From Publishers Weekly
After being called the "greatest poet of the Western saga," film director Ford responded, "I am not a poet, and I don't know what a Western saga is. I would say that is bullshit." Yet Ford--who made such classic westerns as Stagecoach, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--helped define the idea of the western as a quintessential American story for audiences around the world. This first full-length critical biography presents a complex, fascinating portrait of a troubled and conflicted artist and man. Born John Feeney, he was an Irish outsider in Yankee New England. He began working in the film industry in 1914 as a studio ditch digger, but was soon acting in films and, a few years later, directing them. By the early 1930s, he had achieved considerable artistic and commercial fame with The Informer. McBride (Frank Capra) elegantly and cogently weaves Ford's personal life into the fabric of his career. He is at his best describing how Ford's political sentiments emerged in his work (especially the antiracism of Steamboat Round the Bend and The Searchers) as well as the director's move from liberal to conservative politics during Hollywood's red-baiting years and the HUAC hearings. He gives an equally astute delineation of Ford's emotional life--a tempestuous marriage, a possible affair with Katharine Hepburn, his reputation as a tough guy and his alcoholism. Drawing upon a wealth of critical material plus more than 125 interviews with Ford's colleagues, family and friends, McBride has produced a fine, long-needed biography of a pivotal American artist.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." Ford preferred to let his work speak for itself, and his abrasive encounters with film scholars have become legendary. In fact, "Pappy" Ford, who fancied himself a journeyman director, would probably have been perplexed by these two recent additions to the rapidly growing library of Ford film criticism. Arriving hard on the heels of Scott Eyman's comprehensive Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (LJ 10/1/99), McBride's weighty tome, several decades in preparation, paints a similar portrait: Ford was an insecure alcoholic whose gruff, even sadistic treatment of family, friends, cast, and crew masked his sensitive, sentimental nature. Complex and contradictory like many of his films Ford was a man who stood up to McCarthyite blacklisters but later churned out crude propaganda in support of the Vietnam war. He celebrated tradition, family, and community but was a miserable failure as husband and father. As Eyman did, McBride (Frank Capra; Steven Spielberg) draws on exhaustive research and interviews, but he has the advantage of a few memorably brief meetings with the Great Man himself. Ford left an impressive if uneven body of work, and McBride does it justice, examining each film in illuminating detail. Still, although McBride's book is very deserving, public and academic libraries that cannot collect both biographies should stick to Eyman's more streamlined telling. Studlar (film and English, Univ. of Michigan) and Bernstein (film, Emory Univ.) take readers into academic territory, offering nine essays on the work plus a "dossier" of articles on the man and filmmaker. Robin Wood leads off with a classic critique, questioning whether Ford's late films measure up to his early work. Other essays discuss the role of women and religion in Ford's film universe, and the hotly disputed controversy about whether his last epic Cheyenne Autumn was a "mea culpa" for previous insensitive portrayals of the American Indian. Westerns is recommended for academic collections. Stephen F. Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Film director John Ford presents biographers a tough challenge. Colorful as his long life was, his contradictory personality, emotional reticence, and intransigence with interviewers make it unlikely that anyone will ever limn a definitive portrait of him. McBride is better qualified, however, than most of the others who have tried. He coauthored one of the first significant books on Ford in 1974 and has spent 30 years researching this one. He resists other writers' tendency to treat Ford's life and works separately, instead showing, for example, how Ford's frequent themes of family and assimilation reflect his sense of ethnic identity as the son of Irish immigrants. McBride mines the mountain of preceding Ford criticism deeply as he adds valuable insight into considerations of such classics as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man. If McBride's Ford study doesn't disclose major new information or shed much new light, as his revelatory Frank Capra (1992) did, it is still a necessity for film studies collections and a good primary biography for others. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"It's become cliché to say that a biography reflects the spirit of its subject. But in this case it appears to be true. Joseph McBride's book has the sweep, passion, complexity, and tragic grandeur of a great John Ford film. Thoroughly detailed and researched, McBride's book fills in the gaps and gives us the man in full: sentimental yet cruel, brilliant yet forever feigning illiteracy, politically liberal at one moment and conservative the next. Ultimately, McBride shows us that this artist who balked at the very mention of the word art could speak fully and honestly only through his films. For those of us who grew up on those films, the book is a treasure, and an eye-opener. For younger people who don't know his work, who have yet to appreciate the timeless beauty of his greatest pictures, Searching for John Ford should be compulsory reading."--Martin Scorsese
"Essential in every sense, McBride's Searching for John Ford is a consummate biography. The author shares his subject's great reconciling authority-- and his incisive and embracing book is an open door onto the vast, too-rarely-seen landscape of a great American artist."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
"This first full-length critical biography presents a complex, fascinating portrait of a troubled and conflicted artist and man...McBride elegantly and cogently weaves Ford's personal life into the fabric of his career...McBride has produced a fine, long-needed biography of a pivotal American artist."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Essential in every sense, McBride's Searching for John Ford is a consummate biography. The author shares his subject's great reconciling authority-- and his incisive and embracing book is an open door onto the vast, too-rarely-seen landscape of a great American artist."--Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn
"This first full-length critical biography presents a complex, fascinating portrait of a troubled and conflicted artist and man...McBride elegantly and cogently weaves Ford's personal life into the fabric of his career...McBride has produced a fine, long-needed biography of a pivotal American artist."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Book Description
Hollywood has given us no greater director than John Ford. Between 1917 and 1970, Ford directed and/or produced some 226 pictures, from short silent films to ambitious historical epics and searingly vivid combat documentaries. His major works-- such as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-- are cinematic classics. Ford's films about American history are profound explorations of the national character and the crucibles in which that character was forged. Throughout his long and prolific career, Ford became best known for redefining the Western genre, setting his dramas about pioneer life against the timeless backdrop of Monument Valley.
