Thursday 1: Jack Ford/Duke Wayne

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Born John Feeny to Irish Catholic immigrant-parents, John Ford possessed an indefatigable interest in the role of the immigrant in shaping the American identity. An unsuccessful attempt to enlist in the Naval Academy sent a young Ford west to work with his brother in Hollywood. While Ford was still crafting his trade in the late ‘20s, he met a young John Wayne, who was then known as Marion “Duke” Morrison, working in Fox’s prop department. Although it took years for the two to work on a serious project together, a father-son relationship was forged. Affectionately and respectfully, Wayne came to refer to his mentor as “Pappy.”

Ford was an enigmatic man — a supposed alcoholic whose increased bouts of melancholy led to intimacy problems. He notoriously denigrated Wayne on the set. But through it all, the ever-appreciative pupil withstood his mentor’s insults. Whatever resentment Wayne felt was thickly veiled, and they remained dear and loyal friends. Ironically, by the end of his career Ford relied on Wayne’s name to get his projects financed.

Any number of conflicting adjectives could describe Ford’s character, but it was Henry Fonda who said it best: “John Ford will talk about anything but himself. That makes him an easy man to like and a hard man to explain.” Wayne, on the other hand, possessed a charismatic, affectionate and sexualized physical grace that was undeniably masculine. His commanding, engrossing presence lent Ford a handsome veneer that enabled him to profess his conflicted feelings on war and expose the cracks in American modernity.

As the Cold War heated up, the two men found themselves on opposite ends of the political spectrum. Wayne, attempting to live up to his conservative persona, spearheaded initiatives to oust communists from the entertainment industry. Ford, on the other hand, a staunch New Deal-era Democrat, refused to compromise his principles and defended fellow director Joseph Mankiewicz when the Screen Directors Guild threatened to blacklist him for refusing to sign a loyalty oath. However, Ford had a political change of heart when he turned on his television set in the late ‘60s and saw protestors burning American flags. Ford spent an entire career portraying the failure of his nation to live up to its ideals, but this, he felt, was too much.

As long as there have been moving pictures there have been Western films. Yet few have emulated, with precision, the grandiosity of the genre as well as these two men. Favoring the visual poetry of the outdoors, Ford consistently framed and contrasted his actors from a great distance, crossing scenic yet dangerous terrain. In doing so, he sought to remind the audience of man’s size and constant struggle, and of the reverence contemporary society owes its forebears. “When Pappy found Monument Valley,” Wayne once suggested, “he found a subject equal to his talents.” Moreover, the Westerns in this series are a testament to the evolution of a genre. The thematic and aesthetic leap from Stagecoach to The Searchers is striking. Ford won a total of six Oscars, but remarkably not one for a Western.

The “characteristic great man of our times,” writes Paul Weiss, is one who “points a people towards civilization. He defines the tone of culture as that which is to be superseded by a civilized whole of which the culture is an anticipatory fragmentary case.” This is the role Ford often envisioned for his actors. If today his characters seem cliché, Jimmy Stewart once reckoned, “that’s because there’s been so many bad imitations of the original.”

John Ford’s thesis, which exposed the mechanisms that mythologize men, is often misinterpreted. By showing his audience that the real heroes of history often escape the textbooks or that those included are often misrepresented, Ford suggests that many American myths are not true. Yet if myths have a purpose, it is in the shaping and mobilizing of new civilizations out of the wild. In this regard, Ford was not a true iconoclast. His intention was to probe the complexities of history and human nature.

The function of any great picture is to allow the audience to envisage what otherwise could not be seen. Together, Pappy and his stalwart, Duke, accomplished just that, producing some of the medium’s most enduring films. By presenting us with what would otherwise be removed by time, Ford and Wayne assure us that we’re not rootless and that we have a past, even if it’s been mythologized, for better or worse. JM