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by Tag Gallagher
John Ford was born John Martin Feeney, February 1, 1894, at his father's farm in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, the child of Irish immigrants. The Irish were a ghettoised minority, then, and it was only toward the end of his life, Ford said, when Kennedy was elected president, that he felt like a first-class citizen. He grew up in Portland, where his father had a bar. He sailed a boat, played football, and read history. At 20 he took the train to California, to make movies with his brother Frank, going West across a continent as his father had gone West across an ocean.
Jack Ford, as he now became, spent the next three years in a rigorous, all-encompassing apprenticeship under his brother. “He was a great cameraman”, Jack recalled in 1966. “There's nothing they're doing today – all these things that are supposed to be so new – that he hadn't done; he was really a good artist, a wonderful musician, a hell of a good actor, a good director – Johnny of all trades – and master of all; he just couldn't concentrate on one thing too long. But he was the only influence I ever had, working in pictures.” (1) “Jack was no good”, Frank remarked, “until he was given something to do on his own where he could let himself go – and he proved himself then.” (2) What set Jack apart was his persistence. The essentials of John Ford's acting style can be found in Frank's pictures: relaxed relating. There is the same love for vigorous action, painterly compositions, an underlying stream of oxymoronic humour, and warmth: a sense of communal sharing. Films in those days were made in community, as well, by the same troupe of players, writer, cameraman, director month after month – and both brothers found ways to continue this mode of production long after it ceased being an industry norm. It is difficult to imagine either Ford manipulating an actor the way D.W. Griffith did – for instance, Mae Marsh (in the courtroom of Intolerance [1916]) or Lillian Gish (in the closet of Broken Blossoms [1919]) – or “staring” at them with a brutality in cutting and framing that seems often to aim, like sometimes in Hitchcock, for the maximum in sensationalism. And Griffith had a fondness for formal exposition, lordly distance, high angles and sudden close-ups that make him seem rapacious alongside the Fords' low or level angles, gentler cutting, and more respectful distance. Jack Ford's first film, The Tornado (1917) (lost) was made with his brother's troupe, a satiric action picture with a sentimental twist: the hero (Jack Ford) needs money to buy his mother a home in Ireland. His fourth film, The Soul Herder (1917) (lost) was “a little gem”, according to Francis. And it started a four-year, 25-film association with Harry Carey. Carey was 39, the son of a White Plains special sessions
Their movies were successful because of Carey's relaxed, receptive humility. He never seemed superior to his audience or his roles. In contrast to Western heroes like Tom Mix or William S. Hart, “Cheyenne Harry” was a bum, a saddle tramp – a good badman, like so many of Ford's heroes. Universal advertised their second picture, Straight Shooting (1917), as “The Greatest Western Ever Made.” Like the river, that serves as arbitrary barrier between feuding settlers, the division between outlaw and respected citizen is fluid in
Universal finagled a happy ending onto the film. Originally, Carey walks away alone at the end, which is
The techniques of locating an actor's eccentric traits, amplifying them into a screen personage, and getting the actor to relate relaxedly with
In 1920 Jack Ford married Mary McBride Smith, 27, a blue-blooded Scotch-Irish Presbyterian nurse from New Jersey. They bought a house on a hill for $14,000 where they stayed for 34 years, and had two children, Patrick and Barbara. Ford never let his wife onto his set. He made a trip to Ireland, smuggled food to some IRA cousins hiding in the hills, and was roughed up and deported by the British. By 1921 he had made 39 pictures at Universal (of which
The first big success of Ford's career came with The Iron Horse in 1924. While stranded by blizzards for ten weeks in the Sierra Nevadas, Ford and his troupe produced an epic around the building of the transcontinental railroad.
What makes such gags work is Ford's skill at cameo characterisation: the first time we see new characters, Ford presents them as types, with a pose and costume and action that defines them.
