent Americanism’ in the majority population, especially after 1917, when the USA entered the war on the side of Britain and against Germany.10 In 1924 the US Congress, still concerned about the threat of newcomers to national solidarity, passed an immigration bill that fixed an annual quota of immigrants for each country based on its place in the national origins of the US population in the census of 1920, the involuntary immigrants from Africa and Asia excepted.11 As a consequence 70 per cent of the future immigration to the USA would be from Ireland, the United Kingdom and Germany, all ‘white’ and Western countries, envisioned in 1924 to be the core of a future uniform American identity. But even second- and third-generation white Americans from these countries would often yearn to retain features of their group identity before the last shreds had melted away.

An ethnic profile could, as Emile Durkheim suggested, provide citizens of a modern state with spiritual guidance and consolation, helping them steer clear of the despair that attends complete normlessness (‘anomie’).12 A remnant of ‘symbolic ethnicity’ could serve a still vital function even if it amounted only to the celebration of national holidays (e.g. St Patrick’s Day), the determination of one’s religious affiliation (Irish Catholic), rare overseas holidays in the ‘homeland’ (‘the ould sod’), identification with the high culture of one’s ancestral nation (the Irish Renaissance), and the attribution of personality features to inheritance from one’s ancestors (alcoholism, orality, pugilism).13

John Ford illustrates how to throw a punch, Long Gray Line, 1955. (Courtesy Scott Eyman)

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For instance, if one self-medicated by means of alcoholic binges, as Ford often did once he had wrapped a film, one could point to heavy drinking as just part of the personality kit of an Irish male, a mark of group belonging. One could even require one’s drinking buddies and crewmen on the Araner – people like John Wayne and Ward Bond, men of no immediate Hibernian ancestry – to be Irish too. Or how could one excuse one’s physical violence against friends, subordinates and women? For sometimes John Ford unpredictably sucker-punched people.

He did it even to actors with whom he had worked again and again, such as Henry Fonda (Ford ‘suddenly jumped up and slugged him in the face’), Maureen O’Hara (‘He turned on me and socked me square in the jaw. I felt my head snap back and heard the gasps of everyone there’), and Dobe Carey (‘So I’m smiling, and boom! Ford hits me right here [in the jaw]).’14 Such bewildering, unforgivable acts Ford could hope to understand, or get others to interpret, as just part of a romantic Irish personality, the ethnic burden he had to bear. Ford was not a highly articulate man. ‘Ford can’t write,’ screenwriter Nunnally Johnson reported, ‘it just runs him nuts.’15 His sole gift in self-expression was telling through pictures, with words – where essential – provided by others. His surviving letters show very little of the character, humorous charm, elegance and depth embodied in his best movies. So he could not lay claim to the Irish ‘gift of the gab’.

But he certainly had an artist’s creative nature, and he protected its freedoms by evasiveness in relation to truth. His reports on life took the form of fabulations – not transcriptions of an event but heightened, complex translations of it. In interpersonal relations he carried statements one step past irony. An ironic statement is one in which what is meant is different from what is said, but also a statement in which one’s intention is still to be understood. Ford’s conversation, as many producers, stars, and especially interviewers would come to learn, was filled with statements that were plainly misleading. He was, in fact, an unrepentant liar. But this personality attribute could be at least partly transvalued from vice to virtue by being understood as an aspect of his Irish heritage, for the Irish are stereotyped as people of powerfully imaginative natures. In 1937 Ford wrote to a nephew fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War that he was glad the boy had inherited ‘the good part of the O’Feeney blood’. He had to admit that his own temperament carried strains both good and bad: ‘Some of it is awful, very God-damned awful – we are liars – weaklings – and selfish drunkards, but there has always been a stout rebel quality in the family and a peculiar passion for justice.’16

Ford’s claims to Irishness carved out a dimension of freedom in an American civil society that, partly because of its Protestant origins, and partly because of the centrality of the free market to its way of life, officially valued sobriety, self-discipline and speech of almost promissory plainness. If drinking, fighting and tale-telling were Irish habits, they had to be tolerated on the grounds that all ethnic forms of life ought to be equally valued.

An ethnic personality profile might serve not only in justifying personal habits that American civil society treated as vices, but in providing the security of given virtues in a social marketplace of excessive freedoms. Ford’s ‘Irish’ and patriarchal sense of family and his Catholic notions of marriage are important here. In a civil ceremony in 1920 Ford married 28-year-old Mary McBryde Smith, of Scottish and Irish descent. As a Catholic, Ford could not marry in church a woman who was either Protestant or divorced, and she was both. In December 1941, after the death of Mary Ford’s first husband and her conversion to Catholicism, they were married a second time in the National Cathedral, Washington DC. In divorce-happy Hollywood the Fords treated marriage as indissoluble. Ford admitted he was not an ideal husband: it was his ethnic inheritance that made him so difficult, he apologetically explained to Mary. In a sentimental letter written in New York in 1943 while awaiting his departure to the Asian theatre of war, Ford concluded:

I pray to God [the war] will soon be over so we can live our life together with our children and grandchildren and our Araner – Catalina [Island] would look good now! God bless and love you Mary darling – I’m tough to live with – heaven knows & Hollywood didn’t help – Irish and genius don’t mix well – but you do know you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved – God bless m’darling.17

Secure in her position and her house, but aware that Hollywood husbands could sometimes only think of their ‘lousy, stinking tail[s]’,18 Mary Ford somewhat ominously recommended that Hollywood wives take to heart the old saying, ‘Don’t believe any of what you read, and only half of what you see.’

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Not that there was a great deal of gossip about John Ford, even in a town where Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons had turned gossip into an international industry.19 There is little evidence that Ford had a nature that was particularly passionate sexually, or single-mindedly disposed towards either women or men. Yet through the sexist system of procurement operating fairly openly in film studios, he would have been exposed to what for another would be stiff temptations. For instance, at Twentieth Century Fox where Ford was employed in the 1930s and 40s, head producer Darryl Zanuck would have sex with a starlet at four o’clock each afternoon, the identity of the starlets changing regularly.20 In the same period, as leading director for the studio, Ford did not make use of his office couch for casting purposes.

He did become romantically entangled with Katherine Hepburn during the filming of Mary of Scotland in March 1936 and kept up the flirtation at least until January 1937. He took her home to meet his family in Portland, Maine, and had dinner with hers (‘Is it true your people are Irish Catholics?’ Hepburn’s blueblood aunt inquired in mock disbelief). He brought Hepburn out for a sail on the Araner, during which she posed for a photograph giving him an on-deck foot-massage. There is, however, no evidence that Hepburn was lying when she said, ‘He never made a pass at me.’21 While on tour around the Midwest in a stage play, Hepburn wrote to Ford that his spirit went with her; he ‘occup[ied] a wonderful place suspended in mid-air below the [theatre] balcony’,22 a tough, fatherly, yet finally appreciative image before which she could perform in hope of applause. But it was an image that could be relied upon never to become a man, and never to require that she should stop performing and start being a woman. It suited them both, Hepburn’s recent biographer William J. Mann hypothecizes, that Ford was a married man unlikely ever to leave his wife. Thus, they were each protected by his monogamy from what they did not really want in any case. Sexual intercourse could have brought their romance to a catastrophic end. Hepburn’s ‘Dear John’ letter (actually addressed to Dear Sean) of 10 April 1937 pointedly complains of a lack of clarity on both her part and his during the relationship, and concludes that ‘Maybe [was] a feeble way of saying no.’23

Katherine Hepburn and John Ford on the set of Mary of Scotland, 1936. (RKO/Photofest, © RKO)

Ford had other flirtations. One not noticed by his all-but-all-knowing biographer Joseph McBride has been identified by William J. Mann in Kate: The Woman Who was Katherine Hepburn. After January 1937 when Hepburn dropped Ford and literally flew off with pilot, film-maker and millionaire Howard Hughes, Ford found a new darling among Hepburn’s Hollywood friends, the ginger-haired Irish-American Mimi Doyle (1914–79). She was the daughter of a Los Angeles banker and sister of actress Eve March.24 Mann proves that Mimi Doyle is the author of a mysterious love letter in the Ford archive, one that takes the form of a catty playlet reporting Hepburn’s private conversation about her past romance with Ford. But Mann does not go on to observe that on the evidence of this letter Ford may have set Mimi Doyle up in an apartment, for which she appears to thank him: ‘Little boy, the new apartment is wonderful. I have a big picture of you and somehow I’m not quite so lonesome with that to look at first thing in the morning and the last thing at night (oh my I love you).’25 He also found her a part as a telephone operator in Four Men and a Prayer (1938) and other bits in five subsequent films, the final one as ‘Mamie Burns’ in The Last Hurrah (1958).

To what degree this affair was consummated and how long it lasted are things unknown. Perhaps to Mimi Doyle as to Katherine Hepburn, Ford came no closer than floating in the middle distance. In spite of the frank intimacy of her phrasing – the last thing at night (oh my I love you) – it is rather hard to imagine 44-year-old Ford in bed with this 28-year-old. He had certain habits that were likely to render his person unattractive. For instance, he rarely took his pipe out of his mouth, except when replacing it with a cigar or a handkerchief. His favourite tobacco is described by seasoned reporters as ‘unfragrant’ (read stinking).26

Apart from his smoking, a widespread and sexualized pastime in any case for men and women in the period (remember Garbo exhaling clouds of cigarette smoke in the faces of her leading men?), Ford had the unique habit of chewing a large white handkerchief. Evidently, this was some secondary form of suckling behaviour, and one that loosed his mind to reverie. He sucked his handkerchief in script conferences; he sucked it while in his director’s chair on set during filming. He went through handkerchief after handkerchief. The lifelong habit overstimulated his salivary glands. When he would relax with a drink from the tension of creative thought, his lips would grow wet with slobber. Dobe Carey, who was kissed by Ford when drunk, found the experience embarrassing, and needed to wipe himself afterwards, which enraged Ford.27 So Dobe Carey had a double surprise: first the wet kiss, then a sucker punch. Still, whatever may have been the features of John Ford’s physical person, geniuses, millionaires and leaders of men – and Ford was certainly all those – have a supervening attractiveness for women and men. After all, one of the most beautiful, intelligent women in the western world, Katherine Hepburn, had fallen for him.

