A number of years ago I was doing a weekly two-page column for the New York Irish Examiner USA. It was ostensibly on Irish politics, but on the many occasions when I thought that I would go quietly insane if I had to write yet another story of greed, corruption, and sheer old-fashioned skullduggery from the world’s greatest chancers, I would retreat to my real love. And I’d do a piece on books or movies instead. To cleanse the palate, so to speak.
On one of these occasions, I combined the two and found myself enjoying writing a review of Steve Mayhew’s novel Connemara Days. This was the fictionalized account of John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and the crew of John Ford’s The Quiet Man descending on the small village of Cong in County Mayo in 1951, in order to make a movie that would go down in film history. It’s also a family saga, a tale of hero worship, and a love story. I was crazy about it. And so, it seems, was James Bond actor Roger Moore, who before his death had been keen to produce an adaptation. They had even gotten as far as casting Stacy Keach as Ford (inspired, in my opinion) before the film found itself in development Limbo. Still, I have hopes that I’ll see an adaptation some fine day before I fall off the twig. With the right screenplay and director, this could be at least as good as any of the often-dubious content that the streaming services put out.
Steve saw the review and wrote to thank me, a gracious act that I have since found to be typical of the man. An online correspondence began one that has now lasted for quite some years. More importantly, we discovered that we were – as my former partner put it – ‘brothers from different mothers’, sharing the same enthusiasms since childhood. As kids we had read the same monster magazines like Famous Monsters of Filmland; we bought and built the same Aurora Universal Pictures monster kits such as the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dracula, the Mummy, and all the rest of that merry glow-in-the-dark gang; our fathers had even both been stationed in Malta with the Navy during the 50s. And, of course, we loved the old silent movies, those enduring echoes of a Golden Age.
The overriding cinematic passion of Steve Mayhew’s life has been and remains the legendary director, John Ford. And somewhere along the way he did his thesis on Ford’s silent films.
It is with enormous gratitude from those of us at Silent Cinema Galway that we begin reprinting this scholarly, irreplaceable document -- surely a rare treat for all of you John Ford fans out there in the dark.
Thank you, Steve. You are not only a funny, knowledgeable, inspiring man – you’re a generous one, too.
—Charley Brady
STEVE MAYHEW
John Ford Silent Film Thesis
Chapter 1 – Introduction
At a meeting of the Screen Directors Guild in Los Angeles on October 22nd, 1950, John Ford introduced himself to his fellow directors with the words ‘My name is John Ford. I am a director of Westerns’ (McBride, 2003, p.482).[1] The meeting was held at a time when America was almost overwhelmed by the anti-Communist hysteria of McCarthyism and the witch-hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). This in turn had prompted the Guild to contemplate that all members declare an oath of loyalty or suffer the ignominy of the Hollywood blacklist. On that day, Ford was instrumental in overturning a vote of no confidence brought against the absent Guild chairman, the director Joseph Mankiewicz, by the right-wing faction of the organisation, led by Cecil B. DeMille.
When Ford referred to himself as a director of Westerns, we can assume he was including in that statement the numerous silent cowboy films he directed at the beginning of his career. Starting with his first feature-length sound film, The Black Watch (1929), Ford had made approximately forty films by the time he addressed the Guild. Only a handful, eight to be exact – Stagecoach (1939), Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), 3 Godfathers (1948), She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Wagon Master (1950), Rio Grande (1950) – could be classified as examples of the Western genre.
