John Ford

His father came out of Spiddal in County Galway and his mother off Inishmore in the Aran Islands, and they raised 11 children on Sheridan Street in the Irish quarter of Portland, Maine, four of whom died as infants. The father farmed, fished, laid gas pipe, kept a saloon and served as an alderman. At Portland High School the youngest son played fullback and defensive tackle and was called Bull, for the way he put his head down and went at the line. In 1914 he followed his older brother Francis, already a director, to California, took the name Jack Ford, and worked as assistant and cameraman. Among his first paid appearances on screen was an uncredited Klansman in The Birth of a Nation.

He directed more than 130 films between 1917 and 1970, most of the silent ones now lost, working so fast in the early years that he made 15 in 1919 alone. The Iron Horse in 1924 was the first big one. Stagecoach in 1939 made John Wayne a star and set the visual grammar of the American West in a Utah valley that was geographically wrong for almost every plot he put in it. Four Academy Awards for direction followed, a record that still stands, and not one of them for a Western. In the war he ran the OSS Field Photographic Branch, filmed the attack on Midway from the island's power plant with a hand-held 16mm camera, and was wounded doing it. Roosevelt watched the result and said he wanted every mother in America to see it.

The Westerns have a house rule about Native characters: they stay outside the settlement. Ford spent the end of his career arguing with it. Cheyenne Autumn in 1964 was announced as an elegy for the Native American, ran longer and cost more than anything else he made, and lost about a million dollars on release. Scholars still disagree about the whole record, some arguing his Indian characters ranged from hostile to sympathetic and pointing to the Navajo speaking Navajo on screen in Wagon Master. On set he was cruel by policy, humiliating actors in front of the crew, keeping studio executives off his stages by force, and cultivating what one biographer calls the image of a tough, two-fisted, hard-drinking Irish sonofabitch. He was also, by the same account, erudite and easily wounded.

The most quoted line he ever spoke was spoken at a union meeting. "My name's John Ford. I make Westerns," he began, in 1950, opening the speech that supposedly destroyed Cecil B. DeMille's push to force a loyalty oath on the Directors Guild. The line is real. The story is not. A transcript released with Joseph Mankiewicz's papers in 2016 shows Ford rising partly in DeMille's defense, calling the attacks on him un-American and pleading with the membership to keep him. He died of stomach cancer at Palm Desert in August 1973, five months after Nixon handed him the first AFI Life Achievement Award and the Medal of Freedom. The headstone gives his birth year as 1895. It is wrong.

John Ford's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Iron Horse film
  Two towns built on location, 5,000 extras, and no finished script when shooting began 1924
• Stagecoach film
  Monument Valley, and the picture that turned John Wayne into a star 1939
• The Grapes of Wrath film
  From Steinbeck — his second Oscar, and Jane Darwell's 1940
• The Battle of Midway film
  Shot hand-held from the island power plant. Roosevelt made sure it was released 1942
• The Searchers film
  No Oscar nominations at all. Named the greatest Western ever made by the AFI in 2008 1956
• The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance film
  The late reckoning with his own myth-making 1962

• February 1, 1894 aged 0 Born at Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the tenth of 11 children
• 1914 aged ~20 Follows his brother Francis to California and becomes Jack Ford
• 1915 aged ~21 Appears uncredited as a Klansman in The Birth of a Nation
• March 1917 aged 23 Directs The Tornado, his first credited film Universal's Carl Laemmle is supposed to have given him the job saying he yells good. The film is lost.
• July 3, 1920 aged 26 Marries Mary McBride Smith A non-Catholic divorcee. The marriage lasted for life, through his many affairs.
• 1939 aged ~45 Stagecoach opens
• June 4, 1942 aged 48 Wounded filming the Japanese attack on Midway He and cameraman Joseph August shot it from the roof of the island's power plant.
• 1950 aged ~56 Speaks at the Directors Guild meeting on the loyalty oath The transcript found in 2016 does not match the story everyone tells about that night.
• August 31, 1973 aged 79 Dies at Palm Desert, California Five months after receiving the first AFI Life Achievement Award from Richard Nixon.

• John Steinbeck 1902–1968
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men chronicled American hardship. adapted
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. decorated by
• Martin Scorsese b. 1942
  Director and preservation advocate whose films and institutions have shaped both American cinema and understanding of its history. influenced
• Steven Spielberg b. 1946
  Director and producer whose blockbusters and dramas have defined American cinema for five decades. influenced
• George Lucas b. 1944
  Filmmaker who created Star Wars and Indiana Jones, later selling Lucasfilm to Disney for over $4 billion. influenced
• Clint Eastwood b. 1930
  Actor and director whose Westerns and gritty dramas, from Dirty Harry to Unforgiven, defined American masculinity. influenced