Nonetheless Ford's congenial films during his first 10 years were less movies than titles with illustrations. Depth came when he married his cameo technique to Murnau's stylised enrichment of
So impressed was Ford that he set out, with Four Sons (1928), to relearn how to make cinema by doing a complete imitation of Murnau – rather like Mozart who learned to write fugues by imitating Bach. What Ford learned was how to intensify a character's relation to the space containing and surrounding her or him: the way her emotions permeate the entire screen, and the way milieu – customs, culture and tradition, duty and ritual – operate determiningly upon her. An actor's movements become sculpture-in-motion, modelling the light and geometry of the frame. The fundamental Ford composition is a person acting freely within a geometric space –
Along with Sunrise came sound. At last characters were freed from enslavement to intertitles and could communicate directly to the audience. At last filmmakers could dictate precisely the music and sound effects they wished. The emotional experience of a movie became immeasurably more intense. Thus, although Ford had made more than 60 pictures before Four Sons, it is only in 1928 that his mature work begins.
First Period (1927–1935): The Age of Introspection In contrast to the patent imitation of Four Sons, Murnau's influence is increasingly absorbed into Ford's own personality in the gorgeous Irish mists and Gothic grandeur of Hangman's House (1928); in the romp through Europe in the wonderful Riley the Cop (1928); in the jangle of sounds and cultures and music drama of The Black Watch (1929); and above all in Salute (1929), where ethos pervades the sunny air of the Naval Academy. “Duty & Tradition” is a theme in nearly all Ford films. It was a tenet of the social realism of the 1920s that milieu determines our character. Now Ford's Murnau-like music dramas intensify the social structures by which an individual is formed and of which he becomes a perpetuating instrument. Yet the structures that sustain society – duty and tradition, rituals and myths – also destroy its individuals. Their weight can be felt in Ford's heavy chiaroscuro, and in his geometric compositions that crush people between layers of depth of field. Almost invariably Ford places characters in the middle field, surrounded by foreground objects and background.
In effect, it is only through alienation from his society that the Fordian hero, a sacrificial celibate, emerges to moderate the worst ravages of intolerant tradition. Ford's villains are usually simple. In contrast, his heroes are paragons of anguished complexity. A Scotsman (Black Watch) is transported to Pakistan and begins to feel guilt and self-questioning. Even Cheyenne Harry (Straight Shooting) undergoes such traumas of alienation on his way toward moral responsibility that he turns completely against everything he formerly stood for and ends (in Ford's original cut) by exiling himself even from the love that initially ignited his alienation. The second half of this period (“Depression”: 1931–35) contains a series of five-star masterpieces. In the worst years of the economic Depression, Ford defines horror not by the 33-percent unemployment but by the moral meanness corrupting social bonds at every level. Contemporary America, in eight of nine films, is insular, static, misanthropic and oppressive; every individual victim to determinist forces. Cultural values no longer provide surety. Duty seems full of contradictions; heroes find themselves ridiculous and destructive, and turn introspective. Their alienation symbolises the common woe. Happiness belongs only to simpletons – often played by Francis Ford.
Pilgrimage and Doctor Bull offset hard-souled individuals and repressive communities with dreary comedy verging on insanity: a mayor
Flowers mark Hannah's passage. Ford's most constant symbol, they mark most heroes' loves – Lincoln from and to Ann Rutledge; Sean to Mary Kate; Nathan Brittles (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949]) and Frank Skeffington (Last Hurrah [1958]), to their dead wives;
For Ford the Depression was a violent repression of character and freedom. The Whole Town's Talking (1935) also a comedy, is
Ford's characters may seem “types” at first, when they present themselves and do their “turns”, but Ford prepared full biographies for each of them – with tastes, opinions and eccentricities – and then would slip in these tidbits. His actors become their roles. Part of his legend as a director was that he gave only basic directions and refused to discuss anything, yet on screen seems to have moulded every tic. Perhaps this was because everyone was so afraid of missing a signal that attention was riveted on him and his sets were quiet (like a church, said Harry Carey, Jr.). “This man directs less than any man in the business”, remarked photographer Arthur C. Miller. “As a matter of fact, he doesn't direct – he doesn't want any actor to give an imitation of him playing the part. He wants the actor to create the part – that's why he hired him, because