The Books of My Life: The John Ford Movie Mystery

One of the mysteries that Andrew Sarris hoped to solve in his monograph The John Ford Movie Mystery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975) was the mystery of why movie director John Ford's critical reputation declined so much in the United States between the critically acclaimed The Informer (1935) and Grapes of Wrath (1940) and the critically panned or critically ignored Wagonmaster (1950), The Searchers (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962). For Sarris, though he implies this more than laying the argument out, the key to solving the mystery of the decline in Ford's reputation lay in the social and cultural changes wrought in post-World War II America by the civil rights movement and the counterculture of the 1950s and 1960s and the changes and culture wars they brought to the country. In this changed and charged hothouse cultural atmosphere, Sarris suggests, Ford's nostalgia and his celebration of community, family, Catholicism, and American manifest destiny, seemed markers of cultural and ideological backwardness to a cosmopolitan film criticism colony in New York City that had become cognizant of the dangers inherent in American imperialism, American nationalism, and American nostalgia for a romanticised past.

Sarris's monograph, not surprisingly given the central role Sarris played in bringing French style auteurism to the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, is auteurist in form. In addition to attempting to answer why Ford's reputation declined between New Deal and Nixonian post-New Deal America, Sarris explores other mysteries including the themes of Ford's films--nostalgia, family, community, benign American manifest destiny, and Catholicism--for Sarris Ford was more a conservative rather than a reactionary--and Ford's preference for character and image--the epic long shot that emphasised community and character-- over plot and talk.

Sarris's The John Ford Movie Mystery is not the straw man auterism of so many contemporary critics of film auteurism. Sarris's auteurism was grounded in history. Sarris noted, for instance, that, in 1975, it was impossible to see many of Ford's early films and that hence any analysis of Ford's work had to be somewhat tentative. Sarris's auteurism was grounded in a recognition that film was a collaborative medium and Sarris paid attention to Ford's collaboration with writers like Dudley Nichols and Frank Nugent, directors of photography like Greg Toland, and actors like Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Ward Bond, and Ben Johnson. Sarris found no contradiction between the recognition that film is a collaborative medium and the polemic that the director was ultimately the author of at least some of his or her films. Sarris's auteurism was an auteurism that recognised that not every film of one of those few film auteurs was a masterpiece or even good. Finally, Sarris's auteurism was an auteurism that recognised that films by auteurs may help us understand the film artist.

Though not many contemporary critics share or even praise Sarris's auteurist approach, they do still share a great deal with Sarris. Like Sarris's auteurusm, which mixes and matches descriptive analysis with normative aesthetic criticism, many contemporary film critics, including those in the academy, often come to films and the directors of films in order to either praise them and him or her or damn them and him or her. They often praise or damn individual films or the films of their own favoured or disfavoured auteurs for somewhat different reasons than Sarris, however. They often praise or damn films on the basis of their ideological correctness or ideological incorrectness. Given the importance of the normative level in film analysis in both film theory past and present, the mystery that appears in need of exploration and explanation is whether film criticism is inherently a form of reader response even when it comes from professional film critics or academic "experts" in the study of cinema.