The John Ford filmographies published by film scholars and historians such as Peter Bogdanovich and Joseph McBride indicate that Ford directed at least sixty-seven films between 1917 and 1929, some of the early examples running for the length of only one or two reels at the most, but a large majority running for five reels or more. Of these sixty-seven films, approximately forty-three were Westerns. The majority of the titles were comprised of a series of films Ford made with the actor Harry Carey for Universal Studios in which Carey, more often than not, played a recurring character by the name of Cheyenne Harry.[2] It was not until the publication in 1967 of the book John Ford, by Peter Bogdanovich, however, that film scholars started taking Ford’s silent work seriously. In a series of interviews with Bogdanovich recorded between the years 1963 to 1966, Ford is initially dismissive of his early work, discussing the beginning of his career in cursory detail. Ford ignores a number of his silent films completely; the interview jumps from Marked Men (1919) to North of Hudson Bay (1923), with no mention of the seventeen films made in between. Of the films he does discuss with Bogdanovich, it is apparent that The Iron Horse (1924) and 3 Bad Men (1926) take pride of place in his canon of silent work; the former was the most commercially successful of the director’s early titles. In his interview with Ford at UCLA in 1964, George J. Mitchell observes that ‘the discussion then turned to The Iron Horse, a picture Ford obviously wanted to talk about’ (Peary and Lefcourt, 2001, p.64). Ford’s constant retelling of the story of the making of The Iron Horse (1924) indicates that it was a task almost as arduous as the actual narrative of the film itself (the building of the transcontinental railroad across America in the late 1860s).
According to another Ford biographer, Ronald L. Davis, ‘Ford would play down his early accomplishments, claiming that he remembered none of his silent pictures “with any warmth – they were all hard work”’ (Davis, 1995, p.60). Typically brusque when interviewed on any aspect of his career, Ford’s contrary approach to his early films also has him at first dismissing practically everything he did before 1928 with the quotation, ‘It’s a long time ago and to me, you make a picture and that’s it – go on to something else, forget about it’ (in Bogdanovich, 1978, p.41). Later on in the same interview though, he talks enthusiastically about Marked Men (1919), telling Bogdanovich ‘I remember that picture very well. That’s sort of my favourite’ (Bogdanovich, 1978, p.43).
The film writer and critic, Andrew Sarris, wrote in 1975 that, ‘If Ford’s career had ended in 1929, he would deserve at most a footnote in film history, and it is doubtful that scholars would even bother excavating too many of his Twenties works from the Fox vaults’ (Sarris, 1975, p.34). Sarris was writing this statement at a time when only a handful of Ford’s silent films were known to still exist. It is doubtful he would have reached the same conclusion if he had been given the opportunity to view the more numerous extant Ford films that are now available to researchers and film scholars. Since the late 1960s, a number of silent Ford titles have been found languishing in various archives all over the world. A copy of Bucking Broadway (1917) was discovered in the vaults of the French film archives of the Centre Nationale de la Cinématographie (CNC) in Bois d’Arcy in 2002, and a digitally restored version of the print shown at the 2003 London Film Festival (Webster, 2003, [n.p]). A late John Ford's silent film, Upstream (1927), was unearthed in the New Zealand Film Archive in 2009, along with a trailer for his last totally silent film, Strong Boy (1929).[3] No doubt others may eventually surface as film vaults previously closed to scholars are cataloged and made available for research purposes.[4]
In order to examine Ford’s silent films in depth, it was necessary to spend a considerable amount of time finding and appropriating copies of the titles that are known to exist, thus enabling a rigorous interrogation of these hitherto unexamined texts. This thesis is the first to combine a close textual analysis of all of the surviving silent Ford titles, taking into account the implications of the auteur theory as applied to the director’s work. A major part of the research process has therefore been devoted to the appropriation of Ford’s extant silent work so that all existing film materials can be viewed and analysed accordingly. Out of the thirty-eight features it is known Ford directed at Universal between 1917 and 1921, only eight actually exist in some form or the other, either as complete films or just a reel or two – Straight Shooting (1917), The Secret Man (1917), Bucking Broadway (1917), The Scarlet Drop (1917), Hell Bent (1918), By Indian Post (1919), The Last Outlaw (1919), A Gun Fightin’ Gentleman (1919). Only Straight Shooting (1917), Bucking Broadway (1917), and Hell Bent (1918) survive in complete form. The other titles consist mainly of either a few reels or incomplete fragments of footage.