he saw him in the part. You'd sit at a big coffee table in the morning – everybody was there, whether you worked that day or not. You'd drink coffee until you couldn't swig it down any more.” (8) According to Katherine Hepburn, it was Ford's sensitivity that made him a great director of actors. He could always sense what people were feeling – even across a room (and if he sensed hostility he would get up, go over, and find out why). Philip Dunne contends that “Jack's courtesy to any individual was always in inverse proportion to his affection. I knew Jack liked me, because in all the years I knew him intimately he never said a polite word to me, not one.” (9) He never looked at the script or consulted his script girl, Meta Sterne; even the most elaborate montages were never put onto paper; he kept everything in his head, and no one but he knew what he was doing. He
Ford's personal depression was moral, externalised in constant (losing) bouts with liquor as soon as a film ended, two wandering voyages to the South Seas (one with George O'Brien, below right), a perilous romance with Katharine Hepburn, and above all the two-masted 106-foot ketch he purchased in June 1934 and christened Araner after the Irish island where his mother was born. Here Ford retreated to prepare pictures, rest after them, and every chance he got. Here the Fords spent half their lives, cruising winters to Baja and Mexico or to Hawaii, where their children were going to high school. As the image of America in
Second Period (1935–1947): The Age of Idealism “Who am I? What kind of a person am to be?” These questions are posed constantly during these dozen years of disintegration and chaotic flux when names deceive and things are never what they seem. People are introverted, egocentric, obsessed. In The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936) Dr Mudd defines himself by his duty, not by his character. But in The Hurricane (1937) duty brings cosmic disaster. Hollywood, subject since 1935 to rigid repression by its creditors (Morgans and Rockefellers) and production codes (the churches), ceases to confront contemporary America. Ford retreats into the past, introspection, and allegory, into historical romances set in Scotland, Ireland, India, and Samoa, or during the Civil War or frontier eras. The great masterpiece of the first part of this period (“Exotica”: 1935–38) is Steamboat round the Bend (1935), a gentle morality fable in
Yet Winkie is also a study of a British military community in India, like Ford's postwar portraits of American cavalry outposts. Hence it is frightening that Priscilla is made the regiment's mascot, given a uniform, and trained in ordnance. For ordnance will regulate her spirit and merge her into that pleasant pageantry that is the arrogant, racist, and resented position of the British, which we can find in almost every scene (if we look) in the barriers of rank (and race) that seem constantly to terrify even the soldiers themselves. “But this is home”, mother says, and here is a line with reverberation in an oeuvre in which the search for home is a constant theme. An old life, husband, and national identity are dead; new beginnings must be made. There is no choice. Wee Willie Winkie is among Ford's most seminal prewar films not only because like virtually every postwar picture it studies militarist ethos, but also because it grasps the paradox that one must grow up, one must go on, one must belong, and that this is good, even though thereby one's conscience is arrogated and one is inculpated in collective evil. The future is to be entered into willingly. Judge Priest, Steamboat and Winkie were popular and profitable movies. And only a grump could fail to enjoy the allegretto virtuosity, deft cameos, variegated moods and sheer inventiveness of Submarine Patrol (1938). But the art of these movies was totally ignored for
A new magnitude enters cinema with Monument Valley in Stagecoach. Not bigger physically, like the ocean or sky, but bigger in feeling. Civilisation is corrupt, Stagecoach tells us over and over again. But each of the coach's passengers makes a pilgrimage of self discovery and redemption, and this vastness is their aspiration. Space becomes subjective; ideas become space. Ideas are real. The valley = consciousness = our own interiority. It's not simply a valley, but a valley turned into melodrama, like a consciousness expanding as it stares at the world's immensity – in 1939, as the world turned toward war. It's the reality of this gaze that's important, of how things are looked at – not the reality of the rocks. Stagecoach is like a painting, with music – and a world of people. Each of them presents themself (with a “turn”), each of them is initially as basic as adventures in a dreamworld – but in such profusion, in such continuous revelation, in such global contradiction, that Stagecoach sprawls, a dozen stories, three movies not one, a climax per character. Finally, in black night, John Wayne will stalk Plummer with timpani roars as his foot steps. If a single quality stands out in this movie, call it audacity.