When separated by World War II duties from his wife, Ford flirted with his wartime secretary, who called him an ‘old goat’ and always said ‘No’ to what were only joking offers.28 Finally, during the preparations for filming The Quiet Man, he wrote Maureen O’Hara rather corny, stilted love letters, possibly composed when drunk. In them he worked himself into a fantasy that he was the Trooper Thornton hero of that film, later to be played by John Wayne, opposite O’Hara as the heroine Mary Kate Danaher.29

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O’Hara, from what mixture of motives it is hard to say, relays anecdotes in her 2004 autobiography that suggest a counter-explanation of Ford’s monogamy. According to her, Ford never had a sexual love for another woman not because of his Irish Catholic mores, but because his passionate feelings were primarily for men. O’Hara says that in 1954 she went to see the director about costume tests for The Long Gray Line. He did not get up from his desk where he was drawing on a pad. When O’Hara came close, she saw what he was drawing: ‘Penises. Big ones and small ones. Thin ones and fat ones.’ She declined to acknowledge what she saw, and what he knew she had seen, for he continued his drawing. They did not speak of the matter. A few days later, she came into his office without knocking, and this time caught Ford kissing someone, who, when he left Ford’s embraces turned out to be a famous leading man, O’Hara says, without naming the person in question.30

There is admittedly a strain of malice in O’Hara’s reminiscences: she is far more likely to offer shocking revelations about others than about herself. For instance, in the context of a child-custody battle, she reports hearing that her ex-husband was, literally, a ‘cocksucker’.31 While she was grateful to Ford as the one director who ‘allowed her talent to triumph over her face’, and gave her more scope for acting than she was allowed in her ‘tits and sand’ swashbucklers, O’Hara did not like being punched, abused verbally on set, harassed by pseudo-love letters, and upbraided for divorcing her drunk, bankrupt and unfaithful husband – all of which she had to put up with from her old friend and fellow Irish patriot John Ford.32

Apart from the slobbery kiss when drunk applied to Dobe Carey, there is only one other story of male–male love in Joseph McBride’s long biography. Woody Strode (1914–94), a famous African-American decathlon star (kept out of the 1936 Olympics only by a UCLA academic requirement),33 became one of Ford’s favourite actors. In 1960 Ford took the financially risky step of giving Strode, often cast by others as one of many black extras in fourth-rate Tarzan remakes, a leading-role in a Western, Sergeant Ruttledge. The movie is about a soldier in a Negro cavalry regiment who is falsely accused of rape. Strode in some scenes is posed as the archetypal ‘buck’, that virile representation of white suspicions that black men really are better.

Sergeant Ruttledge guides his troops by means of his faith that ‘Some day’, ‘Maybe, but not yet’, black Americans will get the freedom that Lincoln promised them. On that expectation he is ‘crazy’ enough to ‘fight the white man’s war’ against the Indians. His faith in America’s future is precariously vindicated in the climactic trial scene, in which Strode, although exposed along the way to what is depicted as casual and wholly customary courtroom racism, is found Not Guilty of rape by the military tribunal.

Three years later, when Ford was ailing and lonely, Strode temporarily left his own wife and children to move into the director’s house to look after him, sleeping at the foot of his bed. Strode stayed for four months. He gave the old man massages and tried to curtail his alcoholism. The relationship, McBride concludes, had a ‘homoerotic element’ but, as McBride rightly adds, it also matches the affectionate, mutually respectful, master–servant relationship between Pompey and the despairing Tom Doniphon in Liberty Valance (1962), roles played just a year earlier by Strode and John Wayne.34 Anyone who can remember Strode’s body – he plays the spear-carrying gladiator in the duel with Kirk Douglas in Spartacus – will be able to understand what a potent symbol of the life force that physique could be, perhaps especially for a patient undergoing the late stages of bodily decrepitude. What Ford got from Woody Strode seems to have been more therapeutic, medicinal and psychological than sexual. It is a mysterious affair, and one can only wonder at the humanity of Strode, involving a sensitivity beyond shame, in volunteering for the intimate real-life role of male nurse.

The relationship with Strode played a part in John Ford’s emerging appreciation of the value not just of his own ethnicity, but of multi-ethnicity. Ford had been one of the directors to make most regular use of Stepin Fetchit, the jive-talking, lazy and pseudo-stupid ‘coon’ minstrel star. Ford cast him in Judge Priest (1934), Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), and wanted to put him in My Darling Clementine (1946).35

Stepin Fetchit (left) as Jeff Poindexter and Will Rogers as Judge Priest in Judge Priest, 1934. (Google Pictures)

Furthermore, for decades Ford’s Westerns depicted Native Americans in the customary way as simply the Other, against whom the post-Civil War, ethnic immigrants would unite into an American community, their past differences white-washed. Yet The Searchers (1956) tackled the murderous racism and fear of miscegenation lingering in the white population after the Civil War, a national race psychosis underlying American mass-culture narratives of the twentieth century. If Sergeant Ruttledge was, as Ford claimed, ‘the first time we had ever shown the Negro as a hero’,36 Cheyenne Autumn for the first time made the Indians both sympathetic individuals and collective victims of unspeakable injustice and inhumanity. ‘Let’s face it,’ Ford told Peter Bogdanovich on the set, ‘we’ve treated [the Indians] very badly … we’ve cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else, but they kill one white man and, God, out come the troops.’37 The film depicts the Cheyenne’s trail-of-tears migration from an Oklahoma reservation to their old buffalo-hunting grounds in Wyoming. With The Searchers, Sergeant Ruttledge and Cheyenne Autumn, the old director made a radical change of direction in his storytelling about blacks and Indians. The self-described Irishman had come to understand that in a multi-ethnic society, to quote Emile Durkheim, ‘the image of the one who completes us’, the image of the Other, must become ‘inseparable from ours … It thus becomes an integral part of our conscience.’38

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One last key figure in Ford’s life sheds light on Maureen O’Hara’s suggestion that Ford was fundamentally homosexual. Although he has been little written about (two brief references in McBride’s big biography), this man was a significant long-term interest in Ford’s life, and especially in its Irish dimension.

About the sexuality of Brian Desmond Hurst (1900–86) there can be no doubt. Christopher Robbins opens his memoir of Hurst with a characteristic anecdote. Late in his life, Hurst arrived at a Belgravia pub for his customary mid-morning breakfast of a raw egg in a glass of champagne. One labourer seated at a table of three shot off his mouth: ‘Fucking old queen.’ Hurst ordered the men a round of pints, and then swanned over to them. After a friendly toast, he said, ‘By the way, gentlemen, I am not an old queen … I am the Empress of Ireland.’39 Hurst was indeed a flamboyantly indiscreet lover of soldiers, policemen and working-class boys.

He had been born in Belfast. His father was a Protestant and a blacksmith in the shipyards. Hurst joined the British army and in 1915 was wounded at the Battle of Gallipoli. After the war, he shed his Belfast working-class Protestant heritage, and declared his utter different-ness by becoming both an Irish Republican and a Catholic. While enrolled as a student of painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he met James Joyce and Liam O’Flaherty. In 1928 Hurst turned up in Los Angeles, where he got work as an artist, scene-painter and extra. In Ford’s silent A Hangman’s House, starring Victor McLaglen, Hurst had a part as an extra (as did, for his first time on screen, John Wayne, then still called Marion Morrison). Watching Ford on set, Hurst decided to become a director himself.40

Ford took a friendly interest in his fellow Irishman; he called him ‘cousin’. For Ford, the word was significant, not just fanciful. Ethnic membership is based not just on a common religion, language and customs, a shared history and dates of commemoration, but also on the idea of a common ancestry in a certain place, and thus actual kinship ties, even if these are untraced genealogically. Ethnically conceived, all Irishmen thus belong to a single family.41 The kinship is fictive, of course. The Galway Catholic Feeneys and Belfast Protestant Hursts did not have a common religion, shared history, or single ancestral stock; they descended from what for centuries had been and still remained warring groups. Ireland was not a multi-ethnic society like the United States of America; it was a segmented, internally colonized, plural society, largely as a result of Britain’s re-conquest and Protestant plantation of the island in the seventeenth century. But Ford’s readiness to treat individuals who self-identified as Irish in Hollywood as if they were long-lost cousins in need of a helping hand was a very important part of both his personality and his work as a film-maker. It was an American custom, perhaps especially among the Irish, for those immigrants already settled in an ethnic community to provide a job, a loan, a bed, a meal, or just advice to the bewildered newcomers from ‘home’. In the ethnically rich, rapidly transforming metropolis of movieland, the custom had important consequences for the films themselves.

Ford bought a painting by Hurst and invited him home to dinner. In turn Hurst introduced Ford to his Anglo-Irish aristocrat friend, the outlandish Harry Clifton (the man who gave Yeats a massive piece of sculptured lapis lazuli in 1935, inspiring one of Yeats’s greatest late poems).42 So that he might learn his trade, Ford took Hurst on as a gofer on the production team for Arrowsmith (1931). When Liam O’Flaherty arrived in Hollywood trying to sell his novels to the movies, Hurst, Ford and O’Flaherty together drew up some initial plans for the filming of The Informer (1935).43

But Hurst was friendly not only with Ford. In Los Angeles he found, for instance, a boyfriend in Michio Ito (1892–1961), the dancer who in 1916 had performed as a hawk in one of Yeats’s Noh plays, but who in 1933 was choreographing Madame Butterfly for Paramount.44 Hurst had also found his way into the George Cukor set of Hollywood homosexuals. At one time when he was living at Ford’s house, Hurst told his host he was going to Cukor’s for dinner. Returning late at night, he discovered that Ford had waited up for him. Who was there? Ford wanted to know. It was a surprise to learn that his fellow Irish-American Spencer Tracy was at the party.45 But Ford easily accepted that Garson Kanin and professional sissy Clifton Webb would have been among the crowd.46 Next Ford wanted to know about all the rooms in the house, and Hurst obliged, describing the pool, the drawing room, the study, but admitted he could not give an account of Cukor’s bedroom, because he did not go there. Ford said, ‘Brian, I am proud of you.’47

That was the first time, Hurst says, the two men mutually acknowledged the homosexual side of Hurst’s life. But what about the homosexual side of Ford’s life? As characterized in the anecdote, Ford is eager to learn about Hollywood’s closeted community of men, and he takes no trouble to distance himself from friends whom he knows to be homosexual, like Cukor and Hurst, but he wishes them to believe he would be happier if they would not act upon their desires.

Hurst began his career as a director in 1934 working with DuWorld Pictures in Hollywood on a version of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. He then returned to Ireland to make a film of J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1935), starring Abbey actors Sara Allgood, Ria Mooney and playwright Denis Johnston, with costumes borrowed from the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.48 In London Hurst soon got a long-term contract with producer Alexander Korda to direct major motion pictures, such as This Lion Had Wings (1939), with Merle Oberon and Ralph Richardson.

While working in the Office of Strategic Services, Ford visited Hurst in London during 1942.49 On his return to London in 1944 to supervise the filming of the D-Day invasion, Ford spent a weekend in the country with his friend. Hurst then left to film George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra in Denham.50 In 1947 the two men exchanged gifts (blue dressing-gown for Ford, cigars for Hurst) and began to talk of making films in Ireland.51

Director Brian Desmond Hurst is shown on the set of Hungry Hill, 1947. (Courtesy Universal Pictures/Ronald Grant/Photofest)

Along with Michael, Lord Killanin, Brian Desmond Hurst was brought into the planning for The Quiet Man. Initially it was Brian’s producer, Alexander Korda, who was to provide funding for that film.52 Ford, Hurst and Killanin joined up at Ashford Castle, County Mayo, in November 1950 to scout locations. On this occasion Ford and Hurst together took out a two-year lease on the rectory cottage on Killanin’s estate in Spiddal, where they would have free use of a trout stream and the beaches of Galway Bay.53 Upon his return to the USA Ford sent his Irish friend a present of two blue silk shirts, and sought advice about possibly casting Siobhan McKenna in The Quiet Man (though not as Mary Kate Danaher).54

Busy with his own production schedule, Hurst was unable to be on hand during the filming of The Quiet Man during the summer of 1951. The following October, in the wake of the excitement created by the visit of Hollywood to County Galway, Hurst stayed for two weeks in the cottage he had leased with Ford in Spiddal. Killanin and Hurst believed The Quiet Man opened the door to a new possibility. They proposed that Ford join them in forming a film production company based in Galway, with their films distributed by Arthur Rank. The focus of the company would be on adaptations of works from the Irish Literary Revival. In the offer letter they mentioned as possibilities film treatments of Liam O’Flaherty’s Famine and James Stephens’s The Demi-Gods.55 On 24 October 1951 Ford replied by telegram: ‘COUNT ME IN.’ He concurred ‘one hundred per cent’. Strangely enough, Ford sent this telegram just two days after the Screen Directors Guild meeting at which he introduced himself as an all-American movie-maker (‘I am a director of Westerns’).

