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CHAPTER 11: The Masterpieces Part 1-My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, The Searchers

John Ford’s My Darling Clementine, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers are routinely included in most Ford-o-files lists of his greatest masterpieces. It’s a testament to the Old Man’s powers that within a roughly 22 year time span (from 1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln through 1961’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), he made arguably 12 masterpieces. Or put another way: Ford produced an all-time classsic American film every two years.

John Ford is considered the greatest director in the world, or one of the greatest, by among others, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Steven Spielberg, and Martin Scorsese. Ford is a director’s director: a filmmaker who

CHAPTER 9: Ford’s Fractured Families

The decade from 1940 through 1950 found John Ford often returning to the theme of the family under pressure, torn apart, reconciled, or even completely fabricated (yet ultimately cohering into something real). Three of these pictures-The Long Voyage Home (1940), Three Godfathers (1948), and Rio Grande (1950)-serve as fascinating sketchbooks for themes Ford would fully develop in masterpieces that shortly followed. And Rio Grande is itself a masterpiece that sets up an even bigger masterpiece (The Quiet Man).

John Ford was always coming back to questions of…

We appreciate three John Ford silent movies of the 1920’s-The Iron Horse, Three Bad Men, and Upstream which point to the poetic mastery Ford will achieve in the late 1930’s and beyond. We also look with jealousy on an era where a movie director could hone their craft across 80+ movies before really grabbing the spotlight.

It’s instructive (and somewhat sobering) to realize that John Ford was already considered a veteran director of 12+ years before the sound era arrived. And while his 1924 epic of the construction of the transcontinental railroad The Iron Horse was a huge blockbuster that catapulted Ford to top of the director pack, he still was 11 years away from…