The Books of My Life: The Cinema of John Ford

The late 1950s and the 1960s, an era that saw the rise of a youth counterculture all across the world, also saw the advent of a new kind of cinema, a new kind of auteurist or authored cinema. It was, for example, the era of the French and Czech new waves, the British Free Cinema, and the New American cinema. The era also saw the rise of a new kind of film criticism. It was the era of Sequence, of Cahiers du Cinema, of Postif, of Movie, of Pauline Kael, of Andrew Sarris, and of what some have called the little books, of the monographs published by Tantivy/Zwemmer/Barnes, the monographs published in the British Film Institute's Cinema One and Cinema Two series', and the monographs published by Studio Vista/Praeger/the University of California Press/Indiana University Press. It was the era of the rise of an auteurist film criticism focused mostly on directors but also writers, producers, and actors in the Hollywood studio system and its critics.

Hollywood director John Ford, who made 112 feature films between 1917 to 1966, would be one of the auteurs the new auteurist film critics would write extensively about. For John Baxter, author of the Tantivy/Zwemmer/Barnes monograph on Ford (The Cinema of John Ford (London: Zwemmer, 1971)) John Ford was one of the greatest directors of the film medium. Ford's films, Baxter argues, are forceful, exploit the medium, and had popular appeal. Ford, as Baxter notes, worked in multiple film genres--the war picture, the Western, the historical costume drama, comedy, and literary adaptation. Despite working in Hollywood mass produced genres, Fords's, films, Baxter argues, share a common viewpoint and a common attitude to character, a common Fordian viewpoint and a Fordian attitude to character.

At the heart of Ford's films, particularly in the sound era, Baxter argues, are intricate moral structures and insight into the relationship between humans, especially men, and their environment. In Ford's films, Baxter argues, character is at the heart of plot, society, in the form, for example, of the military and it rituals and drinking as a community ritual, is an expression of moral order, and the survival of this community is central. They are also infused, Baxter argues somewhat novelly, with Ford's Irish Catholicism. In Ford's films, argues Baxter, slanting morning and afternoon light, the gestures of his characters, landscapes given an emotional character thanks to their relationship to his characters, and exterior mid-shots and alternating exteriors and interiors, are all examples of Ford's authorial film style.

Baxter's book is an interesting study of John Ford, who is now regarded as one of the world's and of America's great directors. Not everyone, however, will find Baxter's auteurism convincing. Some will see it as, in the catchphrase of modern academic critics, too "romantic". These same critics are also likely to miss the fact that Baxter, like many other 1960s and 1970s auteurist film historians and critics, saw film as a collaborative "art" and, at the same time, and only in some cases, an authored cinema, given the straw man auteurism they tend to construct. For me, Baxter's monograph could have and should have been a paper rather than a monograph, as is the case with so many books on film auteurs. Baxter's "Introduction", it seems to me, nicely sums up Ford's authorial signatures and the chapters after it are largely padding on an already partially eaten wedding cake.