Solving the John Ford Code

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

The films of John Ford are endlessly scrutinized and still there is no consensus. As the received wisdom of one generation is supplanted by that of the next and the next, the battle lines are redrawn.

Once enshrined as an expressionistic liberal, then reviled as a sentimental militarist, then resuscitated as a trickster whose movies say the opposite of what they appear to say, Ford usually kept his own counsel. He had no desire to soothe friendly critics or battle his detractors, though it could escape no one’s attention that he showed far greater respect for enemy combatants than for journalists, whom he usually depicted as lying scoundrels or complacent sheep.

Nor did he grouse overmuch about the butchery inflicted on his work by studio heads: Ford, a shrewd studio insider, managed to make more than 100 films between 1917 and 1966. Those that survive (many silents are lost) contribute to an oeuvre so cantankerously individual that the voluminous Ford studies show no sign of interpretive exhaustion.

Warner Bros. has released two cartons containing 13 Ford films, eight of them representing his long collaboration with John Wayne. All Ford pictures are not equal – there are, or course, masterworks and mutts – but all contribute to the sense of an artist who, usually in Western mode, managed the triple threat of mythologizing the American past, critiquing the American present, and documenting the artist’s evolving perspective, which is frequently tormented, contradictory, sentimental, and cheerless. His vision is held together by repetitions: the stock company of actors, the familiar subjects, and the frequent replaying of scenes and gestures. These amount to a Ford code, the solution to which is ever in the beholder’s eye.

In several films, Ford grandly announces the code with the setting in Monument Valley, an anonymous Western moonscape and geological metaphor used as a kind of cyclorama. In “Stagecoach” (1939), Monument Valley is New Mexico; in “The Searchers,” it’s Texas; in “My Darling Clementine,” it’s southern Arizona; in “Cheyenne Autumn,” it’s Oklahoma. Ford exploited it with a painter’s eye – never more richly than in “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949), for which the heavens aided him and cinematographer Winton Hoch in capturing the most dramatic electrical storm on film.

Critics, who almost always begin as fans, develop a virtuoso skill for justifying their likes, for interpreting day as night, racism as brotherhood, patriotism as pacifism, male bonding as impotence, and every other reversal necessary to repatriate an artist whose politics invariably get in the way. In Ford’s case, that virtuosity isn’t necessary: His movies easily lend themselves to the concerns of subsequent eras while sustaining basic human believability. What we see in them is often not what the original audiences saw.

Take “The Wings of Eagles” (1957), a picture that burlesques and disparages the qualities it pretends to celebrate. The DVD box refers to “a soaring tribute to a courageous friend,” his “indomitable wife,” and “cigar-chomping sidekick Jughead Carson” – enough to turn anyone’s stomach and earn its dismissal as a minor, even egregious work. The opening credits heighten such negative assumptions. “Anchors Away” blares over a naval insignia and a dedication to the “men who brought air power” to the Navy. The film is a biography of Spig Wead, the flyer turned screenwriter and dramatist. But don’t salute too quickly.

The first half-hour is not so much about Spig as it is a parody of the brawling military comedies he wrote in his early years (Ford later interpolates a parallel excerpt from the 1932 film “Hell Divers”). The manly posturing is underscored with witless pie-in-the-face slapstick, the young cadets circling Spig (Wayne) like suckling piglets. They talk about women, but the only physical intimacy permitted them is slugging matches – Ford code for the emptiness of military life, also displayed in “The Long Voyage Home” (1940), “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “Donovan’s Reef.” It is a pathetic and distancing sequence of episodes, almost robotic in its pre dictability.

The tone changes abruptly as Spig and his wife (Maureen O’Hara, caked in makeup) lose their child. Ford shows man and wife in two rooms in the same frame. She holds her arm – more Ford code – in the Harry Carey pose that Wayne revived in “The Searchers” (1956); he, alone in the dark, reluctantly gets up and goes to her, but offers no solace.

Spig’s family is the Navy. He attends a political conference in Washington where the words “pacifism” and “disarmament” are scorned and the conferees talk of the need for permanent war to keep voters asleep while they channel endless funds into defense. (Note that this invocation of a military-industrial empire was shot three years before President Eisenhower’s warning.) Spig gets congressional permission for an Army-Navy race, yet we see his victory only through the eyes of his daughters, watching their absentee father in a newsreel. Meanwhile, Spig incites another slapstick brawl with the fellas.

