Flesh and Blood Cinema

June 1, 2022

Film director John Ford explored man’s most fundamental desires for truth, goodness, beauty and love

By Anthony Esolen

June 1, 2022

Director John Ford (1894-1973) is pictured circa 1930. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

Orson Welles, himself an imposing film director and actor, was once asked who the three greatest American directors were.

“John Ford, John Ford and John Ford,” he replied.

Ford, whose four Oscars for best director are the most in Academy Award history, was the hardheaded son of Irish Catholic immigrants and a member of the Knights of Columbus. But if you had told him that his Catholic faith was the great animating principle of his films, he’d likely have spat and thrown you off the set. Or he might have nodded and said, “Finally, somebody understands something.” For it was true.

Ford was no saint, nor did he claim to be. However, no other American director has portrayed the elemental goodness of the created order — I am not talking about pretty scenes, but flesh and blood, earth and water, man and beast, husband and wife and the hard work they must do — as vitally and lovingly as John Ford.

GOODNESS AND GRATITUDE

How Green Was My Valley (1941), the film that beat Welles’ own Citizen Kane for the Oscar, is a prime example of Ford’s storytelling. Its setting is Cwm Rhondda, a Welsh village dominated, and in part corrupted, by the local coal mine, the only real work for the men there. The heroes are the Morgan family: Gwilym and Beth, their six sons (all miners) and daughter (played by the radiant Maureen O’Hara). The story is told by the youngest Morgan, Huw, an adult man looking back on when he was a boy (played by Roddy McDowall).

Were it made now, the film would feature a vacillating father, a hard-bitten and unpleasant mother, thoroughly evil mine owners and noble socialist workers fighting against the System. And the music would be bombastic, full of exclamation points and neural triggers. What we get instead is an intricate symphony of goodness and nobility, but embodied in fallen and foolish mankind. It is a story about how man, hard of heart, short of sight, prone to anger, vanity and greed, can do his best to ruin the green valley of life. And yet for all his sin and folly, he cannot ruin it altogether.

The world, made by the Father, is a patriarchal one, and Gwilym Morgan (Donald Crisp) stands out for us, sometimes with leonine nobility, sometimes with comic homeliness, as the essential father.

“Everything I ever learnt as a small boy came from my father,” says Huw, “and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless.” But if his father was the head of the house, his mother (Sara Allgood, bulky and strong and sweet at once), he says, was its heart.

“There’s a beauty you are,” says Gwilym to Beth.

“Oh, go scratch,” says she, blushing.

One of the conflicts of the film centers on the mine, and the possibility that the men will form a union. They worry that their wages will be cut because men from other villages, out of work and desperate, will work for less.

Mr. Morgan is convinced that a good worker will always earn a fair wage. “The owners are not savages,” he says. “They are men as we are.”

“They are men,” says his eldest son, who treats his father with a politeness and honor that are almost alien to us now. “But not as we. For they have power, and we have not.”

John Ford was a liberal democrat in the days when that did not mean drag queen story hours for kindergarten children. His heart was with labor, not management. But he was too wise to believe that politics can save the human soul. When the men do form a union and go on strike, and Gwilym, also out of work, does not join them, they grow surly. They cast evil looks on him and throw rocks through his window. Then one night, in heavy snow and storm, Beth Morgan has her son Huw lead her into the woods where the men are meeting.

“How some of you, you smug-faced hypocrites, can sit in the same chapel with him I cannot tell,” she says, shaking her fist at them. “To say he is with the owners is not only nonsense but downright wickedness. There’s one thing more I’ve got to say and it is this. If harm comes to my Gwilym, I will find out the men and I will kill them with my two hands. And this I will swear by God Almighty!”

We believe her, too. So do those men.

Ford was not a traditionalist, because he was not an ideologue. But he loved tradition, as all grateful men and women do. “Men like my father cannot die,” says Huw in the final words of the film. “They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my valley then.” And we see, in a flashback, the young boy and his pipe-smoking father, tramping up the hill, with the music of the wistful Welsh love song “Myfanwy” in the background, sung by a choir of men — for wherever two or three Welshmen are gathered, Huw has told us, there you find a choir.

The Morgan family gathers around its patriarch in a scene from How Green Was My Valley. Maureen O’Hara (second from left) played the Morgans’ daughter, Angharad. Ford often referred to the film as his favorite of the more than 140 he directed. (Archives du 7e Art/20th Century Fox/Alamy)

FORGOTTEN VALUES

Because he was not an ideologue, Ford was also no political optimist. In his works, we often sense a tension between the civilization of a city, and the adventure of a life lived directly from the earth. It is as if a man has to give up half his manhood to found a city and to live there, but if the sacrifice must be made, it must be made. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), the better man, the rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), does not get the woman he loves or win the reputation he deserves. Instead, a young lawyer (James Stewart), a lesser but more modern, more learned, man, ultimately guides the Western territory to statehood and becomes a senator, coasting on a legend of what he did not actually do.

“Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance,” says the train conductor in the last, quietly tragic scene of the film, which is devastating in its near silence. We see that both the senator and his wife know that Doniphon, recently dead, owning nothing more than his boots, forgotten by almost everyone, was not only greater than the senator, but represented a kind of greatness, a masculine courage, fading from the world. It is a more somber view of the same trade-off we find at the end of Stagecoach (1939), when the young cowboy and sometime lawbreaker rides off with the former saloon girl away from a spanking new Western town, to carve out a more vigorously human life for themselves on a ranch.

Ford’s movies are filled with real folk music — Irish fight songs and drinking songs in The Quiet Man (1952), American anthems in his tribute to West Point, The Long Gray Line (1955). In Rio Grande (1950), cavalry men sing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in honor of their captain’s wife, while she and the captain (played by Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne), long estranged, try hard to look and not to look at one another. The music is never merely decorative and never distracting. It is of the essence, just as hymns are in the worship of God, without a trace of the treacly or the showy. Our time is an outlier in many ways, and here is one: Most of us have never heard a big group of men singing in harmony. You will hear them often in Ford’s films, with a sound that can make the earth tremble.

One last point. Whatever the sins of John Ford’s life, in his work, the love of man and woman in marriage is an absolute value. It is the rock on which are founded all human things that last or deserve to last. We see it in his early American pioneers (Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert in Drums Along the Mohawk, 1939); in his lawmen and their families out West (Ward Bond and Mae Marsh in Three Godfathers, 1948); in soldiers and their brides, who sometimes are left behind to mourn their death (William Leslie and Betsy Palmer in The Long Gray Line). Nothing sickly, no adultery served up with social justification or voyeurism, and yet — or therefore — not prudish, not prettified: real men and women, loving one another, often fighting, but always made for one another, as it was in the beginning.

*****

ANTHONY ESOLEN is professor of English and writer-in-residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts in Warner, N.H.

LeRoy Jackson makes a catch for an 85-yard touchdown against the Baltimore Colts on Dec. 8, 1962.

Flesh and Blood Cinema

GOODNESS AND GRATITUDE

FORGOTTEN VALUES

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