Searching for John Ford: The critic and film historian Joseph McBride, believing that John Ford was insufficiently appreciated in his native land, began his search for the curmudgeonly film-maker in and was immediately told by Ford himself that he had 'certainly picked a dull subject'. McBride was a year-old journalist then; Ford was 76 and three years away from his death. One of the two most famous lines from a Ford movie the other is John Wayne's refrain from The Searchers, 'That'll be the day.
McBride's determination to discover the facts behind the legend, and to reconcile the myriad contradictions in Ford's career, accounts for the 32 years he spent on the book and for its length. Ford was a notorious romancer and embroiderer. He often claimed to have been born in Ireland, rather than in Maine, and to have been christened Sean Aloysius O'Fienne in McBride establishes that he was born John Martin Feeney in , the youngest of 11 children of Irish immigrants, his father a saloon-keeper, his mother a hotel maid.
He took his professional name from an older brother, Francis Ford, who preceded him in Hollywood as an actor-director, yet claimed to have taken it from a car so that his involvement in films should not disgrace his family. McBride devotes more than 70 pages to Ford's childhood and youth in New England, establishing how vital to an understanding of the films is Ford's divided nature as a passionate American patriot, fascinated by the country's history, and his awareness, as an Irish-American Catholic, of belonging to a despised minority who saw themselves as exiles from an emerald utopia.
Thus when it came to the conflict between the US cavalry and the Indians in his great postwar Westerns, Ford was on both sides. Moreover, he seemed to regard any persecuted group as honorary Irishmen, whether they were dispossessed Okies heading for California in The Grapes of Wrath, Native Americans returning to their tribal hunting ground in Cheyenne Autumn or Welsh miners drawn together by grief in How Green Was My Valley.
McBride also shows how Ford, who liked to present himself as an untutored roughneck, grew up loving literature, the theatre, the cinema and the visual arts. As a child, watching the elderly Winslow Homer painting on the beach in Maine may have helped shape Ford's understanding of composition. Marty, in one final leg of his search, finds her days later, only after she has fainted from exhaustion. Some film critics [ specify ] have speculated that the historical model for the cavalry attack on a Comanche village, resulting in Look's death and the taking of Comanche prisoners to a military post, was the well-known Battle of Washita River , November 27, , when Lt.
George Armstrong Custer's 7th U. The sequence also resembles the Battle of the North Fork of the Red River , in which the 4th Cavalry captured Comanche women and children and imprisoned them at Fort Concho. Upon the film's release, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a "ripsnorting Western" in spite of the "excessive language in its ads" ; he credits Ford's "familiar corps of actors, writers, etc. Nugent, whose screenplay from the novel of Alan LeMay is a pungent thing, right on through the cast and technicians, it is the honest achievement of a well-knit team.
Variety called it "handsomely mounted and in the tradition of Shane ", yet "somewhat disappointing" due to its length and repetitiveness; "The John Ford directorial stamp is unmistakable. It concentrates on the characters and establishes a definite mood. It's not sufficient, however, to overcome many of the weaknesses of the story. Look described The Searchers as a "Homeric odyssey".
Xan Brooks enjoys an examination of the life of a great director in Searching for John Ford by Joseph McBride. Joseph McBride brings the great director to vivid life as a creator of heroes - and a complex, dangerous man - in Searching for John Ford.
The New York Times praised Wayne's performance as "uncommonly commanding". In , The Searchers was ranked 18th; in , fifth; in , 11th; in , 7th. In a Cahiers du Cinema essay, Godard compared the movie's ending with that of the reuniting of Odysseus with Telemachus in Homer 's Odyssey. In , TV Guide ranked it 18th. The film has been recognized multiple times by the American Film Institute:. On "They Shoot Pictures Don't They," a site which numerically calculates critical reception for any given film, The Searchers has been recognized as the ninth most acclaimed movie ever made.
Scott McGee noted that " Glenn Frankel 's study of the film calls it "the greatest Hollywood film that few people have seen. A major theme of the film is the historical attitude of white settlers toward Native Americans. Ford was not the first to attempt this examination cinematically, but his depiction of harshness toward Native Americans was startling, particularly to later generations of viewers; Roger Ebert wrote, "I think Ford was trying, imperfectly, even nervously, to depict racism that justified genocide.
From the beginning of his quest, it is clear that he is less interested in rescuing Debbie than in wreaking vengeance on the Comanches for the slaughter of his brother's family. In a interview with Cosmopolitan magazine, Ford said,. There's some merit to the charge that the Indian hasn't been portrayed accurately or fairly in the Western, but again, this charge has been a broad generalization and often unfair.
The Indian didn't welcome the white man If he has been treated unfairly by whites in films, that, unfortunately, was often the case in real life. There was much racial prejudice in the West. Film scholar Ed Lowry writes that "[W]hile the Comanches are depicted as utterly ruthless, Ford ascribes motivations for their actions, and lends them a dignity befitting a proud civilization. Never do we see the Indians commit atrocities more appalling than those perpetrated by the white man.
For each son, I take many The theme of miscegenation also runs through the film. Early on, Martin earns a sour look from Ethan when he admits to being one eighth Cherokee. Ethan says repeatedly that he will kill his niece rather than have her live "with a buck", that "living with the Comanche ain't living". Even one of the film's gentler characters, Vera Miles's Laurie, tells Martin when he explains he must protect his adoptive sister, that "Ethan will put a bullet in her brain. I tell you Martha would want him to.