Ford’s first idea for the Irish production company was to use still-surviving participants in ‘The Troubles’ for a story about Republican martyr Kevin Barry (1902–20). Barry was a university student who led an attack against a lorry of British soldiers at the start of the Anglo-Irish war, killing six (the first British casualties in the campaign). He was arrested and hanged, in spite of his request to die by firing squad – hanging was for criminals, not soldiers. Ford intended to make the Kevin Barry story into a ‘patriotic’ and ‘anti-British’ movie, but one to be done with such ‘showmanship’ that even the British would ‘welcome’ it.56

Lord Killanin argued that a nationalist exaltation of Kevin Barry would reawaken divisions within the Irish population (presumably between Republicans and Unionists). So Ford dropped the idea, consenting to the view that the products of the new Four Provinces Films should not ‘antagonize any National group’, presumably in particular the Protestant group in the province of Ulster: ‘I don’t mind killing them, but I am very tender-hearted and don’t care to hurt their feelings.’57 This bravura piece of self-contradiction tells us something: Ford was conscious of the degree to which his ‘I’m an Irish freedom-fighter’ pose was just a pose, and he expected others to allow for an ironical reading of it. Ford admitted to Killanin that, on second thought, his idea for the Kevin Barry film was unworkable, an ‘arty’ combination of ‘documentary’ and ‘romantic’ approaches.

Lord Killanin (right) with unidentified man, during filming of The Rising of the Moon, 1957. (Lilly Library)

Brian Desmond Hurst visited Ford twice in 1952: ‘We … really had a wingding.’ Ford wrote to Killanin, ‘Did him no end of good. We squeezed in a trip to Hawaii by air. Mary, Brian, and I – swell!’58 Their joint venture in turning the Irish Literary Revival into a golden era of film-making in the west of Ireland ultimately led to two limited achievements. Ford made three short unrelated stories (from a Lady Gregory play, a Michael J. McHugh tale and a Frank O’Connor story) into the triptych feature The Rising of the Moon (1957). It is recognizably a Ford film but does not rank in his top twenty, even though Ford handpicked the stories, cast the actors, and partly produced the whole enterprise.

Hurst filmed J.M. Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World in County Kerry locations, with Siobhan McKenna as Pegeen Mike (1962).59 This was the last film he was to make. The Rising of the Moon is a great director’s not very good piece of work; Hurst’s Playboy is a not very good director’s bad work. These two films constitute the total output of Four Provinces Films. Both are literary (though Ford’s handling of the scripts is characteristically free). Neither won high praise nor made the least bit of money, yet they suggest something else that might have been, something Ford long dreamed about: a full identification of the film-maker with the great Irish literary tradition, in a form profitable to Ireland and ennobling to its people worldwide. The happy success of The Quiet Man had made the realization of this dream seem possible.

John Ford (centre; unidentified either side) near Oughterard, County Galway, filming ‘Guests of the Nation’, part of The Rising of the Moon, 1957. (Lilly Library)

John Ford with actors from the Taidbhearc Theatre, Galway, preparing to film The Rising of the Moon, 1957. (Lilly Library)

This aspiration – nurtured by Ford from the early 1930s to the mid-1950s – coincides with his relationship with the unlikely figure of Brian Desmond Hurst. Through these decades Brian Desmond Hurst served as one of Ford’s primary personal contacts with an Irish citizen, but his Irish ‘cousin’ was as untypical and fantasticated an Irishman as it would be possible to find, unless one looked backward to Oscar Wilde or across to the Dublin actor and impresario Micheál Mac Liammóir (an Irish-speaking ‘Catholic’ born in London as Michael Willmore). Wilde was an Irishman who invented modern queerness; Mac Liammóir a queer who invented his Irishness. Like both, Hurst had enormous personal charm and style.

To judge by Christopher Robbins’s memoir, Hurst was a preposterously funny man. Furthermore, he truly loved Ford; loved him as a father and a friend and a film-making genius. But not as a lover. Hurst kept few secrets about men’s love lives. Robbins’s book includes very funny, indiscreet stories about, for instance, Noel Coward and Sir Michael Redgrave, though it is mostly himself that Hurst takes pleasure in outing. One has to conclude that if John Ford was not actively homosexual with Hurst or in Hurst’s demi-monde, he was not actively homosexual, beyond what was supposedly spied by Maureen O’Hara.

The strong bond between John Ford and Brian Desmond Hurst seems to have been woven of several strands: Hurst idolized Ford and Ford liked to be idolized; they both identified from afar with Irishness; both loved film-making; both were visually gifted but with a striking receptivity to literature; like Micheál Mac Liammóir, both identified in a highly romantic way with the Irish Literary Revival, that fin de siècle cultural movement led by W.B. Yeats, which united nationalism with the worship of beauty and artistic expressiveness. Finally, both Ford and Hurst existed in a mental world of wild creative possibility.

7

Ford’s films are often described as love stories among men. He liked to make films of Men Without Women (1930), to quote the title of one; films about soldiers and sailors and cowboys. In such stories, the relationships among the male principals are, as they must be for the sake of the films’ drama and profundity, necessarily intimate. Even in those Ford movies where a woman appears in a romantic leading role, she often serves as the prize in pursuit of which two men engage in intimate combat. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, for instance, the struggle of educated Easterner Rance Stoddard and natural cowboy Tom Doniphon is literally for the love of Hallie Stoddard. She functions archetypally as mother of the American future: will it be ordered by the law and institutions or by the gun and individual mettle?

In another sense, Hallie Stoddard is just the beard who socially enables a relationship between the two men. Those male–male intimacies in Ford’s films between the Rance Stoddards and the Tom Doniphons, the Wyatt Earps and the Doc Hollidays (in My Darling Clementine), are never manifested in kisses, genital touches, or even an ever-so-fleeting consciousness of physical attraction. Ford, or his playmates John Wayne and Ward Bond, would knock you silly for suggesting any such thing. The adolescent frat-house nature of their fun is captured in an entry by Captain Ford in the logbook of the Araner: ‘Caught the first mate [Wayne] pissing in [Ward] Bond’s flask this morning – must remember to give him a raise.’ The rules are strict indeed under which male tenderness can flourish in the straight world.

8

In the long life of a Hollywood director, working with beautiful stars in nearly 150 movies, this is a rather uneventful sexual history, whether with attractive men or women. Given that Ford was furious at Maureen O’Hara for seeking a divorce from her wholly useless husband Will Price (even though a year earlier Ford himself had been romancing O’Hara in letters), that he was torn up about John Wayne’s divorce from his first wife, and that he began the sundering of his relationship to his own son Pat partly on account of his divorce, one must conclude that Ford took seriously the indissolubility of marriage (inherited from his Irish Catholicism) as a valuable standard in the normless flux of modernity.

It is appropriate to put it this way rather than to say that Ford opposed divorce because he believed in the orthodox Catholic teaching on marriage. Asked if he was Catholic, Ford replied, ‘I am, but not very.’60 More significantly, after World War II, when starting a new production company, Argosy Pictures, Ford, along with his screenwriter Dudley Nichols (1895–1960), made a huge effort and financial investment in producing a film of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. The Fugitive (1947) is a terrible film. Henry Fonda – prototype of an American Protestant if there ever was one – is miscast as the last remaining Catholic priest, wearing a sarape and riding a donkey through a dystopian, socialist Mexico, in which both religion and drink have been outlawed. The theological point of Greene’s novel was that a drunken, adulterous Catholic priest who does not acknowledge his own children can still be a true priest; he may yet serve as the instrument of God’s grace. The scenario of Ford and Nichols completely misses this point. Their hero does not have sex with a woman, much less father a child, and he gets drunk only once, and then unwillingly.

But the message with which Greene’s point is replaced reveals something about John Ford.61 The screen narrative becomes a simple allegory to demonstrate that people cannot bear too much reality. They need a drink sometimes. Equally, they require faith and magical rites such as baptism and psychological rituals like confession, just as they require their daily bread and five o’clock tequila. Even if you stamp out all signs of religion and kill all the priests, ministers of faith will as if by magic reappear. People will reassemble humbly and dreamily around them. There is something of Voltaire’s bleak Catholic atheism in the movie’s moral: if there were no God, it would be necessary to invent Him. This is only a coy way of saying, ‘There is no God, but the chaos of instinct would be intolerable without belief.’

John Ford and screenwriter Dudley Nichols were also interested, it seems, in giving high art cinematic status to their Catholicism, just as they had sought such status for Catholic Irishness in The Informer (thus the extreme camera angles, tableau groupings, and imposing chiaroscuro in both films). All that emerges in The Fugitive, however, is a slow-paced, pretentious allegory without any real religious feeling whatsoever. Apart from the fact that The Fugitive saddled Argosy Pictures with a debt from which it never escaped, even though all the company’s subsequent films were profitable, it reveals something about Ford’s attitude to religion. He had, the film shows, a functionalist view of the importance of dogma and religious institutions. Catholicism, like ethnicity, was a necessary fiction.

9

That ethnicity is a fiction, according to Max Weber, is its defining characteristic: ‘Ethnic membership (Gemeinsamkeit) differs from kinship group precisely by being a presumed identity, not a group with concrete social action, like the latter.’ Ethnic groups, he says, ‘entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or customs or both, or because of memories of colonization and migration’.62 Weber here suggests that an ethnic community is maintained in the present by its observance of customs it imagines to have received down the generations from a mythically unitary ancestral past. The members of each new generation commune with each other by imaginatively communing with the past of forefathers in the motherland. They observe the tribe’s dietary traditions (if any), learn its original language (if any), play its native sports, practise its local religion, marry within the tribe, perhaps monopolize certain trades, and maybe build certain kinds of dwellings or arrange domestic interiors in a traditional way. But this notion of even a fictive ‘primordial’ ethnic core has been critiqued by contemporary social anthropologists. In ‘The Poverty of Primordialism’, Jack Eller and Reed Coughlan argue that ethnic identities are not given and long-established, but are ‘renewed, modified, and remade in each generation. Far from being self-perpetuating, they require creative effort and investment.’63

Included among the processes by which ethnic identities are continuously remade are the cultural industries, which themselves feed upon the inventions of poets, novelists, popular historians and film-makers. The power of cinema in particular to shape social attitudes was recognized, with a high degree of worry, by churches and government representatives. The centralization of the power to fashion identity in one industry concerned American authorities sufficiently that, in spite of the Constitutional protections of the freedom of speech and freedom of the press, the US government was ready to create an official film censorship at the very start of the silent era. This move was only stopped in 1922 by the producers’ pre-emptive appointment of Will Hays, a Republican politician, to run a system of self-censorship, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association [MPPDA]. Hays proved insufficiently aggressive for the Catholic Legion of Decency, so their representatives, Irish-Americans Joe Breen and Martin Quigley, put teeth into the MPPDA by creating a ‘Production Code’, enforced with very little change from 1934 to 1952.64 As a result of Breen’s invisible but very Catholic hand, blue-pencilling every single script prior to shooting, crime never paid, divorce was never mentioned, unmarried couples always kept their feet on the floor, homosexuals were not to be seen, and priests appeared frequently on screen as cheery good fellows.