Each element of the portrait is more an idea than a tracing of reality – the river, trees, Ann's clothing and pose, her flowers, her greeting, the fence. Ford's tastes in sexuality are maybe not so fashionable as Hawks' (with his preternaturally rutting mannequins), but to me the outline of Ann's breasts, the simple way she stands and her forthright directness make a strong statement. Also to Ford obviously. His pluckish ingenues resemble each other, perhaps with Hepburn their ideal (e.g., Lucy in Stagecoach, Clementine in My Darling Clementine [1946], etc.). The purity of aspiration in Lincoln's vision of Ann resembles the way we looked at Monument Valley. Lincoln, in the Rousseau-like purity of nature, discovers law is nothing but right and wrong, and at the
Here is the Fordian hero: solitary, celibate, come like Christ from outside history to mediate intolerance and reunite a family. He even pulls from his magic hat the stars themselves to win his trial. Yet as Brecht said, “Unhappy the land that needs a hero.” Already intolerance is ossifying the frontier societies in Stagecoach, Lincoln and Drums along the Mohawk. Ringo and Dallas ride into the rising sun and escape civilisation; for us, this is fairyland. In The Grapes of Wrath, The Long Voyage Home, Tobacco Road and How Green Was My Valley, people are suffocated by social structures and traditions. Frank Nugent, in The New York Times, placed Grapes on the “one small uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks” (11). It was difficult to recall (since no one remembered Ford's earlier work) a movie from a major studio whose tone was so “aware”. Even today, few films appear so seditious, bitter, damning, so primed so spark the revolution. It is curious how Ford gets us to adopt class solidarity with the Okies, with “Our People” (as Ma Joad calls them) and to feel alienated from the actual “our people” (the people just like us who regard the Okies as sub-human). Ford concentrates here on the effects and victims of intolerance (whereas his subsequent movies will investigate the causes and perpetrators). Grapes climaxes with the family destroyed and the Fordian hero (Henry Fonda, as in Lincoln) going up into the hills to continue the struggle. But this trumpet of revolution is muted by an epilogue, a sort of happy ending added by the studio after Ford left. Even so, the studio and Ford came under savage attack by right-wingers. Takes are long in Grapes, and cutting slow, nonetheless inspiring some commentators to define Ford's style by this untypical example. Another anomaly, The Long Voyage Home (1940) drawn from short plays by Eugene O'Neill, was adored by critics (and Ford and O'Neill) for its long-day's-journey-into-night style visualisations of O'Neill's words (most of them newly composed by Dudley Nichols) which, like The Informer, incessantly evoke cosmic malevolence. Quite other is How Green Was My Valley, one of the finest things in our world, where cinematic form becomes spatial music, and memory strives tragically to suppress reality. “Who shall say what is real and what is not?” argues Huw (Roddy McDowall). Huw sustains his mind's-eye narration over almost the entire movie, repressing the awakening awareness
“I was 12 years old”, recalled Roddy McDowall. “I had already made about 20 films in England, and I wasn't naive. I knew what was going on. What stands out in my mind is that I never remember being directed. It all just happened. Ford played me like a harp. I remember him as very dear and very gentle... He forged a unique sense of family with all of us.” (12)
His hero Gruffydd is a Fordian hero manqué: celibate, solitary, claiming truth and authority, even posed at the end like Christ on the cross, but a figure of impotence, who watches families being destroyed while his vampiric congregation sit in their pews like soldiers in formation. It's a nasty place, this green valley. Even Huw's family is a failure, disintegrating in its own intolerance. All the more reason that Huw will not fail, will not leave the valley, will not abandon the mine to become a doctor or lawyer. Like everyone in his valley, he clings to tradition to protect him from change – and death. “Can I believe my friends all gone when their voices are a glory in my ears? No!… They remain a living truth within my mind.” Consecrating his life to purity, he rejects growth, as tradition itself becomes, unrecognised, the malignant slag that destroys the valley. At the end, when the colliery lift reaches light, Huw stares into nothingness, his eyes fixed inward, not outward, into a desolate soul without a thing to look at. And so he closes his eyes. And there it is: the whole movie running by in flashback, as it has for Huw for fifty years now. Huw abolishes change and dwells in mine and memory. We may not wish, in the cold light of day, to share Huw's choices, but Ford lets us feel their power and attraction as Huw himself does. The afternoon of December 7th, 1941, Ford, Mary, and their daughter Barbara were dining at the Alexandria, Virginia, home of Admiral William Pickens, navy chief of navigation. “The phone rang”, Mary recalled, On his own initiative Ford had gotten together dozens of Hollywood film technicians to drill weekly under ex-marine Jack Pennick (a bit player in almost every Ford movie). Eventually Ford got Colonel “Wild Bill” Donovan to accept his group into the foreign intelligence agency that Roosevelt had ordered Donovan to set up. Ford became chief of the Field Photographic Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, later the CIA); his only superior was Donovan, whose only superior was Roosevelt. “Our job”, explained Ford, “was to photograph both for the Records and for our intelligence assessment, the work of guerrillas, saboteurs, Resistance outfits [and aerial mapping].