Of the silent films Ford made for Fox, sixteen exist either in complete or partial form – Just Pals (1920), The Village Blacksmith (1922), Cameo Kirby (1923), North of Hudson Bay (1923), The Iron Horse (1924), Lightnin’ (1925), Kentucky Pride (1925), The Shamrock Handicap (1926), 3 Bad Men (1926), The Blue Eagle (1926), Upstream (1927), Mother Machree (1928), Four Sons (1928), Hangman’s House (1928), Riley the Cop (1928) and Strong Boy (1929). The Village Blacksmith (1922), North of Hudson Bay (1923), The Blue Eagle (1926), Mother Machree (1928), and Strong Boy (1929) are incomplete, the last title existing in trailer form only. The other aforementioned Fox titles exist in full, with The Iron Horse (1924) available in both a domestic and an international version. The first section of the appendix lists the sources for these films, as a unique reference for further researchers and scholars of John Ford’s silent work.
The transition from silent to sound as it affects Ford’s style and sensibility covers approximately a three-year period, from 1927 to 1930. The thesis therefore also considers the early full-sound titles Ford directed for Fox at this point towards the latter part of the 1920s, including The Black Watch (1929), Salute (1929), and the part-silent synchronised sound version of Men Without Women (1930).
The research process was not confined purely to tracking down Ford’s silent films. Materials relating to the pre-directing and directing career of John Ford between the years 1914 to 1930 are located in a number of countries, particularly America, which is where initial inquiries were directed. It was discovered that the largest collection of Ford silent films was held in the archives at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A trip was arranged to the museum in March 2006 through the auspices of Charles Silver, the curator of Film Studies at MOMA, who arranged free screenings of the nine films in their collection. Access was also given to all materials in the film department relating to both Ford and Harry Carey.
Further research indicated that other materials, including film titles not held at MOMA, could be found at the BFI in London. After arranging a viewing session at the BFI archives, another trip was organised to America in October of 2007 to facilitate the research of information held at the Powell Library located at the University of California, Los Angeles; the Margaret Herrick Library, also in Los Angeles; and finally the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, Bloomington. Dan Ford had donated his grandfather’s papers to this particular institution, and personally authorised access to the complete collection held at the library for the purpose of the thesis. During the trip, interviews were also arranged with Ford biographer Joseph McBride, and Harry Carey’s son, Harry Carey Jr., who provided an insight into his father’s working relationship with Ford during the years 1917 to 1921.
The gathering of further materials and attendance at screenings of Ford’s silent films continued in the following years, including visits to the Cinema Museum in Kennington, London, and a return visit to the BFI for a screening of surviving footage of a recently discovered 1916 Francis Ford film, The Bandit’s Wager (1916), featuring a young John Ford in a supporting role. A visit to the Czech Film Archive in Prague in 2010 provided the opportunity to view two further silent Ford titles. In the same year, the Bologna film festival provided the opportunity to attend screenings of available extant silent Ford films that had not been available to view up until that point.
As part of the ongoing research process and textual analysis exercise, all of Ford’s feature-length sound films were viewed in order to help identify the key thematic components of the ‘Fordian sensibility’ in the director’s later work. The object of this exercise was to construct a reference point relating to the director’s style that could then be used to interrogate more fully the earlier silent films for the presence of known thematic and visual motifs. This meant that some of Ford’s little-known early 1930s titles also needed to be viewed, and the festival at Bologna offered the opportunity to see a number of these films as well. A final field trip was undertaken in 2010 to Ford’s birthplace in Portland, Maine, on the New England coast, to gather photographic materials relating to the director’s childhood.
Various other trips resulted in establishing a number of personal contacts that bore fruit as regards the collection of Ford’s surviving silent films. Eventually, by the beginning of 2012, all of the existing titles were available for research purposes on a combination of official and non-commercial DVDs for close textual analysis and inclusion in the thesis.
The purpose of the thesis is to suggest that the evolution of the ‘Fordian sensibility’, and its early beginnings, can be traced through a close analysis of Ford’s initial work within the context of the following research questions:
- How and when did Jack Ford, the man, and the director, become ’John Ford’, the brand, and the label?