While the Production Code Administration kept its eye upon sex and crime (and through them the proper mating between social groups and the protection of private property), Congress was vigilant about the representation of nationalities. In 1941 the USA was governed by a Neutrality Act with respect to the warring parties in World War II. Two senators on the Committee on Interstate Commerce accused Hollywood producers of allowing foreign-born directors to attempt to drag America into the war, by means of pro-British epics like That Hamilton Woman (1940, dir. Alexander Korda) and anti-German thrillers like Manhunt (1941, dir. Fritz Lang). Darryl Zanuck, appearing before the Committee, defended Hollywood by saying the movies ‘sold the American way of life not only to America but to the entire world’.65 Zanuck was thinking perhaps of pictures he himself had recently produced, starring Henry Fonda, and directed by John Ford: Drums Along the Mohawk, Young Mr Lincoln and The Grapes of Wrath. Not only did these films market the American way of life to Americans and others, they participated in the invention of that way of life. The self-recognition of Americans as American came through identification with stars like Henry Fonda in stories of the country’s past. As a role model, he was a lesson to immigrants and a clarification to old inhabitants.

John Ford’s claim to be the great film fashioner of American identity (the implicit role in which he appeared at that 1951 meeting of the Screen Directors Guild) was already secure by the end of the 1930s. In 1939, his miraculous year of triumphs, he also made one more classic, Stagecoach (1939). In it, John Wayne has his first successful starring role in an A-list movie. Stagecoach, like Ford’s post-war Cavalry trilogy, gives profound and entertaining expression to abiding issues of American culture – freedom versus law, race and democracy, violence and what George W. Bush called the ‘homeland’, a Fordian touch meant to evoke both national destiny, domestic decency, and a circle-the-wagons alert to the core white ethnicities, to unite against the Absolute Other.

If one sees Ford as an American among Americans, and director of Westerns, then The Quiet Man of 1952 is a charming freak of Irish-American sentiment, with little precedent in his career, and less bearing on Irish realities. And that is how Ford’s career is often represented. But Ford’s career did not look this way to other people in the 1930s, and it may be doubted that it looked that way to him. In his own mind he was not just an American who made stories about America, but an Irish artist. Just as Yeats, Synge, O’Casey, Liam O’Flaherty and others had invented an heroic modern Irish identity in literature, he wished to do the same in films. He developed contradictory plans either to transplant to Hollywood the remaining geniuses of that cultural revival, or to go to Ireland to join in the building up of the Irish Free State. In The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History, published in 1939, Lewis Jacobs gives a solid account of Ford’s biographical background and the stages of his stylistic development. Jacobs concludes: ‘It is safe to say that the best of [Ford’s future] pictures will be painted with the green hills of Ireland as a background.’66 This raises two questions: first, since none of Ford’s films up to then had been made in Ireland, on what evidence might a bright man like Lewis Jacobs think this was a safe thing to say in 1939? Second, why did that prediction turn out to be so incorrect?

10

A key collaborator in Ford’s Irish cultural enterprises was Dudley Nichols. The son of a doctor in a small town in Ohio, Nichols served with the navy in World War I and then became a journalist for the New York World. With the emergence of talkies, opportunities arose in Hollywood for writers of every kind. At the urging of Winfield Sheehan, production chief of Fox Studio, Nichols came west to seek his fortune in June 1929. Assigned to work with Ford, Nichols recalled that, even on first meeting, ‘I liked him. I am part Irish and we got on.’67 Being part Irish was a big help in getting on with John Ford.

Another man working on the story was James Kevin McGuinness (1893–1950), along with Ford, Nichols and Winfield Sheehan, a person of Irish ancestry. They agreed to work together on a submarine story, but Nichols said that while he knew about the navy, and he knew how to write a play, he had no idea how to construct a screenplay. Well, Ford said, could you write a play in fifty or sixty scenes? Nichols answered that of course he could tell a story not just in three acts but in many scenes. Ford and Nichols also came to agree that film dialogue should be scantier and plainer than dialogue in a play or novel.68 The collaboration went smoothly, and the two men thereafter ‘worked together as much as possible’.69

While many directors and screenwriters worked separately from one another in the studio system (the director was given a completed script produced by a team of writers and re-writers unknown to him, or a writer and director were randomly matched project by project by the producer), Nichols and Ford collaborated as a production unit on five films over the next four years. Yet these were still films assigned to them by the producer. They might seek to discover their own film style. They might stuff the cast with Irish actors – J. Farrell MacDonald, Spencer Tracy, George O’Brien, Walter McGrail, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Jack Murphy, Maurice Murphy, Sally O’Neill and so forth. But what they really wanted to do, initially in company with James McGuinness, was a film of Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer. In such a film they would bring on board the composer, set designer and photographer from the very start, even before the screenplay was written, so that the entire project would be an integrated collaboration, rather than a producer-managed factory enterprise with complete division of labour and no creative autonomy for the artisans. 70 However, in the emerging structure of the studio system in Hollywood, it was not the business of writers or directors to pick subjects or organize the sequence of their development; those were jobs for the producer.

Fox Studios refused their request to buy the rights to O’Flaherty’s novel. McGuinness then moved from Fox to Metro Goldwyn Meyer, and Ford and Nichols worked variously for Universal, Columbia, MGM and Fox, before arriving at RKO, a studio formed in 1928 by Joseph Kennedy. In the 1960s, while John F. Kennedy was president, Ford told Peter Bogdanovich that it was the president’s father Joe Kennedy who had brought him into RKO. Offered scripts for some Westerns, Ford said he was tired of them. ‘I’ve got a story here written by my cousin Liam O’Flaherty.’71 The line producers at RKO were furious at the rejection by a director of his assignment. Their understanding was as follows: John Ford is a director of Westerns; here were some Westerns; his job was to direct them. RKO was not long after declaring bankruptcy, and still under bank supervision, and Westerns were dependable money-makers. Joe Kennedy then said, according to Ford in 1963, ‘An Irish story? That ought to be good; why don’t you let him make it?’

This is a fine story of ‘Micks on the make’, and was especially newsworthy since JFK was then president, but things did not happen this way. Joe Kennedy sold the last of his stock in RKO in 1931, while Ford’s first picture with the studio was The Lost Patrol in 1934. According to a 1935 interview with the New York Times, the producer who approved the purchase of The Informer was an Irishman, but it was not Joe Kennedy; it was J.R. McDonough, co-executive producer at RKO from February 1934. He had been persuaded to back the film partly through the efforts of assistant producer, Cliff Reid (after Ford showed him the novel, Reid said, ‘I was crazy about it; I saw it had great stuff in it’).72

Learning that The Informer had been given a green light, the other executive producer at RKO and guardian of the bottom line, B.B. Kahane, threw a fit.73 It was a ‘criminal waste of money’, an Irish story would never sell.74 To sweeten his proposition, Ford offered to forswear his fee and direct the film for 12.5 per cent of the profits. Even so, Ford recalled, ‘They wouldn’t let me work on the lot [on Melrose Avenue] – they sent me across the street to a dusty old stage [at California Studio] … They wouldn’t build us any real sets … the city of Dublin was just painted canvas.’75

It was Ford’s custom as a director, having fully invested himself in the story, to take his ideas for how to stage scenes from the setting.76 He liked to choose locations that were already poetry, as in his famous preference for Monument Valley, Utah, its arid grandeur serving more as a dreamscape and heroic threshold of the American West than as a possible place of habitation, or even a historical route to areas of settlement. In the case of The Informer, however, the cheaply constructed set was unevocative. But Ford had the help of a photographer of genius, Joe August (1880–1947). August had been filming in Hollywood since 1913, and he was not only an old hand, but an ambitious visual artist. Like Ford, August had been awestruck by the style of F.W. Murnau, the great German director, in Sunrise (1927), starring George O’Brien, one of Ford’s own leading men. O’Brien plays a farmer torn between two women, in a melodrama that poses city against country and bad mistress against decent wife.77

In February 1935 at California Studio, with only a dusty stage and painted flats to stand in for 1922 Dublin, Ford released Joe August to do what he could in the Sunrise style, with light, camera angles and dissolves. Ford animated the space within the set by means of a wind machine and an overworked fog machine (magically, wind and fog exist together, as in nature they cannot). The beauty of Sunrise was invented within the camera, with toy trains, fake marshes, mock-up German cities in the night, luminous mists, and boats on dark waters taking on a convincing surreality by careful, frame-by-frame superimpositions. It is a magic lantern illusion of light and dark, not an optical register of the physical world.

Liam O’Flaherty’s somewhat Dostoevskian tale is a psychological study of a classic Irish stereotype, the man who out of cowardice, drink, poverty, or all three, betrays a secret nationalist organization to the British authorities, thus thwarting once again the goal of Irish independence.78 The film is faithful to the novel’s innovative representation of an individual not at the level of consciousness but as a sort of hungry, melancholy animal moved by deep but dull instincts amid the deterministic complications of an only dimly apprehended society. Although big and powerful, the anti-hero, Gypo, is so unenlightened he is past being contemptible; he becomes the pitiable victim of circumstances.

A large part of the work of capturing O’Flaherty’s new conception of human individuality (similar to the heroes in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape [1922] and Richard Wright’s Native Son [1940]) was achieved by casting. RKO producers tried to foist well-known heavies on Ford, but he was determined to get Victor McLaglen.79 While McLaglen’s surname was perhaps a sufficient basis for Ford to call him cousin, he was not actually Irish.80 Born in Kent, McLaglen was the son of the Anglican bishop of Tunbridge Wells. He served with the Irish Guards of the British army during World War I (and was made Privy Marshal of Baghdad when General Allenby captured the city),81 fought as a professional boxer across Canada, and travelled right around the world. Arriving in Hollywood in 1924, he became a leading man and a personality in the ‘Hollywood Raj.’ He started a United Services club to welcome officers of British ships docking in California harbors.82 McLaglen had a huge, muscled 6’3” frame and people sometimes thought he had no more than that, but he was an articulate, gentle and even elegant man off-screen. On screen he was well able to play parts besides those of the heavy – cast as a Russian spy in the 1931 Dishonored, he is the love interest for Marlene Dietrich.

Victor McLaglen with his Oscar, 1 January 1937. (Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images)

After reading O’Flaherty’s novel, he was ‘dubious’ about the part. By ‘shrewd salesmanship’, Ford gradually brought McLaglen round to the view that he was born to play Gypo. ‘Physically and mentally, he was the informer,’ Ford told a reporter, and then corrected himself: ‘Just make that physically.’83 This is a typical stroke of Ford’s humour – slightly sadistic. Indeed, McLaglen, with his huge hands and beetling Neanderthal brow, was physically right for the part. Furthermore, he was flexible enough an actor to give the role what it required. However, McLaglen was a far cry from the instinctual, cowardly beast that was Gypo. It was not for who he was, but for what he could do, that Ford cast Victor MacLaglen as Gypo. He needed a big-framed star from an earlier era of screen acting to play a completely inarticulate man, to play him, that is, as he would be played in a silent movie, with big gestures and a face that displayed emotional messages with the rapidity and unsubtlety of bulletins on an electronic billboard.

