The Books of My Life: John Ford (Eyman)

With the revival of auteurism, if in a more systematic form than that of earlier film critic generations, in the 1950s and 1960s in France, England, Scotland, and the United States, director John Ford became one of the stars of the auteurist firmament. Ironically, he became a pantheon or Olympic director at the same time as his star was dimming in mainstream gatekeeper film criticism of publications like the New York Times as film historian, film critic, and film biographer Scott Eyman notes. In an era impacted by the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement, Ford's sentimental and nostalgic Americana "pictures", particularly his manifest destiny Westerns with their negative portrayals of America's First Peoples, seemed, at least to establishment film critics, long past their sell by date and seemed reactionary to boot.

Scott Eyman's John Ford: The Searcher 1894-1973, also known as John Ford: The Complete Films (Köln: Taschen, 2004), takes readers on a chronological tour through the fiction films, documentaries, and television episodes directed by John Ford from The Tornado of 1917 to Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend of 1976. In the text and in the captions to the real star of Eyman's book, hundreds of stills and on location photographs, Eyman explores Ford's thematic motifs, visual motifs, and collaborators, and argues, like Sarris and others before him, that Ford really only became an auteur in the late 1930s and early 1940s with Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and How Green Was My Valley (1941).

Eyman's encyclopedic odyssey through Ford's films is unlikely to please those looking for more sociological, modern cultural, or reader response analysis of the impressionistic or quantitative sort. It is unlikely to please academic critics of auteurism since it simply accepts auteurism as its starting point. It is unlikely to please those who argue that Ford's film are grounded in those old literary analysis standards of man against man, man against nature, man against society, and man against change and popular culture genres. If, however,  you are looking for a brief and workmanlike analysis of Ford's films with an excellent selection of stills and on location photographs, this is the book for you. There is, by the way, no doubt that the stills are an excellent if somewhat problematic visual aid to the study of the films and television work of John Ford.