Michel Foucault asserts that the author’s name ‘has other than indicative functions. […] It is the equivalent of a description’ (Foucault, 1984, p.105), going on to suggest that ‘a text always contains a certain number of signs referring to the author’ (Foucault, 1984, p.112). The intention is therefore to determine at what point Ford’s name became detached from the personal to serve as an objective reference and descriptor, separate from the artist as an individual in his own right.
- Using Ford as a case study, is it possible, through a close examination of his early silent work, to evaluate how the idea of ‘authorship’ is formed?
Pam Cook writes that the politique des auteurs, as formulated in Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s, ‘proposed that, in spite of the industrial nature of film production, the director, like any other artist, was the sole author of the finished product’ (Cook, 1985, p.114). An element of complexity surrounding the question of authorship is introduced when Wollen contends that ‘the auteur theory does not limit itself to acclaiming the director as the main author of the film. It implies an operation of decipherment’ (Wollen, 1987, p.77). The thesis, therefore, applies the auteur theory as expounded by both Cahiers du Cinéma and Wollen. Ford’s silent films will be subjected to a close analysis of the filmic text, demonstrating how the director consistently molded and shaped material ostensibly authored by others into a distinctly Fordian style, whilst at the same time deciphering those elements in Ford’s work that provided him with the opportunity to make the material his own. The ongoing issues and debates surrounding the provenance of authorship in the film will be discussed in greater depth in the later chapter on the auteur theory.
- To what extent do Ford’s silent films demonstrate the evolution of a personal, individual style and aesthetic, and to what extent is this aesthetic shaped by external influences such as biographical background, changes in technology, studio and institutional conventions, and surrounding cultural discourses?
Edward Buscombe proposes ‘a theory of the cinema that locates directors in a total situation, rather than one which assumes that their development has only an internal dynamic’ (Buscombe, 1993, p.32). He goes on to suggest a number of ways in which the auteur theory could be tested, such as considering ‘the effect of society on the cinema; in other words, the operation of ideology, economics, technology’ (Buscombe, 1993, p.32). The book thus evaluates the evolution of Ford as an auteur by examining the numerous external factors, including ideology and technology, that shaped his work.
Prior to examining Ford’s silent film output, the thesis will present a literature review of the most significant secondary sources on John Ford, and identify the gaps in previous scholarship that this work will seek to address. The chapter that follows covers the genesis of the auteur theory in greater depth and detail. Through a case study of Ford, it defines the ‘Fordian sensibility’ as it has been constructed to date by critics, scholars, and reviewers, supported by an original close analysis of all of Ford’s sound films, from The Black Watch (1929) through to 7 Women (1966).
The rest of the thesis considers the evolution of this ‘Fordian sensibility’ throughout the director’s early work, and the way in which it developed through a combination of influences, shaped by Ford’s own biographical interests and concerns, but also by new technology, generic trends, and social change.
The chapter structure is chronological, following Ford’s early career through four key periods:
Pre-directing career 1914 – 1917
Apprenticeship at Universal 1917 – 1921
Early 1920s work at Fox 1921 – 1926
Late silent period at Fox 1927 – 1930
Chapter Four considers the influence of directors such as his older brother Francis Ford, as well as that of D.W. Griffith, on Ford’s directing style, and the manner in which their work helped to shape his approach to film making. The chapter also examines, along with the beginnings of Ford’s directing career, the extent to which working within the institutional factor of the Hollywood studio system contributed towards the director’s eventual sensibility and aesthetic, with specific reference to the use of a stock acting company, and the way that Ford’s work was shaped by the still-evolving conventions of the Western genre.
The other three main chapters continue this interrogation through a chronological study of Ford’s silent work. They cover the working partnership between Ford and the actor Harry Carey, and how Carey played a major role in helping the director to define the archetypal Fordian ‘good bad man’ protagonist that permeated the director’s work. These chapters trace the genesis and evolution of significant Fordian themes such as family, community, ritual, Irishness, and religion within the framework of the director’s biographical background.
