Director John Ford born John Martin Jack Feeney in 1895, was a considerably flinty product of the remote New England state of Maine, though if you consulted his soul, it would have suggested he was born in Ireland. Specializing early on in Westerns that had the calling card of casting Harry Carey, at Universal, he set up house at Fox in 1930 churning escapist Westerns with genre familiar Tom Mix, then a 'Southern'; Cameo Kirby (1923), featuring John Gilbert as a discredited riverboat gambler and the epic Western The Iron Horse in 1924. The mainspring of his latter silent Westerns, Three Bad Men set in 1877's Dakota Gold Rush was the director's Catholicism. The film is rife with visual imagery, the villains of the title sacrifice themselves to save the young hero and heroine from a band of outlaws, thereby winning both love and reverence. The highlight of the film is the grandiosely staged land rush - the quest for the gold is made subordinate to land settlement and farming, which were regarded in populist mythology as inherently more virtuous activities. Ford's biggest success following The Iron Horse was Four Sons which conveyed a tragic familial breakup, a theme the director would oft revisit. In the case of Four Sons, the family is German and three sons are killed in the Great War; but the fourth son takes his mother abroad to America, the golden land of opportunity.
Ford's years at Fox would enable him to explore in greater depths another pet subject, the country Ireland, whether it be the idyllic pastoral Erin of 1926's The Shamrock Handicap in contrast with the USA as the vigorous new society where the immigrant can find success by simply picking it right at the bookies - or the dark studio created land of the 'Troubles' in Hangman's House (1928) in which an exiled Irish renegade (Victor McLaglen) returns to exact vengeance on a high-born Irish collaborator who has betrayed his sister. Like Four Sons, which was partly filmed on the sets of F.W. Murnau's Sunrise (1927), Hangman's House illustrates how much Ford had cultivated the Germanic influence in lighting and staging, Ford adopted a different style - open-air location shooting and natural sunlight - for his Americana such as Just Pals (1920), an appetizing tale of two small-town buddies, the resident layabout Bim (Buck Jones) and a wandering orphan (George E. Stone) both of whom suffer dearly from the intolerance and bigotry of the townspeople, though Bim never loses his loyalty to the community.
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| Mother Bernie's got four and Uncle Charlie's only got three |
In a word, John Ford was always the consummate visual director and not much of a wordy one and he firmly laid the foundation of his later career in his dozen years in silent films. Ford passed away in the year 1973 at the age of seventy-eight.
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| John Ford the Irish cowboy (1895-1973) |