Old Master

Orson Welles was once asked which American directors most appealed to him. "The old masters," he replied. "By which I mean John Ford, John Ford and John Ford." Ford, 78, who died of cancer on Aug. 31, was a school of maestros unto himself. Others liked typecasting; Ford preferred archetype casting. Others made films; he made epics. Others debunked the old legends; he treated them seriously. "We've had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes," Ford claimed, "and you know damn well they weren't. But it's good for the country to have heroes to look up to." For more than 100 feature films, audiences and moviemakers looked up to the heroes of John Ford --and to the man himself.

A native of Portland, Me., Sean O'Feeney was the youngest of 13 children. An adventurous older brother, Francis, changed his name to Ford, went West and began to direct silent two-reelers.

Sean followed Francis in name and profession. He served an apprenticeship as stunt man, grip, cameraman and finally director. At first he was merely a foreman, grinding out bathetic stories of cowpokes in leather and gals in gingham. But with The Iron Horse (1924), Ford was abruptly thrust into the front ranks of American film makers. In the tale of a son's search for his father's murderer, Ford composed a stark sagebrush Odyssey that was to echo in almost all his later work. The forces of nature and fate were given substance; the backdrop of plains, railroads and skies was as important as actors.

With the coming of sound. Ford adopted the modern artist's essential rule: less is more. Other directors used scripts that chattered merely to fill the air. Ford insisted on terse dialogue and let the camera narrate. As a result, when most '30s films became rococo antiques.

Ford's movies remained as powerful and functional as bullets. Nor did Ford restrict himself to a single genre. In six years he directed four classic films: The Informer, a tragedy of the Irish uprising; Stagecoach, the most emulated western of all time; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's saga of the Okies; and Eugene O'Neill's sea drama, The Long Voyage Home.

Although the walls of Ford's Hollywood house were covered with books, he liked to affect the pose of a simple man who blundered into masterpieces. His innocence was not wholly feigned; in an industry renowned for double-dealing. Ford did not know the meaning of hypocrisy. Did his heroes exalt the virtues of loyalty? So did the man who became known as "Pappy." He used such players as Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen and Harry Carey Jr. so frequently that they became known as the Ford Stock Company. Did his leading men exhibit an austere devotion to their wimmenfolk? The devout Catholic took particular pride in his long marriage to an Irish sweetheart, Mary McBryde Smith. Were Ford characters patriots? When World War II came along, despite a personal battle with blindness, Ford volunteered for overseas duty. He directed the Navy's film documentary unit, received a machine-gun wound at the battle of Midway, gathered evidence for the Nuremberg trials and retired with the rank of rear admiral in the Reserves.

By the '50s. such credulity and fidelity seemed a knot in the American grain. To be sure, a few military heroes were still acknowledged--one of them became President. But the devaluation of the American past was under way.

Years before. Ford had advised young directors: "When in doubt, make a western." In a time of uncertainty, he took his own prescription. His postwar horse operas--Two Rode Together, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, Rio Grande--are among the best ever filmed. They were The Iron Horse all over again, informed with melancholy and immense technical prowess.

All were populated with men to match the towering structures of Monument Valley. James Stewart, Henry Fonda, Richard Widmark and, above all, Ford's personal discovery and booze companion John Wayne played exemplars of moral rectitude. They were all loners rather than leaders, men whose greatest act was not achievement but renunciation --of fortune, women and sometimes life itself. Ford also threw in some classic easterns, including Mister Roberts, The Quiet Man and The Last Hurrah.

By his seventh decade. Pappy had vanished into his work. He answered critics with a snarl and disciples with a grunt. When Ingmar Bergman pronounced him "the best director in the world," Pappy pretended not to hear. He was just as deaf to the industry celebrations. Ford refused to attend the Academy Award ceremonies for any of his four Oscars.

Despite the claims of a Ford cult that embraces radicals, auteurists and Richard Nixon, the master's films are less than perfect. They are marred by sentimentality, and the Stock Company often verges on caricature. Nevertheless, the epic vision is constant, and the heroic qualities--of the films and their creator--seem doubly valuable in an era of demythology. The uncritical worship of great men may be a prelude to national selfdelusion. But constant debunking can lead to an equally pernicious fiction--that no man is better than his society. It is a notion that Ford disputed in every scene of every film. His overriding, obsolete and heroic testament is a single line from one of his finest westerns, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.