The opening sequence of the film rapidly lays out the plot and creates a remarkable mood of inevitability without any dialogue whatsoever. Gypo comes upon a poster offering £20 for information leading to the capture of Frankie McPhillip, wanted for murder. Gypo, with his slow ooze of mentation, takes a while to digest the information – thinking is an alimentary process for him. The poster activates a memory trace: himself and Frankie, uniformed and armed with rifles, merrily drinking bottles of stout in a pub. The image is briefly superimposed on the poster. Throughout the movie, Gypo’s phases of consciousness take shape as hallucinations. In silent movies this was a device for showing a character’s thoughts, but in the sound era it suggests a character who does not have thoughts; Gypo is sub-conceptual. His consciousness is a screen on which sense-impressions, memory traces and fantasies appear and dissolve.

Victor McLaglen as Gypo Nolan in The Informer, 1935. (Courtesy RKO)

Frowning, Gypo tears down the poster, crumples it in his big meaty hand, and drops it on the street. With slow rocking strides, he makes his way down the foggy streets and then bumps his head into an overhanging street sign. With a scowl, he looks up at the sign’s advertisement for ‘Fish and Chips’, a little two-second incident that rapidly establishes Gypo’s abnormal height, his hunger, and his poverty. He comes upon a crossroads where a street singer (Denis O’Dea) under a lamp gives a tremulous rendition of the ‘Rose of Tralee’. Brought to a stop by the song’s sentimentality, Gypo suddenly feels the crumpled poster, blown down the street, sticking to his trouser leg. The fog in which Gypo is surrounded, and the gusts of wind that drive him down the streets, are plainly expressionist symbols of his interior life, for the poster is a chillingly animated symbol of his doom.84 He shakes his leg once, twice, before he rids himself of the poster. He is then jerkingly startled by the sight of a platoon of five armed soldiers frisking pedestrians. He pulls his cap down on his head, as a man on the run would do.

Down the street under another lamp stands a young woman (played by Margot Grahame) in a Madonna-like attitude: shawl around head and shoulders, sad uplifted eyes. Opposite, a middle-aged man in a bowler hat eyes her up. He smiles meaningfully. In a famous magical transformation, she heaves a sigh of resignation, lowers her gaze to the man, and throws back her shawl, revealing a head of blonde hair, a décolleté dress, and a cute little hat perched on her head – the perfect Magdalene. The transition from virgin to whore is achieved in a single second.85 She sidles toward the man, and he sidles toward her, until he is close enough to exhale his cigarette smoke into her face. Meanwhile, the wanted poster has blown down the street and is sticking this time to her ankle, and again it has to be kicked loose.

Gypo comes upon the scene. He picks up the gentleman as if he were a lightweight manikin and tosses him five yards out into the street. Margot Grahame then has the first line of spoken dialogue in the film: ‘O Gypo! O, Gypo! What’s the use? I’m hungry and can’t pay the room rent.’ In a shop window, she sees an advertisement offering boat passage to America for £10. Twenty pounds, and we would both be free, she tells him. He is startled with rage and fear at what he takes to be her suggestion that he should rat out his old friend. But the idea has been planted in the thick’s brain. Again and again, like hallucinations, the images of the wanted poster with the £20 reward and the advertisement for the £10 tickets are superimposed on what Gypo sees around him. When Frankie McPhillip later finds Gypo over his dinner in a lodging house, Gypo stares astonished at his old friend’s face, seeing Twenty Pound Reward written all over it. It is no time before Gypo informs the British police, Frankie is shot, and the reward is paid.

From that point on, the focus of McLaglen’s acting is Gypo’s belief that every single person, even the blind man in the street, can see that he is a Judas. In a painful paradox, everything he does to hide it stupidly makes his guilt more visible. A ferocious boxer, he slugs everyone who looks at him crossways. Buying a bottle of whiskey to quell his fear and guilt, he flashes his money to a surprised barman, to whom Gypo is well known to be chronically penniless. He brags to his girlfriend that he has come into possession of her fare to America. Half-drunk, he goes to Frankie’s wake and accidentally spills gold coins onto the floor in front of everyone there, including men in belted trench-coats from the IRA. While all the mourners watch, he hands over a large donation to Frankie’s mother (Una O’Connor).

Called to account by the commandant of the IRA (Preston Foster), Gypo admits he has not had a job in six months. He is soon buying fish and chips for all his new hanger-on friends. One particularly determined leech (J.M. Kerrigan), calls him ‘King Gypo’ and (the classic Irish cliché) ‘a king and the descendant of kings’. By means of such simple flattery, Gypo is led to a whorehouse for further fleecing. This is not a detective story of little clues slowly adding up to the truth, but of the truth known from the start and the procession of its painfully obvious consequences.

At 1 am, at the end of Gypo’s long day of shame, a court of inquiry is held by the IRA. McLaglen, breaking down, asks the Volunteers and the jury of ordinary citizens, ‘Is there anyone here who can tell me why I did it?’ They cannot, but, led by a jury foreman in a long grey beard (played by Francis Ford), they condemn him nonetheless. After some terrific fighting by McLaglen with his would-be executioners, a chase around the streets and up and down stairs, he is at last mortally wounded and staggers into a church where Frankie McPhillip’s mother is praying. The next-to-last line in the movie is hers: ‘I forgive you, Gypo. You didn’t know what you were doing.’ The final reconciliation scene is unsatisfactory to some modern movie-goers – too allegorical, pretentious and Catholic for contemporary tastes – but it is an admirably deft piece of writing by Dudley Nichols, whereby, through a little verbal echo, the blind patriarchal judgment of the courtroom is washed away by the Christian mercy of the holy mother, and, arms spread as if on a cross, the Irish Judas becomes a Jesus.

Gypo is not the sole representation of Irish ethnicity in the movie. Another is Dan Gallagher, the IRA commandant. Played by handsome leading man Preston Foster, he is a sober, alert, Catholic and fair-minded, but unsentimental patriot. (In O’Flaherty’s novel, this figure had been a murderous, repellent communist.)86 He broods over the threat of Gypo to the movement. Not only has he betrayed one man to the police; with what he knows he could go on to destroy the whole organization. Clearly, with his obvious character flaws – sentimentalism, drink, belligerence, self-flattery, hunger for popularity with the crowd, and ignorance – Gypo Nolan, however lovable a brute, cannot be trusted with the country’s destiny. He and all he represents must be killed off for Ireland to be free.

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The Informer is a famous case of a ‘sleeper’, a movie that after little studio promotion and a slow start with the public becomes a commercial success as a result of good reviews and ‘word-of-mouth’ advertising. While there are certainly estimable qualities in The Informer, it received favourable treatment from critics partly because it bucked the trends of 1935 Hollywood. Still in the first flush of talkies, movies at the time were in love with dialogue, often borrowed from stage plays; The Informer reverted to the aestheticism of the silent era. It was deliberately arty, while the moguls of the entertainment business were anti-art. When big studios like MGM promoted their million-dollar epics on the basis of their conspicuous expenditure – big stars, casts of thousands, fairyland sets – The Informer was shot in three weeks for about $250,000. One critic, Pare Lorentz of Vanity Fair, made much of the fact that its one star, McLaglen, is never allowed by the director to ‘control the mise en scène … It is the film and its collective that work, as opposed to the Hollywood norm where all … is thrown aside that the one personality may be blown to the skies.’87

Ultimately, the artistic-political significance of The Informer came to a head in the debate over the Academy Awards of 1936. The awards were made by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). This was an organization controlled by a cabal of the studio producers. The same group of producers had alienated other interested parties in the studio system – writers, directors, actors and cameramen – by demanding an across-the-board 50-per cent pay-cut in 1933, supposedly to save the industry from the effects of the Depression. The producers, however, spared themselves any belt-tightening. In the struggle for financial and artistic power within Hollywood, screen actors, screenwriters and screen directors each formed guilds, all of them in conflict with the producers, and sometimes with each other. In an article published by The New York Times before the Awards were announced, The Informer was defined as evidence that the writer and the director, working freely, were the secret of motion-picture success.88 Bossy producers and vain actors either stole the credit that belonged to others, or actually got in the way of the truly creative people.

Ford and Nichols themselves gave this same spin to the publicity for The Informer. Nichols, an activist in the Screenwriters Guild, declared that even if offered an Academy award for his work on The Informer, he would not accept it, because there were few writers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – only 35 – as opposed to 990 in the Screenwriters Guild. The vote of so few of his colleagues would be no honour at all. (Nichols was given the award, and he did refuse it.)

Ford gave one interview about The Informer in which he said that all that producers want to do is make money, and a lot of money. That was fine; he conceded that the art form depended on capital. But the only way producers knew how to make money was by doing once again what made money the last time. In fact, they knew nothing about what made a movie successful. Ford himself doubted that success had any more to do with stars than with producers. ‘You don’t think The Informer went over because of McLaglen, do you? … I’m no McLaglen fan you know.’89

Ford had given out the story that, the night before filming the climactic courtroom scene, he had sent people out to get McLaglen drunk. The following morning, Ford made the actor stumble unrehearsed through the scene, ad-libbing, repeating himself, and looking lost.90 He was not acting as if he were stressed, it was implied; he was stressed. The genius of the performance (for which McLaglen got the Award for Best Actor), Ford not very subtly suggested, derived from himself, the invisible director (who also got an Academy Award for The Informer).91 Indeed, he told a reporter that credit for the movie, nominated for five Oscars and winner of four, belonged to ‘Nichols and me – We did The Informer.’92

This interpretation prevails in the present. On the current trailer for The Informer on ‘The John Ford Film Collection’ (a set of five DVDs), Peter Bogdanovich is interviewed:

What had happened was that Ford told McLaglen that he didn’t have to work the next day and he came back and it was the most important scene in the picture. McLaglen told him he was miserable about it and couldn’t do it. [Here a film clip is inserted in the trailer, McLaglen saying in the trial scene, ‘I couldn’t, I don’t, I don’t know what I’m doing’.] That’s what made it so good. Ford knew that if he’d (McLaglen had) acted … [Ford] wanted him to be almost incoherent. And that’s how he got the Oscar.

That is not what happened. This is auteur-worship, an idol of the tribe. McLaglen may have gone out the night before with some Japanese people, as Joseph McBride claims. He may have had some drinks, as he was accustomed to do anyway. He was given a direction by Ford to ad-lib during the trial scene, to ask questions, and express confusion, and he drew upon his skills as a professional actor to do so. And that’s how he got the Oscar.

By whatever complexity of men and means, The Informer turned out a huge success, to the surprise of the RKO producers. But ‘does that make it any easier to go ahead with O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars?’ Ford asked. ‘Not for a second!’ He and Nichols were ‘fighting to have the Abbey Players imported intact and we’re fighting the censors and fighting the so-called financial wizards at every point’. Creation was conflict in 1930s’ Hollywood. The interviewer asked Ford what was the ultimate purpose of his struggle with the studios. Did he ‘believe, as a director, in including your point of view in a picture about things that bother you?’ Ford looked at him as if ‘to question the necessity of an answer’: ‘What the hell else does a man live for?’93 Thus, in 1935, John Ford staked his claim to being the author of the films he directed.

