John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master

This is a pretty good overview, in some detail, of John Ford's career as one of Hollywood's most admired and successful directors, and as a man who seemed unable to find personal happiness. It gets the job done for anyone except Ford scholars. And it's a biography, not an appreciation of his movies. There isn't much on Ford's Irish ancestry, not in the kind of detail found in, say, Sinclair's book. And there's not much on the details of his films. Only the important ones are described, and then only thoroughly enough to give us an understanding of why they were successful or, in some cases, why they flopped. It's candid and realistic. Davis seems to have interviewed many of the survivors of Ford's old stock company and has taken anecdotes from the memoirs of some others without, as another reviewer noted, all the sorts of scholarly attributions we might expect. Yet the book has an impersonal quality, as if Ford and all his quirks and accomplishments were being examined under a microscope. If you want warmth with a personal touch, you'll have to go elsewhere. Try Dobe Carey's book, or "Pappy", by Ford's grandson. There was no point at which I felt John Ford was being pictured by the author as meaner than he actually was. That is to say, he could be a nice, sensitive guy to his friends and co-workers, but just as often (or maybe more often) he was a domineering son of Beelzebub who enjoyed seeing others in pain and in states of humiliation. In James Cagney's memoir, without anger, just in passing, Cagney refers to Ford as a "sadist." All of which, of course, raises a question of far broader significance. Why is it that we regard authoritarian achievers with awe (eg., Patton), while we seem only to respect equally effective authority figures who are not authoritarian (eg., Bradley). Or -- still more generally -- what exactly does "charisma" mean? Whatever moved Ford to the extremes of authoritarianism -- a shift reflected dimly in his political views too -- Davis tries to explain in psychoanalytic terms, without much success. But the anger was certainly there. Ford hung with a few of his male friends, mostly ignored or argued with his family, tended to drink like a fish between productions, exiled old friends for the slightest of slights, gave his wife the non-person treatment, read widely, held a strong and somewhat unrealistic sentimental attachment to Ireland, found himself engulfed by an increasingly complex production system run by MBAs instead of persons, began repeating himself in his later years like so many other aging directors, and wound up depressed, reduced in means, and given to boozing. His last movie was an unqualified disaster. He died in bed, of cancer, an adored, respected, ancient and wizened figure surrounded by religious objects representative of just about every faith known to man or beast, "the elements so mixed in him that nature might stand up and say to all the world, 'This was a man!'."

I recently read the John Ford biography by Ronald Davis, PhD, and found the book to be well written and very informative. After reading this book, it became quite obvious that Ford had an unhappy personal life. While Ford was in control of his professional life, his personal life was out of control. Ford was a represed man who lived a lie...