The rape of captive white women by the Comanche is an unspoken theme. An important plot undercurrent is the obvious mutual attraction between Ethan Edwards and his brother's wife, Martha.
Although no dialog alludes to it, there are a multitude of visual references to their relationship throughout the film. Such a situation would add further layers of nuance to Ethan's obsessive search for Debbie, his revulsion at the thought that she might be living as an Indian, and his ultimate decision to bring her home—and then walk away. Beyond the ostensible motivations, it might depict a guilt-ridden father's need to save the daughter he made by cuckolding his brother, then abandoned.
The Searchers has influenced many films. David Lean watched the film repeatedly while preparing for Lawrence of Arabia to help him get a sense of how to shoot a landscape.
The film influenced several aspects of George Lucas' film saga Star Wars. Episode II — Attack of the Clones. In the film, Anakin Skywalker learns that one of his family members has been abducted by a group of Tusken Raiders though it is the character's mother who is kidnapped, rather than a niece. Anakin massacres the kidnappers in vengeance, much like The Searchers' climactic battle in the Comanche camp. The film served as the inspiration for the name of the British band The Searchers.
Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan stated that the ending to the show's final episode, " Felina ", was influenced by the film. The Canadian film Searchers is a partial remake of the film, in which an Inuit man in finds his wife and daughter has been kidnapped. It was one of the many contradictions McBride documents well. And for this director who is most famous for his male dominated films, his last movie, 7 WOMEN, has a mostly female cast, with one character clearly suppressing lesbian tendencies; hardly the stuff of an old man chasing past glory.
Retrieved April 6, He took his professional name from an older brother, Francis Ford, who preceded him in Hollywood as an actor-director, yet claimed to have taken it from a car so that his involvement in films should not disgrace his family. Debbie is brought to the Jorgensen ranch, and Martin reunites with Laurie. Thus when it came to the conflict between the US cavalry and the Indians in his great postwar Westerns, Ford was on both sides. Look described The Searchers as a "Homeric odyssey". This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Episode II — Attack of the Clones.
Yet as his career behind the camera faded into the sunset, his influence only grew larger, as a new generation of directors watched and learned from the master; Sergio Leone, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese are among the few who would openly pay homage to Ford in their films, many made long after the man had left the scene.
For us movie buffs, his gallery of vivid characters, live and breathe still, as real today as the first time we were introduced to them: In the course of reading this book, I ran across most of them at one time or another on TCM, AMC or any of the other movie channels in my cable package. A must read for anyone who loves movies. Jan 20, Rob rated it it was amazing.
This is the third biography of John Ford that I have read and easily the best. McBride is one of the premier historians of American film, with an earlier book that contains some of the best analyses of Ford's work ever written. I found the early chapters of Searching slow going, in part because I never enjoy that section of a biography, but as soon as Ford arrived in Hollywood and especially after he became renowned in the s the book was riveting.
McBride deftly approaches Ford's complex pol This is the third biography of John Ford that I have read and easily the best. McBride deftly approaches Ford's complex political views and alliances, showing how he became more conservative in the s while simultaneously growing more and more sympathetic to the outsider in American culture. This is one of the great film biographies. Dec 07, Dermott Hayes rated it really liked it.
McBride's biography of John Ford is exhaustive. It covers every stage of Ford's career and life in meticulous detail, even examine his Irish roots, school and college days as an Irish Yankee in Portland, Maine. As a fan of Ford's contribution to cinematic history, I've always wondered about this man who is one of American cinema's great pioneers yet one who managed to live and work within the studio system, without much creative conflict.
The trick, of course, lay in Ford's background, first, as McBride's biography of John Ford is exhaustive. The trick, of course, lay in Ford's background, first, as a carpenter and stuntman for his brother, Francis in the early days of silent movies and then his own grounding as a jobbing director. Everything he made was made within budget. He used a cast of actors who became his go-to crew. Of course, all the compromise required and all the attention to detail meant he was tyrannical towards the people he worked with and when he wasn't working, he was a phenomenal drinker, a bad father and a philanderer.
Halfway into this exhaustive and exhausting tome, I began to wonder was McBride getting a little too repetitive in his attempts to rationalise and explain and excuse Ford's behaviour? Sep 04, Robert C Mayho rated it it was amazing. The definitive biography of the great film director, by one of the foremost film historians.
McBride does not flinch from some of Ford's less than attractive character traits, nor does he lionize. But the respect for this most influential of directors shines through; a perfect book for someone with a passing interest in Ford and his work, but equally valuable for the more serious cinephile. Oct 05, Peter Burton rated it really liked it. Very good,detailed biography by a true lover of his movies. It makes you want to see them again to fully understand the author's analysis and comments.
It turns out that Ford was a very unpleasant man,cruel ,rude but sometimes kind and thoughtful. Jun 02, Padraic rated it it was amazing Shelves: What a pain in the tucas. And he made great films. The biggest surprise is that Ford bullied John Wayne, sometimes to tears. It's a reminder that being a great artist is completely unrelated to being a good person. I call that the Picasso rule. Apr 13, Stuart rated it it was amazing Shelves: Fascinating look at my favorite director.
Jul 05, Clint rated it really liked it. An excellent, thorough, and as close to authoritative biography of the great filmmaker as is ever likely to be written. Mar 14, John M. Long, in-depth biography of America's greatest movie director, full of insights into both the man and his films. Andrew Stewart rated it it was amazing Mar 11,