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The auteur theory as a theory was developed by cinephiles in France in the early 1950s. Truffaut, Godard and others, instead of seeing new releases one by one, got a chance to look at the whole tranche of American movies Occupied France had missed during World War II. They were struck by the personal distinction of some directors’ careers (Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and a few others, but not Ford) and the incoherent and therefore impersonal nature of the output of others. Their theory was that film could be an art form only when a great director imposed authorial control over the medium. The director’s work would then be thematically and artistically coherent. When, as was often the case in Hollywood, a director does not pick the subject, write the script, cast the actors, perform the roles, operate the camera or edit the footage, it can be difficult to trace the director’s hand in the final product.

Obviously, film is always an absolutely collaborative art. While the public is eager for an artist’s signature (preferably in the bottom right-hand corner of the painting), all the arts are, in fact, social and collaborative. Film-making is more so. The credits roll at the end of a Hollywood movie, and one sees hundreds, even thousands of names. There is no other art form like that. Can one then really claim that a movie, like a poem, has a single author, and expresses that one person’s point of view?

It is clear from the case of The Informer that the auteur-theory of film was not simply an academic question arising in the 1950s and 60s; it was the subject of labour conflicts within the film-making industry in the 1930s. Creative control was struggled over between professionals with divided and yet equally essential responsibilities. In the context of the 1936 Academy Awards and the push by producers to impose discipline on the factory system of production, Ford and Nichols railed against producers, ridiculed star Victor McLaglen, and rather ignored the contributions of cameraman Joe August and music composer Max Steiner.

But we never find either Nichols or Ford on screen or soundtrack. Why not say that what is really relevant to understanding the meaning of this work of art is the ethnic background, sexual history, artistic influences and aesthetic views of Victor McLaglen, or Joe August, Max Steiner or J.R. McDonough, who, as producer, envisioned the potential success of Ford as director for this literary property? For that matter, why not look to the biography of Liam O’Flaherty? He is the one who came up with the basis for the whole affair.

John Ford did aspire, as he told the interviewer in 1935, to express himself through film. But so did the others involved in the making of The Informer. What else did Joe Kerrigan live for, the old Abbey Theatre actor who plays the leech Terry, but to express himself? Why did Una O’Connor, the ex-Abbey Theatre actress who plays the bereaved mother of Frankie McPhillip, launch herself on the wandering life of a theatre and film actress? She too lived to express her talent. All the participants in such a venture are talented people with real vocations.

Yet Ford’s job as a director was unique. He alone had to work with each and every creative partner in the film and orchestrate the contributions of all. To the extent that John Ford had genius, and that was to a very great extent, it was a genius for collaboration. A director’s collaboration in movie-making, the most complicated of all cultural industries, has many sides. One side, sometimes impeded by the studio system of long-term contracts, is picking one’s collaborators. Ford tended to pick people of Irish ancestry, his widespread if fictive cousinage. He entertained an absolute faith in the brandname of the Abbey Theatre as a store of quality actors. In the case of cinematographers in particular, he simply went for men of talent, like Joe August, Gregg Toland and Winton Hoch. He also tended to work with the same people again and again, in a sort of team, or even family – the loosely affiliated ‘John Ford Stock Company’. Membership required not just personal creativity but loyalty to Ford, belief in Ford, and subservience to Ford. A poem written by Ford’s regular crew concludes: 94

We love him like we love the Lord;

We’re the students of the great John Ford.

A second side of the director’s art of collaboration was the capacity to appraise accurately the creative potential of his co-workers. In some films, for instance, Ford would tell the cameraman where to put the camera and he would strictly limit the amount of footage shot, so as to curtail the freedom of the editor. In cases like The Informer, however, Ford would, out of a respectful understanding of the cameraman’s capacity, set him free to do what Ford had anticipated he was capable of. In other words, Ford expresses himself by his understanding of how Joe August will express himself and by his permission for the photographer to do so.

A similar anticipation of an artiste’s expressive capacity is crucial to the casting of actors: ‘You’ve got to tell your story through the people who will portray it,’ Ford explained to a reporter.95 While he seems to have seized the freedom to cast The Informer, studio executives often picked the stars, or they insisted on the director at least drawing upon those the studio had under long-term contract. Even in those cases, however, Ford claimed the right to cast the minor parts. For these he tended to choose former stars or else veterans of the Abbey Theatre ensemble:

I’m able to see that these ex-stars will, after all, give a better performance even in the smallest parts than any casual extra would; and it’s my contention that the bits in any picture are just as important as the starring role, since they round out the story – complete the atmosphere – make the whole plausible. You’ve seen, certainly, a good many really fine scenes spoiled suddenly by a background player who is obviously reciting his lines, or blundering awkwardly through his action. I won’t have that.96

Once he had chosen his actors, he did not try to tell them how to do their work, as Maureen O’Hara noticed: ‘The most wonderful thing in watching Mr Ford work was the freedom he gave his actors … He never gave specific directions, and I learned over time that this was the best compliment Mr Ford could give.’97 It was not in doing his collaborators’ work for them, or in predetermining the outcome, but in setting free the creative initiative of members of a trusted crew that Ford excelled as a director.

A third side of Ford’s art of collaboration was his preference for working with a screenwriter from early on in the development of the story. While he could not write a script himself, his nightmare was being a hack studio director handed a few pages on the set each day to film, with no overview of the story, his only role being to tell the actors where to stand.98 In his favourite method of collaboration, he and Dudley Nichols would go on a voyage on the Araner. Ford would suggest something; Nichols would suggest something, back and forth. Then the writer would produce a draft, and Ford would give his opinion before redrafting. They would return to port with a finished script.

This happened in the case of The Informer. The draft screenplay for The Informer, dated 18 December 1934, begins in the dining room of a Dublin lodging house and a long, wordy exposition by way of a conversation between Gypo Nolan and Frankie McPhillip, the man he will betray. Not until page 12 of this draft does Gypo read the wanted poster, the first thing he does in the finished script. After this draft was written, however, Nichols went with Ford on a voyage on the Araner. The script that was completed upon their return, used for shooting in February 1935, and thereafter followed closely by Ford, begins with detailed action and no dialogue:

WIDE ANGLE SHOT of a Dublin street corner. Thick fog. Somewhere in the distance a street singer is singing to a fiddle. Before us is a blank brick wall where diverse bills are posted, some tattered, some new, but all vaguely seen through the fog. A lamp post on the corner lights this wall and throws shadows up this side street. Around the corner past his lamp post is a brighter street – our Dublin street which extends for a short block past a fish and chip shop to the public house on the corner. But all that is out of the scene now. Out from the fog down this dark street emerges the slouching figure of GYPO NOLAN. Desolate and down and out. Hands shoved in his pockets. An old felt hat on his head. An old white muffler wrapped round his throat. In this FULL SHOT we see him come out of the fog like some strange fish out of a mysterious ocean of mist. He halts near the corner and stares at a small poster …99

In an important 1951 article published in Films in Review, Lindsay Anderson argued that Ford did not understand his own genius; he had been led astray in a string of movies by Dudley Nichols into ‘sentimental simplification of issues and characters, a highly self-conscious striving for significance, and a fundamental unreality’.100 The great Ford films, according to Anderson (and he was ready to make the largest of claims for their value) were American stories produced by Darryl Zanuck, like Drums Along the Mohawk, Young Mr Lincoln and My Darling Clementine. There is no question but that Nichols had an influence on Ford, but was it a good influence?

The films made without Nichols do not, to name but one difference, have the same degree of respect for literature (Irish literature especially) or an equal ambition to discover filmic equivalents for literary effects. In the mid-1930s, through figures like Dudley Nichols and John Ford, as well as bookish Jewish producers like Irving Thalberg and David O. Selznick, movies were ambitious to match the expressive reach of literature.101 In the case of Nichols and Ford, the goal was to realize and add, in particular, to the achievements of the Irish Literary Revival. If Nichols made a difference to Ford, Ford also made a measurable difference to Nichols. The drafts of The Informer screenplay before and after the voyage on the Araner force one to conclude that Nichols wrote in ready collaboration with Ford’s own notions about the mise-en-scène and screen continuity. The Informer – story, dialogue and camera set-ups as encapsulated in the script – is the result of collaboration.

In gratitude for being allowed to collaborate with the writer, Ford would invite Nichols onto the set, usually forbidden to writers, partly because the studio had to pay the writer for his time there, and partly because many actors and directors were wary of writers, who tended to keep guard on the verbatim realization of their photoplays. In a 1930s’ survey of Hollywood writers, Ford and Nichols, along with the writer-director pair of Robert Riskin and Frank Capra, were overwhelmingly named as the colleagues most admired. Those partnerships had enviable creative identity.

A final side of Ford’s skills as a collaborator is his dark side. He was a bully who loved a scapegoat. He would single out a person – actor, producer, cameraman, or whatever – and humiliate him or her in front of the assembled production team. Sometimes he would pursue his victim for days and days afterwards. Even stars like Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne did not always escape such public spectacles of humiliation. A case has been made that the bullying was part of a crafty motivational strategy by which the director got the best out of an actor. The treatment of McLaglen in the courtroom scene, for instance, can be read (though not convincingly) as the prototype for such motivational stratagems. But often an artistic pretext is not apparent for what seems unmotivated, disproportionate public cruelty.

In his book on John Wayne, Garry Wills concludes that Ford was just a son of a bitch who abused his position of power.102 Certainly, many of the tales of Ford’s explosions on set relate to this power. He turned nasty whenever the director’s authority was the least bit called into question. For instance, Cliff Reid, assigned to be associate producer for The Informer, arrived on set the first day. Normally, it would be his job to keep a close eye on the day-to-day progress of filming – numbers of lunches eaten, extras used and pages shot – and thus on the project’s budget. Ford called the company together. ‘This,’ he said, pointing to Reid, ‘is an associate producer.’ He took Reid’s chin in his hand, and turned his head into profile. ‘Take a good look at him, because you will not see him again until the picture is finished shooting. Thank you, Cliff, I’ll see you at the rushes.’103 Disgraceful conduct to a colleague without whom the project might not have been green-lit! But in this way the director succeeded in getting freedom from further interference by the associate producer.

Left to right: John Ford, Margot Grahame, unidentified man and Victor McLaglen, filming The Informer, 1935. (Courtesy Scott Eyman)

On the same day, the schedule called for the first scene to be shot at eight o’clock in the morning. It was a scene involving Margot Grahame, the English stage actress cast as Gypo’s streetwalking girlfriend. But at 8 am, Miss Graham was not on the set. Ford said to his brother Eddie O’Fearna, ‘For chrissakes, Eddie, it’s her first day. Let’s not panic just because the actress is a bit late. Let’s give her some time.’ He took a few puffs on his pipe, then said, ‘What time is it now?’ ‘Two minutes after eight.’ ‘Well,’ Ford said, ‘let’s give her until seven minutes after. There’s no reason to make her nervous on the first day.’ O’Fearna ran off to the wardrobe department, but at 8.07, there was still no Margot Grahame, and Ford informed Joe August that they would move on to another scene. When the actress followed by her assistant arrived at 8.45, Ford complimented her on her make-up, her clothes and her hair, and then said he wished she had been there at eight o’clock. Now there was no time for that scene. ‘We’ll just eliminate it from the script. It’s a very pretty dress though.’ The actress’s assistant wept.104 Of course, this treatment, however pseudo-polite, not only made Miss Grahame nervous, it terrified the whole cast, and ensured that for the next three weeks of filming, the actors, a class of people not known for being on time, paid close attention to the shooting schedule.

