Last month the latest iteration of the great American Western, Cowboys and Aliens, Starring in his first, film of the genre is Harrison Ford. Executive producer Steven Spielberg, also invited director Jon Favreau with a collection of classic Western films. Spielberg also invited the director and the writers to a private screening of several John Ford Westerns and provided live commentary on how to make one properly.
The origins of Western can be traced to many mythical art forms: James Fenimore Cooper’s heroic frontier adventure novels, such as The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer; The melodramatic stories of Bret Harte and Zane Grey and the “all too gorgeous” landscapes of 19th century Romantic painters such as Albert Bierstadt.
No other country has a national equivalent of the Western; but this uniquely American phenomenon has never been taken very seriously at home. It has received much more respect in Paris, Berlin, Rome and Tokyo.
In 1967, Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges stated that “I think nowadays, while literary men have neglected their epic duties, the epic has been saved for us, strangely enough, by the Westerns…has been saved for the world by of all places, Hollywood.” And since the first Western,Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, 1903, the genre has celebrated myth not fact. (Although the film is set in Wyoming, it was shot in New Jersey and Delaware.) As the newspaper editor tells us in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Film cowboy Tom Mix observed, in 1938, that “The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it’s a state of mind. It’s whatever you want it to be.” From its beginnings the Western is a vehicle for telling the story of the American Identity. Cowboys and Aliens perhaps can be seen as another mythical metaphor for American fears of terrorism that have been with us now for a decade.
. John Ford directed perhaps more films than anyone in Hollywood. (Around 226) He began his long career in Westerns; he had come out West from Maine with his brother Francis and reportedly got his first director job in 1917 because he could yell the loudest. He made dozens of Westerns in the silent era. The first Westerns in the 1920’s were not big productions; these “horse operas” featured simplistic plots, low budgets and were usually shot within a week. But with the advent of sound in 1927 the tradition of the Western was carried on in “B” pictures aimed at children. In the early 1930’s Adult audiences flocked in record numbers to musicals, comedies and urban melodramas; there was almost no market for “prestige” Westerns. At this time Ford was to achieve acclaim in other genres in films such as the Informer, 1937.
But between 1939 and 1962, Ford was to almost singlehandedly change the face of the Western with six iconic films that have done more to create a vision of America that still persists to this day in every part of the world. These six movies: Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance represent John Ford’s unique vision of the American frontier. This vision was to change radically over 23 years; but the Ford fundamentals are: A sense of community; ritual, the advance of civilization and the insignificance of humanity.
In 1939 Ford felt that if properly presented, an adult Western could still be successful. And he had the perfect vehicle for Stagecoach, a morality play influenced by the social criticism in Guy de Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif” a commentary on bourgeois hypocrisy in which roles are reversed; the banker turns out to be a crook; and the prostitute and the drunk are redeemed.
Almost by chance Ford discovered a remote location on the boarder of Utah and Arizona called Monument Valley which served as the location for five of his six greatest Westerns. This valley in what once was the great prehistoric body of water known as the Sundance Sea with its towering mesas and buttes that rise to create a truly monumental backdrop; this timeless and eternal vista that to so many around the world became their vision of the American West. This enchanted place became the perfect canvas for Ford to continually embellish his theme of the insignificance of mankind in the great scheme of things.
Monument Valley can be seen all around Ford’s recreation of Tombstone the setting for My Darling Clementine (1946); surely the most un-historic telling of the gunfight at the OK Corral. Ford gives us a melodrama laced with Fordian touches such as civilization and Shakespeare overcoming the frontier brutality of the Arizona Territory and Ford’s love of dance and ritual; and of course we have the obligatory grave scene.
These same elements are carried forth in Fort Apache (1948) ; which is loosely based on Custer’s last stand. But Ford adds the strong sense of community in the Cavalry and creates magnificently vivid skies using infra-red film; he pushed black and white film to the limit of its expressiveness. On the eve of battle, he films soldiers that resemble Remington bronzes that at any moment will join the monuments in eternity. In the final scene he introduces the Western concept of the preference of legend over fact.
Monument Valley is featured prominently in Ford’s first Technicolor Western, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Ford was not a fan of color photography; but used the medium to the maximum; According to biographer Joseph McBride, pushing cinematographer Winton C. Hoch to photograph the celebrated thunderstorm sequence “under protest;” for which he won the Oscar for Color Cinematography.
In The Searchers (1957), Monument Valley never looked better in color and wide screen Vista Vision. In his later years, Ford becomes more and more retrospective and to a degree pessimistic. John Wayne’s character is perhaps his most unsympathetic; he is a bitter racist; but in the end finds redemption; the final shot of Wayne framed in a doorway is one of the most memorable in all cinema.
In perhaps his final great Western of 1962, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance reveals the full extent of Ford’s rather bleak, revised vision of America. It is a gritty film; made almost entirely in the studio; with none of Fords pictorial grandeur.
Ford went on in the 70’s to make other less memorable films; they do not compare with his earlier award winning classics in other genres such as Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, They Were Expendable and The Quiet Man.
But John Ford’s position as perhaps America’s greatest director rests mostly on these six monumental Westerns. He is often characterized as perhaps our greatest “Visual Poet.” But in his own words “You say someone’s called me the greatest poet of the Western saga. I am not a poet, and I don’t know what a Western saga is. I would say that is horse_____.”
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