John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master (Oklahoma Western Biographies) [Hardcover]

Ronald L. Davis (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1995 | Series: Oklahoma Western Biographies (Book 10)

John Ford remains the most honored director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards. Drawing upon extensive written and oral history, Ronald L. David explores Ford’s career from his silent classic, The Iron Horse, through the transition to sound, and then into the pioneer years of location filming, the golden years of Hollywood, and the movement toward television. During his career, Ford made such classics as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers-136 pictures in all, 54 of them Westerns. The complexity of his personality comes alive here through the eyes of his colleagues, friends, relatives, film critics, and the actors he worked with, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara, and Katharine Hepburn.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

During a career that spanned more than 50 years, Ford (1895-1973) directed 136 films and established himself as a creative genius. Davis, a history professor at Southern Methodist, presents a lively and well-researched study of Ford's life and work. Although best known for directing westerns that emphasized visual beauty, action and mood rather than dialogue?Stagecoach (1939), Fort Apache (1948)?Ford won six academy awards for non-westerns, including The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941), which dealt with social themes. Davis draws on the recollections of the actors who worked frequently with Ford, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Maureen O'Hara, to document Ford's tyranny on the set, which intimidated his cast but wrung brilliant performances from them. Although he married and had two children, Ford was most comfortable with men, according to Davis, and masked his deep emotional insecurities by abusing alcohol. Illustrations.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

YA?A biography that humanizes both the dean of Hollywood directors and the motion-picture industry itself. Davis weaves Ford's roots as the son of 19th-century Irish immigrants throughout his portrayal of the filmmaker's illustrious career. From silent-film beginnings to the early '60s, his presence shaped the industry. Intimate glimpses into Ford's personal life provide insight into the making of his films as well as reveal his influence on many of Hollywood's legends.?Sue Callahan, R.E. Lee High School, Springfield, VA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr; 1St Edition edition (April 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0806127082
• ISBN-13: 978-0806127088
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,737,307 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So-so Ford Bio, March 17, 2000

By 

Donald McNamara (Rochester, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master (Oklahoma Western Biographies) (Paperback)

If you've never read a Ford bio, this is a decent introduction. But the book has three problems. It has very little interpretation and evaluation of the films. Much of the book is about Ford's flaws as a human being, especially his cruelty to the people he worked with. Film by film, he piles up examples of Ford's bad behavior without explaining what all this nastiness has to do with Ford's achievement as an artist. Finally, much of the book's material comes from interviews. In a bibliographical essay, Davis lists all this material. In the text, however, he never makes it clear where he got a particular quote. Davis did quite a few interviews for the book. Those don't need further citation. If you want to track down quotations from other interviews, however, forget it. There's no way of finding out when an interview was given or what the context for the quote is.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but misses the real genius, December 30, 1997

By 

Daryl R. Gibson "Writer, Editor, Technology Geek" (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master (Oklahoma Western Biographies) (Paperback)

Although this book does a reasonable job of delivering the essential information about one of Hollywood's great directors, it spends too much effort attempting to analyze the dark side of John Ford, and too little time dealing with the art he created. The author speculates on Ford's drinking, his sexuality, and his family problems. If you want to know Ford's work, don't buy this book...buy one or two of his movies, instead....or buy Harry Carry Jr's book, or Peter Bogdanovich's book.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Torment and Genius., April 1, 2010

By 

Steven Daedalus "Steve" (Deming, NM USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: John Ford: Hollywood's Old Master (Oklahoma Western Biographies) (Paperback)

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!'."