As noted, Ford’s style was also significantly affected by changes in technology, such as camera mobility, lighting, set design, and film stock. The technological advancement that most radically impacted his films, and most obviously shaped the evolution of the ‘Fordian sensibility’ identified by critics in his later work, is the introduction of sound, as covered in the final chapter. The prevailing attitude in the early part of the twentieth century towards minority ethnic groups such as Native and black Americans, Asians, Irish, and Italians, also, inevitably, influenced the representation of race on screen, and Ford’s silent films engage with the contemporary mood towards ethnicity during that period in America.
Ford’s world, according to Peter Wollen, is ‘governed by a set of oppositions’ (Wollen, 1987, p.94), and the director’s personal passion for American history manifests itself through this thematic antimonies: the conflict between East versus West, and civilisation versus wilderness. Ford’s love of history also entices him to repeatedly explore the role of the military forces in the settling of the West and, a specific fascination of Ford’s, the American Civil War. This latter subject provides particularly rich, albeit problematic, material for analysis, in terms of the director’s admiration for the defeated South; meanwhile, the theme of Irishness and the migrant experience consistently appear as a common strand throughout his work.
The four main chapters also demonstrate how Ford’s ‘brand’ profile and ‘author function’ changed dramatically between the years 1917 to 1930, from that of an anonymous hired hand to a director whose image and name were heavily promoted by both Universal and Fox. In reference to the ‘author function’, Foucault points out that, ‘it does not develop spontaneously as the attribution of a discourse to an individual. It is, rather, the result of a complex operation that constructs a certain rational being that we call “author”’ (Foucault, 1984, p.110). This ‘complex operation’, such as the way the name ‘Ford’ began to circulate as a guarantor of certain values in studio publicity and journalistic discourse, led to a process by which the director as a person was transcended by the director as an entity. Part of the purpose of the thesis is to explore that process in more detail.
The research carried out by the author means that, for the first time, there is now gathered in one place a complete collection of practically all known existing footage relating to the silent films of John Ford. The surviving episodes of a 1914 serial directed by Francis Ford, entitled Lucille Love: The Girl of Mystery (1914)[5] are the only silent film footage that could not be acquired for consideration. The various materials that have been collected, combined with the extensive research carried out over a period of five years in visiting academic institutions located in America, England, Czechoslovakia, and Italy, underlines the new and original manner in which this thesis is able to comprehensively determine how John Ford’s directorial style evolved in the years 1917 to 1930.
[1] There is a misconception that the actual quotation is ‘My name is John Ford. I make Westerns’. In an interview with Joseph McBride in October 2007, he stated that the version of the quotation in his biography, Searching for John Ford, came from the original transcript of the meeting.
[2] In an interview with Harry Carey Jr. in October 2007, he suggested that his father only ever played the character of Cheyenne Harry in Ford films. Further investigation shows that this is not the case. In his book Big U: Universal in the Silent Days, the author I.G. Edmonds records that Carey Senior played the character for at least one other director at Universal, Fred Kelsey, in a film entitled The Bad Man of Cheyenne (1917).
[3] See the article by Pilkington, E (2010) ‘Lost John Ford movie unearthed in New Zealand’, available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jun/07/john-ford-movie-new-zealand
[4] In February 2009, Vladimir Opela, curator of the Czech Film Archive, hinted at the existence of a collection of silent film titles awaiting restoration. According to Mr. Opela, one or two of the titles might possibly be ‘silent Harry Carey films’.
[5] The BFI archivist John Oliver announced at the 2010 film festival in Bologna that episodes 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12, 13, and 14 of Lucille Love: The Girl of Mystery (1914) are held in the Library of Congress Moving Image Collection in Washington, DC. They have been made available for viewing but apparently, it has yet to be ascertained if John Ford can be identified in the existing footage.