… Besides this, there were special assignments.” (14) Most of them, said Mary Ford, were “over age and rich – people who could never have been drafted. But when Jack said, 'Let's go', they obeyed him.” (15) Their first project, with Zanuck at Fox, was Sex Hygiene (1941), a short designed to terrify young men. Ford himself had been rejected by the navy during World War I for his poor eyesight. This grated, because of Mary, who came from a “war-fighting family”, whose admiral uncle was Chief of Naval Operations, and who regarded movies as relatively trivial. Through her connection in the Pacific fleet, Ford obtained a reserve commission as a lieutenant commander in September 1934 and occasionally submitted reports of Japanese activity off the Mexican coast. What Ford adored about the military was its panoply. He went off to war carrying not a gun but a camera, trading shots of film for shots of bullets. He was strongly disapproved of. He acted as unmilitary as possible, and most of his men probably did not know how to execute a right-face. He would skip important meetings, was seldom in uniform, and his slept-in clothes were stained with a week's worth of chocolate and tobacco. To win friends, he would invite officers to screenings of his movies, where he would deliver a stock speech: “I've been wanting to see this picture myself. I never saw it after it was all put together.” Afterward, he would pull out his big white handkerchief, wipe away a tear, and croak, “I'm glad I waited until I could see it with you. I didn't realise it was so moving.” (16) Mary would see almost nothing of Jack or Pat (their son in the navy) during the next three and a half years. She took over the kitchens at the famous Hollywood Canteen, a free club where celebrities entertained 6,000 servicemen a night. Ford's headquarters were in Washington, D.C. He flew to Iceland and the Panama canal to film defence reports, got onto the carrier from which Doolittle launched his raid on Tokyo, and managed to film Japanese planes attacking him, him personally, in the middle of the biggest naval battle in history. It was the turning point of the Pacific war, the moment when the United States became the dominant power on Earth, and the poet laureate was there. “The image jumps a lot because the grenades were exploding right next to me.…A blast of shrapnel…knocked me out. I was wounded pretty badly.” The Battle of Midway (1942) was a type of film virtually lacking formal precedent, one for which Ford had to invent something new.
Because of interservice rivalry, Ford needed FDR's support to release his movie. After inserting a close-up of the president's son, marine major James Roosevelt, he took the print to the White House. The president chatted all through, then froze into silence when his son appeared. At the end Eleanor was crying, and the president proclaimed: “I want every mother in America to see this picture!” Most of them did. Ford's editor, Robert Parrish, attended the Radio City Music Hall premiere. “It was a stunning, amazing thing to see. Women screamed, people cried, and the ushers had to take them out.…The people, they just went crazy.” (17)
Instead it was decided to leave the Hawaiians alone, after the military governor, General Delos Emmons, supported by the community, resisted Washington's orders. Accordingly, some 50 minutes of December 7th were deleted, now Japanese-American loyalty is stressed, and the portion that remained was exhibited not in theatres but in factories. Virtually all the footage of the Pearl Harbor attack was staged at Fox. (All prior accounts of December 7th's history, including my own, have missed this story completely. Hawaii's successful defiance of Roosevelt is a deeply forgotten event in American history – not surprisingly.) Ford's war took him to North Africa, India, China, Tibet. He parachuted into Burma to film guerrilla tribesman and was on a destroyer during the first landings on D-Day. Thirteen men of Field Photo, out of about 200, were killed in action. When MGM wanted him to make They Were Expendable (1945) Ford exacted a $100,000 contribution toward acquisition of “The Field Photo Farm”, in the San Fernando valley, where any of his unit could live free of charge, and where for the next 20 years Ford presided over rituals of weddings, funerals, Christmas parties and Memorial Day ceremonies. Symbols and myths seem brighter and trustier in Ford's World War II documentaries, compared to the despair of his '30s fictions. But with the end of the war a sense of ruin returns; Ford's worlds are blacker than ever. From being servants of myths, heroes become puppets, overwhelmed by absurdity, groping for faith. In They