Davis takes a psychological approach to Ford and his 156 films and 54 Westerns arguing, if not novelly, that the director was a bundle of contradictions or paradoxes. Davis's Ford was an authoritarian tyrant--something several other film directors have been said to be--at the same time that he was a generous man. Davis's Ford was or wanted to be a macho man who celebrated the individualism of the American West and the rituals of the military in order, Davis argues, to hide his sensitive artistic side so as not to appear weak among the company of the macho men he cultivated and surrounded himself with. Davis's Ford was an Irish nationalist at the same time that he was an American nationalist of Irish heritage who had a sentimental nostalgia for both. Davis's Ford was a director who worked within the studio system, but who, at the same time, was able to make several of the more personal films that he wanted to make and which reflect, according to Davis, Ford's personal themes and display Ford's superb visual and compositional sense. Davis's Ford was a realist who loved history but at the same time reveled in ethnic stereotypes, particularly of the Irish and America's First Peoples, and manufactured myth making legends that fed into America's and American's nationalistic and mythical collective sense of self and nation. Davis's Ford was a man who appreciated and tried to emulate the loner heroes of the past while at the same time he celebrated the collective family and the collaborative civilisation that replaced the world of the loner heroes he made myths and legends of. Davis's Ford was an Irish Catholic who, at the same time, was a cultural Catholic who rarely attended weekly services. Davis's Ford was someone who was repressed sexually and who rarely kept the company of women who did not emulate the macho man persona he adored, while at the same time he celebrated women as Madonnas and Magdalenes. Davis's Ford was an intellectual and an anti-intellectual at the same time.
Like many books and articles grounded in oral histories Davis's book has an immediate and tangible quality that, to some extent, makes its subject come more alive. Davis's book does a decent job of putting Ford into his social contexts. Davis, for instance, argues that Ford's turn from the socially conscious socialist Democrat, Ford's phrase, who made The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) became, as a result of World War II and the Cold War, more reactionary and conservative Republican in his politics like many of his peers. All this said Davis's book is more biographical and chatty, endlessly repeating the charge that Ford could be difficult and was often a tyrant during filming in order to, at least according to some who did oral histories on Ford, get better performances from his actors, than analytical and systematic in its approach to its subject.
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