Searching for John Ford: A Life - Softcover

McBride, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312310110 ISBN 13: 9780312310110

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2003

Synopsis

John Ford’s classic films---such as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers---earned him worldwide admiration as America’s foremost filmmaker, a director whose rich visual imagination conjured up indelible, deeply moving images of our collective past.

Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker in its depth, originality, and insight. Encompassing and illuminating Ford’s myriad complexities and contradictions, McBride traces the trajectory of Ford’s life from his beginnings as “Bull” Feeney, the nearsighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-honored career, as America’s national mythmaker. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford’s films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands.

About this title

About the Author:

Joseph McBride is an assistant professor of cinema at San Francisco State University. His books include Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Hawks on Hawks, and the critical studies, John Ford (1974, with Michael Wilmington) and Orson Welles.

From Library Journal:

"My name's John Ford. I make Westerns." Ford preferred to let his work speak for itself, and his abrasive encounters with film scholars have become legendary. In fact, "Pappy" Ford, who fancied himself a journeyman director, would probably have been perplexed by these two recent additions to the rapidly growing library of Ford film criticism. Arriving hard on the heels of Scott Eyman's comprehensive Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (LJ 10/1/99), McBride's weighty tome, several decades in preparation, paints a similar portrait: Ford was an insecure alcoholic whose gruff, even sadistic treatment of family, friends, cast, and crew masked his sensitive, sentimental nature. Complex and contradictory like many of his films Ford was a man who stood up to McCarthyite blacklisters but later churned out crude propaganda in support of the Vietnam war. He celebrated tradition, family, and community but was a miserable failure as husband and father. As Eyman did, McBride (Frank Capra; Steven Spielberg) draws on exhaustive research and interviews, but he has the advantage of a few memorably brief meetings with the Great Man himself. Ford left an impressive if uneven body of work, and McBride does it justice, examining each film in illuminating detail. Still, although McBride's book is very deserving, public and academic libraries that cannot collect both biographies should stick to Eyman's more streamlined telling. Studlar (film and English, Univ. of Michigan) and Bernstein (film, Emory Univ.) take readers into academic territory, offering nine essays on the work plus a "dossier" of articles on the man and filmmaker. Robin Wood leads off with a classic critique, questioning whether Ford's late films measure up to his early work. Other essays discuss the role of women and religion in Ford's film universe, and the hotly disputed controversy about whether his last epic Cheyenne Autumn was a "mea culpa" for previous insensitive portrayals of the American Indian. Westerns is recommended for academic collections. Stephen F. Rees, Levittown Regional Lib., PA.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0312310110
• ISBN 13: 9780312310110
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 880