Were Expendable, the GIs in the Phillipines are defeated, abandoned, betrayed; their sacrifice is meaningless. In My Darling Clementine, morality is so muddled, that the question “to be or not to be” makes little sense. In The Fugitive (1948), the hero can hope for substance only in death. My Darling Clementine approaches allegory. Wyatt Earp (the U.S.) gives up marshalling in Dodge City (World War I), but takes up arms again to combat the Clantons (World War II) to make the world “safe.” Victory is horrible, and Wyatt must return to the wilderness, to his father (confession; reconstruction), leaving innocence, hope, and civilisation (Clementine) behind, “lost and gone forever”, a distant memory (the long road) in Tombstone (the world of 1946). Wyatt (Henry Fonda) combines the godhood of Lincoln, the passion of Tom Joad, the directness of the
In March 1946, Ford, seeking independence as numerous filmmakers were doing, incorporated his own production company, Argosy Pictures. William Donovan, Ole Doering (a member of Donovan's Wall Street law firm), David Bruce (married to a Mellon and variously ambassador to England, France, Germany, and China), and William Vanderbilt were his principal backers. Almost as important to Argosy Pictures as Ford was Merian C. Cooper who handled production chores. Cooper was a fighter pilot turned journalist turned documentary filmmaker (Grass, [1925]) turned producer-director (King Kong [Merian. C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) and promoter of Technical and Cinerama. The Fugitive, Argosy's first production, was an indulgent triumph and a commercial disaster The Fugitive belongs to the underground
The characters are abstract, depersonalised in a cold, fractured, shadowed world. The hero (Fonda again) cannot separate his subjective colourings from “actual” reality; he lives outside of himself. To save Argosy, Ford went back to making Westerns (Fort Apache [1948], etc.). And he changed to a brighter style. But he was unrepentant about The Fugitive. “I just enjoy looking at it”, said Ford. “To me, it was perfect.” (18) Ford conjured up his movies while listening to period music. “He works something like a painter”, explained scenarist Frank Nugent, “selecting his colours and doing a palette – blues, greens, yellows, he lays them all out in his mind. Then, putting his thumb in here with a broad splash of colour, then a little touch on the other side. He goes home at night after a day's talk and reads books, or listens to records. And, listening to the music, pictures, colours, or moods come into his mind. He has a great feeling for characters, some from his own imagination. These series of impressions, images, moods – music moods, character moods, atmosphere – become in effect his raw material.” (19) Ford's space, in contrast, is almost always structured; he is obsessed with lines, planes, interior angles, depth-of-field alleys, which take on force in relation to defined space (the frame), and even this he emphasises, by angling his stage slightly to his focal plane. The result of so much style is that Ford's movies are self-reflexive and transparent in their workings. Some critics have promoted a contrary notion, that the “classical” cinema of Hollywood sought to mask its “codes”. But to watch a Ford movie without feeling – physically, emotionally, intellectually – his cutting is like listening to music while being oblivious to rhythm and harmony, or like looking at Renaissance painting while being oblivious to composition. When Will Rogers had died in an air crash in 1935, Ford had gone to pieces; and for the next couple of decades he wore a hat with a funny hole in it Rogers had given him. When Harry Carey died, Olive went and stood on the porch. “And I remember Jack came out and he took hold of me and put his head on my breast and cried, and the whole front of my sweater was sopping wet. For at least 15 or 20 minutes he cried, just solid sobbing, solid sobbing, and the more he cried, the stronger I'd get. It was very good for me, it was wonderful. Oh, God, he shook and cried. I thought, it's chilly here and here I am sopping wet all the way down.” (20). His pathological attitude toward Frank, which so infuriated Harry Carey and other old-timers, continued. Frank, after years making cheap Westerns as part of a co-op, had abandoned directing in 1927. He played violin, sculpted, and painted huge canvases in his garage – and would impulsively cut out sections as gifts. He survived as a bit player, usually as a drunk. He was marvelous at comedy, and comedy was the only thing John allowed Frank to do. Once John was sitting back acting nonchalant as a procession of people admired a camera setup he had arranged. Then Billy Ford, Frank's son, took a look. “Whadya think?” asked John. “Well, it's great but it looks just like something my father once...” John threw Billy off the set right then and there (21). Toward women Ford could be utterly tender, but men he loved combatively – and how much more so Frank, who was probably the person in his life he held most in awe.
© Tag Gallagher, March 2004 If you would like to comment on this article, please send a letter to the editors. Endnotes:
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