What really riled Ford was getting advice, or even the least suggestion, from one of the crew. When he was making Mary of Scotland, leading lady Katherine Hepburn volunteered an idea. Watched by a reporter from the LA Times, Ford said, ‘All right, if you know so much, you direct,’ and walked off the set. Hepburn, unfazed, mugged looking through the camera. Such a fit was childish, but it also made it clear to everyone that Ford was not going to be bossed around by his star, no matter how brilliant, beautiful and nervy she was. Ford explained to his wife that ‘As exec,’ he had ‘to be an SOB.’105

Whether he had to be an SOB or not, John Ford was one, and it did not seem to come to him with difficulty. The director kept his stock company on pins-and-needles in expectation that he might stage one of his on-set sideshows of personal humiliation. ‘Will I be next?’ they wondered. Nonetheless, a lot of talented people liked to work with Ford. One reason was that their talents were shown to good effect in the movies he directed. When Stagecoach premiered in New York city, it got rave reviews, and Dudley Nichols (who wrote the screenplay) wrote to congratulate Ford:

If there was ever a picture that was a director’s picture, it was that one. I tried to make that clear to everyone who complimented me in New York. I feel I was a very happy collaborator; and tried to do my best, as did Bert Glennon [cameraman], Tollubov [art director], Lovey [editor], and the rest. That is one thing you invariably do, inspire your whole crew including the writer to pitch in and do their best. I don’t believe you will ever have a bad crew.106

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As soon as The Informer was wrapped, Ford was alive with plans for more Irish films. The Abbey Theatre company was on tour in the USA in 1935, and it happened to play in Los Angeles while Ford was filming O’Flaherty’s novel. He had already put into the film’s cast two former Abbey stars, J.M. Kerrigan and Una O’Connor. With the Abbey in town, he added current member Denis O’Dea, who plays the street singer. Ford then came up with the idea of making a movie of one of the Abbey’s biggest repertory successes, Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, using the whole Abbey cast. Just after shooting on The Informer concluded, RKO purchased the rights to the play, and announced that Ford would be the film’s director and Dudley Nichols the screenwriter.107 Plans were afoot to follow The Plough and the Stars with Juno and the Paycock.108 What thus far had not been settled was whether or not Ford would get his way and be allowed to import the whole cast for the production from the Abbey.

A year later, on 25 February 1936, well before filming began on The Plough and the Stars, Ford bought the rights to a short story by Maurice Walsh, ‘The Quiet Man’. Evidently, RKO was not interested in making a commitment to this project, so Ford began to look for a producer, and to look, and look. It would be sixteen years before the film was made. That was not entirely owing to the fact that no American producer could see the value in making a film either based on a play James Agee had recently called the best since Shakespeare, or one based on a short story about an American boxer going home to live in the west of Ireland. By 1939, when Lewis Jacobs published his book, things were shaping up nicely for Ford’s plan to make movies with ‘the green hills of Ireland as a background’, or at the least, for making Irish-interest films in Hollywood with the best of Ireland’s actors playing parts in them. But Jacobs, writing in early 1939, could not know that in September of that year, World War II would break out. Ford could not know that. The Abbey actors who came over for Plough and the Stars and got studio contracts could not know that war would make it impossible for them to go home to their families.

World War II changed everything. In Ireland Irish neutrality, the emigration of talent, and an oppressive attitude to freedom of expression had put an end to the Irish Revival. In the USA Ford began to side with Britain even before the USA entered the conflict: England, he told Anna Lee (matron of British Hollywood), was one of the bravest countries the world had ever known.109 That change in attitude to Britain would necessitate not only a new take on his Irish nationalism, but the complete erasure of Maurice Walsh’s setting of The Quiet Man, the evils of the Black and Tans and the heroism of the IRA flying columns. Ultimately, Ford would be led by his experience of war away from Irish nationalism and toward a multi-ethnic appreciation of American democracy. As a writer on Ford’s post-war Westerns puts it, the director developed an old strain in his vision of life, his pluralistic multi-culturalism. The Irish become the Ur-Ethnics, but there also appear various tribes of ‘Native Americans, Mexicans, African Americans, Slavs and Poles, Frenchmen and Italians, Swedes and Germans, poor whites and Southerners’.110 He was led by history away from the celebration of the pure virtues of ethnicity and toward a celebration of the USA, at a time when it really was a democracy of immigrants based on tolerance, ethnic difference and respect for individuality.

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However, before war broke out, by bringing Abbey stars to America, Ford imported the Irish cultural revival, especially as it was literally embodied in the performers of the plays of Sean O’Casey. The actors carried the Revival’s heritage within their own expressive capacities. Their acts of self-expression were the means by which Ford often told his stories and expressed himself. Furthermore, the range of their work in Hollywood, for both John Ford and other leading directors, would disseminate the Revival throughout the world.

Notes

1. For details of the Screen Directors Guild meeting, see Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (Faber and Faber: London 2003), pp. 479–84. And for a different, and standard, reading of this episode and of Ford as a director of Westerns, see Jim Kitses, Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood (BFI Publishing: London 2004), p. 29.

2. Robert S. Birchard, Cecil B. DeMille’s Hollywood (UP of Kentucky: Lexington 2004), p. 343.

3. David Thomson, Showman: The Life of David Selznick (Alfred Knopf: New York 1992), p. 179.

4. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 191.

5. Edward Bernds, quoted in ibid. p. 483.

6. Ibid. pp. 139–42.

7. Maureen O’Hara, ’Tis Herself: A Memoir (Simon and Schuster: New York 2004), p. 60.

8. Ibid. p. 139.

9. It is a pleasure to credit this observation to Darcy O’Brien, actor George O’Brien’s son, a novelist and distinguished scholar of Irish literature, and my own teacher at Pomona College, California. The observation is recorded by McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 200.

10. Desmond King, The Liberty of Strangers: Making the American Nation (OUP: Oxford 2005), p. 67.

11. Ibid. p. 60.

12. Emile Durkheim, Division of Labour in Society, trans. W.D. Halls (Macmillan: London 1984), pp. 304–8.

13. Herbert J. Gans, ‘Symbolic Ethnicity’ in John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith (eds), Ethnicity (Oxford UP: Oxford 1996), pp. 146–52.

14. O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, p. 104; McBride, Searching for John Ford, pp. 549, 650.

15. Brian Spittles, John Ford (Longman: Harlow, Essex 2002), p. 20.

16. John Ford to Bob Ford [September 1937?], Bill Brown’s Physical Training Farm, John Ford papers, Lilly Library. Bob Ford was the son of the actor and director Francis Ford.

17. Daddy to Dear Ma [26? June 1943], Office of Strategic Services stationery, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

18. Mary [Ford] to My dearest Jack, 1 June 1943, Lilly Library; the reference is to John Wayne, whose marriage to Josie Saenz was falling apart because of his affair with 17-year-old Mexican actress Esperanza Bauer (1926–61).

19. One threatened exception to Ford’s escape from slanderous publicity was avoided in early 1942. Ollie Carey warned Ford that a writer named Tom Wood was preparing a scurrilous article about him. Ford wrote to John Wayne and Ward Bond, asking them to threaten Wood that if one derogatory word was published about Ford, they would ‘kick the shit out of [him] regularly each and every day of the week’ (Ford to Wayne, 12 January 1942, Lilly Library). He also asked his agent, Harry Wurtzel, to hire a lawyer to put Wood on notice that his work would be examined carefully for libel (Ford to Wurtzel, 12 January 1942). It is not clear what Ford feared Wood would say. Wurtzel got the story, and sent it to Ford for clearance before its publication in Liberty in the last week of February (Wurtzel to Dear Pappy, nd, Lilly Library).

20. Leonard Mosley, Zanuck: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Last Tycoon (Little, Brown and Co.: Boston 1984), p. 242.

21. Mimi [Doyle] to My Darling [December 1938?], Monday, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

22. Katherine Hepburn to Dearest Sean [John Ford], [?March 1937], Marriot Apartment Hotel, Indianapolis, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

23. [Katherine Hepburn] to Dear Sean [John Ford], 10 April 1937, Havana Special, Pennsylvania Railroad stationery, Lilly Library.

24. The original name of ‘Eve March’ was Adalyn Doyle. She got a start in Hollywood as a stand-in for Katherine Hepburn, and, though only 5’ 3” tall, was said to resemble Hepburn. Darryl Zanuck groomed Doyle for feature roles, beginning with a small, uncredited part in Advice to the Lovelorn (1933) (New York Times, 8 October 1933).

25. Mimi to My Darling [December 1938?], John Ford papers, Lilly Library; William J. Mann, Kate: The Woman Who Was Katherine Hepburn (Faber and Faber: London 2006), p. 253.

26. [Frances Rich] to Dearest Pal, 30 April 1937, Cranebrook Academy of Art, Michigan, Ford Papers, Lilly Library. Rich gossips about Ford’s romance with Hepburn and confesses that she herself is aiming to sleep with Erro Saarinen, the architect and sculptor, before the week is out. There is no sign that Ford and Rich were a couple.

27. McBride, Searching for John Ford, pp. 649–50.

28. Ibid. p. 383, Ford to Spig Wead, 11 February 1944, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

29. [John Ford] to My Darlin’ (My loved one, my heart, Maisin!), 19 November 1950, 5 December 1950 and 19 January 1951; O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, pp. 144, 147, 149.

30. O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, p. 190. Tyrone Power is suspected to be the man.

31. Ibid. p. 197.

32. Ibid. p. 131.

33. ‘A Footnote in the Decathalon’, New York Times (30 June 1996).

34. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 651.

35. There is a continuing debate about whether Stepin Fetchit was degrading to African-Americans or satirically exploitative of white prejudices, on the lines of Baron Sasha Cohen. On 14 February 1945, Stepin Fetchit wrote to ‘Commander John Ford’ to say: ‘It would be a life-saver and opening of corporal grace again if you could arrange anything for me.’ A year later, Ford suggested to Darryl Zanuck that they cast Stepin Fetchit in My Darling Clementine as ‘bellboy, porter, night clerk, waiter, bootblack, bartender and chambermaid at the hotel’. Zanuck replied the following day, 5 February 1946, that Walter White, head of the NAACP, had singled out Stepin Fetchit as one who always portrayed the blacks as ‘lazy, stupid, halfwit[s]’ and they were furious about it.

Everyone who knew him well could agree that Stepin Fetchit was an intelligent, furiously industrious actor with a well-schooled skill in physical comedy, but those who saw his work were not sure who the joke was on. Woody Strode himself recalled defending Fetchit to other black actors in 1965: ‘He was one of our greatest comedians and the first black actor to get star billing. I took a stand for him. I said, “If it hadn’t been for Stepin Fetchit, I wouldn’t be here. Somebody had to start it.” They’re going to do his story some day and all this history will come out. John Ford loved the guy; so did Will Rogers. In fact, John Ford directed a couple of pictures in which Will and Step shared top billing. As a child [in Los Angeles], the only black movie star I had ever heard of was Stepin Fetchit. He made two million dollars during the 1930s. He owned sixteen cars. I saw him when I was a kid; he was driving a pink convertible Rolls Royce.’

36. Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (University of California Press 1978), p. 97.

37. Ibid. p. 104. Ford also told Bogdanovich that it was the American audience that liked ‘to see Indians get killed. They don’t consider them as human beings – with a great culture of their own – quite different from ours’ (pp. 94–5). This is well said, but it ignores Ford’s own role through scores of mass-culture cowboy films made before 1964, which fed the audience’s readiness to treat native Americans as not really human.

38. Emile Durkheim quoted in John Rex, ‘Multiculturalism in Europe’ in Hutchison and Smith, Ethnicity, p. 245.

39. Christopher Robbins, The Empress of Ireland: Chronicle of an Unusual Friendship (Scribner: London 2004), pp. xi–xii.

40. Ibid. p. 335.

41. Hutchison and Smith, Ethnicity, pp. 6–7.

42. W.B. Yeats to Edmund Dulac, 6 July [1935], Past Masters, Oxford UP.

43. Brian Desmond Hurst to Dear Jack, 16 July 1951, Renown Film Productions, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

44. Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner, The Biographical Dictionary of Dance (Shirmer Books: New York 1982), pp. 452–4.

45. Spencer Tracy’s homosexual life, to the degree that it existed, is documented in William J. Mann’s biography Kate.

46. Clifton Webb specialized in playing sinister sissies. He was blackballed by the Hays Committee for being homosexual, and was not able to work for many years, until Otto Preminger won permission to use Webb in Laura. Webb was nominated for an Oscar in the film, which reactivated his Hollywood career. See Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies (Harper and Row: New York 1987), pp. 45, 59, 94.

47. Robbins, Empress of Ireland, pp. 337–8.

48. Abbey Theatre Minute Books, 14 June 1935, NLI, Acc 3961, vol. 4.

49. Daddy to Dear Ma [John Ford to Mary Ford], [August 1942?], John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

50. John Ford to Darling Mary, 23 June 1944; Ford to My darlings, 27 June 1944; Ford papers, Lilly Library.

51. Brian [Desmond Hurst] to Dear Jack [Ford], [24 September 1947], John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

52. Michael Killanin to My dear Jack [December 1947?], House of Lords, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

53. John Ford to Maureen O’Hara, 10 January 1951, O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, p. 149.

54. Jack to Brian [Desmond Hurst], telegram, 6 April 1951; Hurst to Ford, 9 April 1951; John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

55. Michael Killanin to My dear Jack, 20 October 1951, Spiddal House, John Ford papers, Lilly Library. Ford told Maureen O’Hara that he had her and John Wayne in mind for The Demigods, which seems bizarre (O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, p. 180); the proposed cast list was later amended to O’Hara and Barry Fitzgerald, with an ‘extremely handsome … preferably blonde’ boy yet to be sourced (Ford to Killanin, 9 September 1952). After the producers encountered difficulty with the purchase of rights, the film of Stephens’s novel was never made.

56. Ford to Michael Killanin, 25 October 1951, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

57. John Ford to Michael Killanin, 3 December 1951, John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

58. John Ford to Michael Killanin [c.20 August 1952], John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

59. Adrian Frazier, ‘“Quaint Pastoral Numbskulls”: Siobhan McKenna’s Playboy film’ in Adrian Frazier (ed.), Playboys of the Western World: Production Histories (Carysfort Press: Dublin 2004), pp. 59–74.

60. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 671.

61. Ford says the plot was changed to comply with film censorship: ‘Even today, you can say s--- and f--- on the screen, but you can’t have a priest living with a woman,’ in Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 86.

62. Max Weber, ‘The Origin of Ethnic Groups’ in Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, p. 35.

63. Ibid. p. 45.

64. Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918–1939 (University of Exeter Press 1997), p. 108; Gregory D. Black, The Catholic Crusade Against the Movies, 1940–1975 (CUP: Cambridge 1997), pp. 10–12.

65. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (Chappel & Co.: London 1978), p. 245.

66. Gaylyn Stuldar and Mathew Bernstein (eds), John Ford Made Westerns: Filming the Legend in the Sound Era (Indiana UP: Bloomington and Indianapolis 2001), p. 228. They were quoting from Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of American Film: A Critical History (Harcourt Brace and Co.: New York 1939).

67. Dudley Nichols to Lindsay Anderson in Andrew Sarris, ‘You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet’: The American Talking Film: History and Memory 1927–1949 (OUP: Oxford 1998), p. 169.

68. Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 52. According to Ford, he did not require Nichols to put in ‘“scene so-and-so, camera moves in, zooms in, pans”. None of that stuff, because it’s none of the [screenwriter’s] business.’ It soon became an axiom of Nichols’s business as scenarist ‘to write as a camera’, i.e. his scenarios did indicate the close-ups, medium shots, or long shots. Furthermore, he made it clear that the emphasis of the film would be on how the hero reacted to situations. These aspects – writing as camera, essential reaction-shots – characterize the script Nichols produced for The Informer. For an analysis of Nichols’s occasional pieces on screenwriting, see Patrick F. Sheeran, The Informer (Cork UP: Cork 2002), p. 68.

69. Andrew Sarris, ‘You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet’: The American Talking Film, History and Memory 1927–1949 (OUP: NY, Oxford 1998), p. 169.

70. For a discussion of this ideal and its achievement in The Informer, see Sheeran, The Informer, p. 66.

71. Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 59.

72. ‘A Producer’s Lot is Not …: Cliff Reid, Who Has The Informer to his Credit, Confesses that Making Nine Films At Once Has Its Woes’, New York Times (28 July 1935).

73. Thomson, Showman, p. 139.

74. Douglas W. Churchill, ‘John Ford: The Man Behind The Informer’, New York Times (5 January 1935). In the John Ford papers, Lilly Library, there are unaccustomedly truthful statements by Ford, in answer to questions in writing from William Hawks (30 May 1946), including this one: ‘I tried to peddle [The Informer] from studio to studio. I tried unsuccessfully for four years … Eventually, through the offices of J.R. McDonough, Executive Producer, and Cliff Reid, RKO bought it.’

75. Bogdanovich, John Ford, p. 61; McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 220.

76. Elia Kazan once asked Ford where he got his ideas about how to stage scenes. ‘He said from the set. Not from the script, not from the actors, not from the theme. From the set. The settings he chose were already poetry.’ Stuldar and Bernstein, John Ford Made Westerns, p. 293.

77. Sunrise photo from Village Voice article (8 September 2004), and credited to Photofest/Film Forum.

78. O’Flaherty, like O’Casey a communist, actually laid the plot in the Civil War of 1922, immediately after the Anglo-Irish Treaty brought about the departure of the British. The hero betrays the anti-Treaty forces to the new Irish government, not to the British. The film, however, places the story in the IRA’s war against the British.

79. Ford, 1936 interview with Howard Sharpe, in Gerald Peary and Jenny Lefcourt (eds), John Ford Interviews (UP of Mississippi: Jackson 2001), pp. 16–17.

80. In the fairly rapid boil of the Californian melting pot, one could not certify an American’s Irishness by hair or skin colour, body type, accent, place of birth or religion, so any white-skinned person with a Scottish or Irish surname (and McLaglen could be either) would be entitled by Ford to the benefit of the doubt.

81. Philip Liebfred, ‘Victor McLaglen’, Films in Review, 41, 4, 214–20.

82. Sheridan Morley, Tales from the Hollywood Raj: The British Film Colony on Screen and Off (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: London 1983), p. 140.

83. Churchill, ‘The Man Behind The Informer’.

84. Dudley Nichols said the fog was intended in his screenplay to be ‘symbolic of the groping primitive mind; it’s really a mental fog in which he moves and dies’. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 219.

85. Sheeran, The Informer, p. 40.

86. Ibid. p. 69.

87. Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics of the New Deal (Temple UP: Philadelphia 2001), p. 49. See also Sheeran, The Informer, p. 61, and Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet, p. 181.

88. ‘Stormy Advices from Hollywood’, New York Times (29 December 1935).

89. Emanuel Eisenberg, interview with John Ford in New Theatre (April 1936); also in Peary and Lefcourt, John Ford Interviews, pp. 11–12.

90. Bogdanovich, John Ford, pp. 63–4.

91. With some reporters, Ford backtracked and denied that ‘McLaglen was tricked into doing some of the scenes … That’s absurd. Vic is a superb actor.’ Churchill, ‘The Man Behind The Informer’.

92. Peary and Lefcourt, John Ford Interviews, pp. 13–14.

93. Ibid. p. 14.

94. ‘We never worked for Max Reinhardt/Or the Moscow Theatre of Art’ are the opening lines. John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

95. Howard Sharpe interview with Ford for Photoplay (1936), in Peary and Lefcourt, John Ford Interviews, 16.

96. Ibid. p. 17.

97. O’Hara, ’Tis Herself, p. 69.

98. Peary and Lefcourt, John Ford Interviews, p. 12.

99. ‘The Informer, RKO, Screenplay by Dudley Nichols from the Novel by Liam O’Flaherty, 18 December 1934’, Arts Library Special Collections, UCLA. My friend the late Pat Sheeran of the National University of Ireland, Galway, gives an interesting analysis of the respective contributions of Ford and Nichols to The Informer in his book on film treatments of O’Flaherty’s novel (Sheeran, The Informer, pp. 63–72). According to Dan Ford’s book on his grandfather (Pappy: The Life of John Ford, Da Capo Press: New York, 1979), in a series of meetings at the director’s Odin Street home, Ford shouted at Nichols, insulted him, insisted on Ford’s superior knowledge of Ireland, and virtually dictated the script, so he is the real author of The Informer. However, Nichols himself said several times that he wrote the script at ‘white heat’ and there was never a second draft. Neither account is convincing. Nichols wrote a long draft, dated 18 December 1934, and then, before shooting began in February 1935, produced a tighter final version (both drafts are in the Special Collections, Arts Library, UCLA). It is reasonable to conclude that the changes between the first and second drafts were the consequence of discussions between Ford and Nichols on the Araner voyage.

100. Lindsay Anderson, ‘John Ford: his work is a portrayal of the righteous man’, Films in Review (2, 2, February 1951), 7.

101. Sklar, Movie-Made America, p. 191.

102. Garry Wills entitles a chapter on Ford ‘Sadist’ in his John Wayne’s America (Simon and Schuster: New York 1997), pp. 67–76.

103. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 217.

104. Robert Parrish, Growing up in Hollywood (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich: New York and London 1976), pp. 132–3.

105. John Ford to Mary Ford [22 May 1942], the Carlton, Washington DC, John Ford papers, Lilly Library. Ford was speaking of a naval officer under his command.

106. Dudley [Nichols] to Dear Sean [John Ford], 26 March [1939], John Ford papers, Lilly Library.

107. New York Times (30 April 1935).

108. Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (Simon and Schuster: New York 1999), p. 179.

109. McBride, Searching for John Ford, p. 328.

110. Charles Ramirez Berg, ‘The Margin as Center: The Multicultural Dynamics of John Ford’s Westerns’ in Stuldar and Bernstein, John Ford Made Westerns, p. 75.