Between 1917 and 1970, John Ford's astonishingly prolific career encompassed some 226 films as a director and/or producer. That total includes 113 features, 24 shorts and 89 documentary films made during the second World War. Not bad for an Irish saloon-keeper's son who was born in Maine in 1894, suffered from bad eyesight all his life, indulged in binge drinking, and had an irascible temper that antagonised many of his peers in the motion-picture business.
Joseph McBride sets out his stall early by quoting Ford's defiant proclamation: "The truth about my life is nobody's damn business but my own," and then asks: "What was he trying so hard to conceal? What was he hiding behind those dark glasses? Who was this enigmatic man who was, and will remain, as great a national poet as Walt Whitman? As I ride out to 'search his heart and soul,/ Go searchin' way out there,' I hope to find some answers to those questions."
Having ploughed through the main body of the text, some 720 pages, my personal opinion is that he was of that body of singular people given one bright shining gift, which he pursued at the expense of other, more humane and civilising traits.
In his relations with his family and friends, he was obnoxious in the extreme - the film star Joanne Dru, visiting in the garden of their house with Ford's daughter Barbara, saw him peeing out of an upstairs window, his only nod to propriety being his "Good afternoon, ladies"; he continually cheated on his wife, Mary; was a bad father to his son and daughter; treated actors John Wayne and Ward Bond as whipping boys; created a phoney first World War military record for himself; was most ambivalent during the McCarthy witch-hunt of Hollywood directors in the 1950s; had mephitic personal habits, and was generally insufferable to all and sundry.
Yet in spite of, or maybe because, of these deficiencies, he created a body of work that was classic in the best sense of the word. Films like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, his cavalry trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande, and, above all, The Searchers, stand the test of time, have never been surpassed, and probably never will be.
Taking Ford's life chronologically, and giving it a wider dimension by examining the films and what they had to say about the man, McBride comes up with a sprawling panorama that makes for absorbing reading, especially if, like me, you happen to be a cineaste from way back.
It was Ford's older brother, Frank or Francis - a well-known actor and director himself in the silent days - who led his sibling into the film trade. Later, when Frank's career declined, Ford treated him shabbily by giving him small parts in his films, usually as an amiable drunk. McBride paints a picture of Jack Feeney - Ford's family name - as he was at that early time in Hollywood:
"Jack hung around with stuntmen, extras, and crewmen in his early days at Universal, but though he always felt more comfortable around men than around women, he never seemed entirely 'one of the guys'. The secretive, eccentric personality he cultivated after becoming a director was not entirely an act, but an outgrowth of the self-protective character traits that even in his youth made him 'a faraway fella'."
There was also a question mark over his sexuality. Some of his early colleagues, including the seminal cowboy actor Harry Carey, circulated innuendo about his liking for the company of strong, muscular types like George O'Brien, Ward Bond and, later on, John Wayne. Wayne, who suffered more than most from Ford's almost pathological needling, once got back at him after being accused of "walking like a fairy". His response was that he had always copied Ford's way of walking. Ford didn't talk to him for a couple of years after that.
In July 1920, Ford married a 28-year-old divorcΘe named Mary McBryde Smith. Their union was to turn out a stormy affair, but they remained together over the years. They had a son, Pat, and a daughter, Barbara, but neither of them was a good parent, and the children grew up confused and emotionally bankrupt.
Ford, like his fellow Irish-American Spencer Tracy, to whom he gave his first starring role in the film Up the River, had a weakness for going off on alcoholic binges. While he was working on a picture, he stayed off the hard stuff, but as soon as the film was in the can he drank himself into oblivion. At times he became so bad that he had to be hospitalised in order to be dried out.
He did have a good second World War, however. He enlisted in the navy, was made a captain, and showed great heroism while working on war documentaries. At the Battle of Midway, he filmed the approach of enemy planes, was wounded, but continued filming. The navy thought so highly of him that in 1951 he was made a rear admiral.
He won four Academy awards, for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man. In 1956 he made the consummate western film The Searchers, with John Wayne playing against type as the embittered racist Ethan Edwards. After that Ford directed only one other picture of note, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, an underrated film that had as much to say about the the US at the time it was made as it did of the country's past.
Ford's treatment of Indians in his films has always been a talking point, but the Navajo tribe of Monument Valley, where he set a number of his westerns, were grateful to him for providing work at a time when it was difficult to come by. There is a nice story of how Ford hired a medicine man named Hosteen Tso to make sure he got the right kind of weather. He normally came up trumps, but one day he failed to deliver. When asked why, his droll reply was that his radio was broken.In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was dumped by the studio bosses, being regarded as out of date. He became more embittered than ever, but, when diagnosed in 1973 as having terminal cancer, he faced death heroically.
Fittingly, for a man who delighted in obfuscation, there are three different versions of his last words. This is the one I like best: when the priest saying the last rites was driving everyone to distraction by going on and on, Ford suddenly opened his eyes and said: "Cut!"
Vincent Banville is a writer and critic
This books is available through Internet bookshop