The tone changes again as he comes home unannounced, bearing flowers and finding a note that indicates his wife is at a rendezvous. He puts the children to sleep, cleans the place, then gallantly pretends all is well when his wife returns. This lovely, unusual, adult moment is but a prelude to Spig waking to his daughter’s crying and breaking his neck on the stairs. The rest of the film is a series of losses and missed connections. Even when he regains the use of his legs, there is little sense of victory.

A comic routine concerning hospital visitors sneaking in liquor, previously used in “Fort Apache” (more Ford code), suggests the banal world in which Spig voluntarily encases himself, having driven away his wife. Nor is there relief in the money and acclaim he wins as a writer – hired by Ward Bond, doing a funny impersonation of John Ford. In the end, he gives no more of himself to his friends than to his family. As his “indomitable” wife is assaulted by a phonograph spitting discs at her, Spig leaves her to rejoin the Navy, from which he eventually expels himself, in a wheelchair, hovering over the abyss between two ships. The genuine emotion of the climax is as bleak as the feckless humor of the opening.

This largely overlooked film, like many Ford works, comforts the audience with its patriotic music, heroic central character, and mindless fisticuffs. Its original audience bought into those surface tactics and left with gratifying tears, or else found the humor and narrative strategy lacking, but few saw the film as a hard-boiled dissection of Spig and his way of life. Similarly, Wayne fans heard reporters favor legend over fact in “Fort Apache” (1948) or “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962) and assumed that they spoke for Ford, when, in fact, the films exist to expose the legends as fraudulent.

“The Wings of Eagles” takes on additional power when one remembers that Spig wrote “They Were Expendable” (1945), Ford’s magnificent World War II film, for which he shares his directorial credit card with Spig’s screenplay. Based on the life of another Ford friend, Captain Robert Bulkley Jr., who in 1943 won the Medal of Honor, “They Were Expendable” stops well short of military success. Robert Montgomery’s Brickley (the names were changed, though the people who were played by Wayne and Donna Reed successfully sued for misrepresentation) never gets to prove the value of PT boats. His occasional victory presages greater failure – it’s 1942 and the Japanese are in charge.

Significantly, Ford, who served bravely in the war, brooks no racial characterization of the enemy. The opposition is unseen and insurmountable – like the Arabs taking down members of “The Lost Patrol” (1934), Ford’s influential World War I drama, which served as the plot device for the popular “Bataan” (1943). When reference is made in “Expendable” to Bataan, many filmgoers must have had that tortuous one-by-one massacre in mind.

The image carries over to the conclusion as Brickley and Wayne’s Ryan are called home while much of their command is left – expendable – on the shore to face certain slaughter. In the penultimate scene, Ryan sits near Brickley, who explains to the fresh-faced recruits that they are going home in order to return and finish the job. Ryan lowers his left arm around Brickley, cradling him in the most dramatic instance of physical contact in the movie. Yet the final shot is of those left behind, and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (the entire score is Mickey Moused with patriotic themes) can do nothing to undermine the sense of unspeakable waste.

The cavalry films that followed, with great commercial success, extended Ford’s view of war. “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949) plays a variation on the theme of troops left behind as the commander rides off, promising to return. He does, and using a ruse to scatter the Indians’ ponies, averts war. This extraordinary film, which appears to promise yet never delivers a climactic battle, is a brief for pacifism and disarmament. It’s a picture in which white settlers and soldiers are killed and white traders are tortured to death while Wayne, who describes his final assignment as “mission, failure,” idly chews tobacco. The Indians emerge unscathed – even the belligerent Red Shirt (who would reappear in “Cheyenne Autumn”) is shown firing away to the end – and Wayne’s command suffers no casualties.

Of the 13 films assembled by Warner, only “Mary of Scotland” (1936) is borderline unwatchable; it is included in “John Ford Film Collection,” along with the dated but still gripping “The Informer” (1935), the entertaining “The Lost Patrol,” and two major late-Ford Westerns: “Sergeant Rutledge” (1960), the first film made about black regiments and misogyny (starring Woody Strode and Constance Towers), and the flawed but infinitely interpretable epic “Cheyenne Autumn”(1964).

The Wayne/Ford collection includes five masterpieces: “Stagecoach,” “They Were Expendable,” “Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “The Searchers,” as well as the fascinating “The Wings of Eagles,” the exceedingly desolate “The Long Voyage Home,” and the bathetic but engaging “3 Godfathers” (1948). The many extras include two feature-length documentaries. Ford contains multitudes and so does Wayne, whose performances are never less than commanding and usually riveting. But then everyone always knew that about him, except for the critics.


The New York Sun

© 2024 The New York Sun Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. The material on this site is protected by copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used.

The New York Sun

Sign in or  Create a free account

By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use