Director Stamps: John Ford

The USPS has issued a set of four stamps honoring great film directors. The four selected are: John Ford, John Huston, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder. We will be exploring the lives and work of these directors over the next several weeks. First, we will look at the career of John Ford.

Over his 50-year career, John Ford made 140 films, garnering a record four Academy Awards for Best Director (The Informer [1935], The Grapes of Wrath [1940], How Green Was My Valley [1941], and The Quiet Man [1952]). The film he has probably become best known for is The Searchers (1956), which was successful at the box office, but it was not nominated for any Oscars.

Because Ford’s career spanned the transition from silent films to sound, he can rightly be considered one of the authors of the language of film. His silent Westerns helped establish the genre, which has had a love-hate relationship with film studios. The studios had shown a lack of interest in the genre until Ford’s Stagecoach revived it in 1939. The Searchers (1956) was the only Western Ford directed in the 1950s, and was named by the American Film Institute as the Greatest Western of all time in 2007.

One of the ways Ford’s experience directing silent films influenced his sound pictures is in the economy of dialogue. He preferred his characters to speak only when they had something to say.

Ford was an early innovator in location shooting. His films are characterized by long shots framing subjects against a sprawling landscape. The opening shot of The Searchers is often copied, especially in other Westerns (e.g., Lawrence Kasdan’s Silverado). One of his favorite locations was Monument Valley in Utah, which stood in for Texas in The Searchers, southern Arizona in My Darling Clementine, and other settings throughout the American West.

Ford moved the camera so seldom that some people claim that he never moved it, but that claim is erroneous. In several of the films to be reviewed in upcoming posts, Ford moved the camera to track the motion of his subjects. To modern audiences, the relative lack of camera movement and cutting can make Ford’s films seem to have a slow pace, but he thought that too much cutting and too much camera movement would make the audience too aware of the camera. He thought that if the camera moved, then the camera became a character.

He also rarely used close-ups; in the years before television, long and medium shots seemed sufficient to tell the story on a large screen. Filmmakers of his era did not have to consider how the film would play on television, let alone iPads and smartphones.

Ford also had a reputation for editing in camera, rarely shooting more than a few takes of a scene. He said, “I don’t shoot anything I don’t want in the picture.” This practice prevented the studios from changing takes or cutting or editing the picture in ways of which Ford would have disapproved. He did not use storyboards, so he had to know what he wanted when he started filming, and in some cases, filming commenced before the script was finished.

References:

http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/ford/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ford

See also special features on The Searchers, My Darling Clementine, Young Mr. Franklin, and Mister Roberts.

This post was written by LR Simon.