Ford's films earned him worldwide admiration. As a man, however he was tormented and deliberately enigmatic. He concealed his true personality from the public, presenting himself as an illiterate hack rather than as the sensitive artist his films show him to be. He shrewdly guided the careers of some of Hollywood's greatest stars, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Maureen O'Hara, and Katharine Hepburn, but he could be abusive, even sadistic, in his treatment of actors. He began his life steeped in the lore of Irish independence and progressive politics; by the end a hawkish Republican and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, he was lionized by Richard Nixon for creating films that extol the "old virtues" of heroism, duty, and patriotism. Little wonder that those who have written about Ford have either strained to reconcile the daunting paradoxes of his work and personality or avoided them entirely. They have printed the legend and ignored the facts-- or printed the facts and obscured the legend.
In its depth, originality, and insight, Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker. Encompassing and illuminating Ford's complexities and contradictions, Joseph McBride comes as close as anyone ever will to solving what Andrew Sarris called the "John Ford movie mystery." McBride traces the whole trajectory of Ford's life, from his beginning as "Bull" Feeney, the near-sighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, through to his establishment as America's most formidable and protean filmmaker. The author of critically acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg, McBride interviewed Ford in 1970 and co-wrote the seminal study John Ford with Michael Wilmington. For more than thirty years, McBride has been exploring the interconnections between Ford's inner life and his work. He interviewed more than 120 of the director's friends, relatives, collaborators, and colleagues. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford's films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands. Searching for John Ford will stand as the definitive portrait of an American genius.
Ford's films earned him worldwide admiration. As a man, however he was tormented and deliberately enigmatic. He concealed his true personality from the public, presenting himself as an illiterate hack rather than as the sensitive artist his films show him to be. He shrewdly guided the careers of some of Hollywood's greatest stars, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, James Stewart, Maureen O'Hara, and Katharine Hepburn, but he could be abusive, even sadistic, in his treatment of actors. He began his life steeped in the lore of Irish independence and progressive politics; by the end a hawkish Republican and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, he was lionized by Richard Nixon for creating films that extol the "old virtues" of heroism, duty, and patriotism. Little wonder that those who have written about Ford have either strained to reconcile the daunting paradoxes of his work and personality or avoided them entirely. They have printed the legend and ignored the facts-- or printed the facts and obscured the legend.
In its depth, originality, and insight, Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker. Encompassing and illuminating Ford's complexities and contradictions, Joseph McBride comes as close as anyone ever will to solving what Andrew Sarris called the "John Ford movie mystery." McBride traces the whole trajectory of Ford's life, from his beginning as "Bull" Feeney, the near-sighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, through to his establishment as America's most formidable and protean filmmaker. The author of critically acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra and Steven Spielberg, McBride interviewed Ford in 1970 and co-wrote the seminal study John Ford with Michael Wilmington. For more than thirty years, McBride has been exploring the interconnections between Ford's inner life and his work. He interviewed more than 120 of the director's friends, relatives, collaborators, and colleagues. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford's films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands. Searching for John Ford will stand as the definitive portrait of an American genius.
About the Author
Joseph McBride is a film historian and critic whose fourteen books include Orson Welles, Hawks on Hawks, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, and Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success. A former reporter and reviewer for Daily Variety in Hollywood, he is an adjunct professor of film and literature in the Irish studies program at New College of California in San Francisco.
