Searching for John Ford

Author: Joseph McBride
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496800567
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 983

Book Description
John Ford's classic films—such as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers—have earned him worldwide admiration as America's foremost filmmaker, a director whose rich visual imagination conjures up indelible, deeply moving images of our collective past. Joseph McBride's Searching for John Ford, described as definitive by both the New York Times and the Irish Times, surpasses all other biographies of the filmmaker in its depth, originality, and insight. Encompassing and illuminating Ford's myriad complexities and contradictions, McBride traces the trajectory of Ford's life from his beginnings as “Bull” Feeney, the nearsighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-honored career, as America's national mythmaker. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford's films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands.

Searching for John Ford

Author: Joseph McBride
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 160473468X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 883

Searching For John Ford

Author: Joseph McBride
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312310110
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 884

Book Description
The definitive biography of the great, dark cinematic poet of the American West, the troubled director of Stagecoach, Red River, and scores of other Hollywood classics.

Print the Legend

Author: Scott Eyman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476797722
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Book Description
Follows the legendary John Ford through a career that spanned more than five decades, drawing on dozens of personal interviews, material from Ford's estate, and film criticism.

Three Bad Men

Author: Scott Allen Nollen
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786458542
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 407

Book Description
These were unique, complex, personal and professional relationships between master director John Ford and his two favorite actors, John Wayne and Ward Bond. The book provides a biography of each and a detailed exploration of Ford's work as it was intertwined with the lives and work of both Wayne and Bond (whose biography here is the first ever published). The book reveals fascinating accounts of ingenuity, creativity, toil, perseverance, bravery, debauchery, futility, abuse, masochism, mayhem, violence, warfare, open- and closed-mindedness, control and chaos, brilliance and stupidity, rationality and insanity, friendship and a testing of its limits, love and hate--all committed by a "half-genius, half-Irish" cinematic visionary and his two surrogate sons: Three Bad Men.

The Searchers

Author: Glenn Frankel
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608191052
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
Traces the making of the influential 1950s film inspired by the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, sharing details of Parker's 1836 abduction by the Comanche and her return to white culture twenty-four years later.

The Western Films of John Ford

Author: Janey Ann Place
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Films of John Ford.

John Ford

Author: Tag Gallagher
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520063341
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 588

Book Description
This radical re-reading of Ford's work studies his films in the context of his complex character, demonstrating their immense intelligence and their profound critique of our culture.

How the West Was Sung

Author: Kathryn M. Kalinak
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520941071
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
James Stewart once said, "For John Ford, there was no need for dialogue. The music said it all." This lively, accessible study is the first comprehensive analysis of Ford's use of music in his iconic westerns. Encompassing a variety of critical approaches and incorporating original archival research, Kathryn Kalinak explores the director's oft-noted predilection for American folk song, hymnody, and period music. What she finds is that Ford used music as more than a stylistic gesture. In fascinating discussions of Ford's westerns—from silent-era features such as Straight Shooting and The Iron Horse to classics of the sound era such as My Darling Clementine and The Searchers —Kalinak describes how the director exploited music, and especially song, in defining the geographical and ideological space of the American West.

Wayne and Ford

Author: Nancy Schoenberger
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385534868
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
John Ford and John Wayne, two titans of classic film, made some of the most enduring movies of all time. The genre they defined—the Western—and the heroic archetype they built still matter today. For more than twenty years John Ford and John Wayne were a blockbuster Hollywood team, turning out many of the finest Western films ever made. Ford, known for his black eye patch and for his hard-drinking, brawling masculinity, was a son of Irish immigrants and was renowned as a director for both his craftsmanship and his brutality. John “Duke” Wayne was a mere stagehand and bit player in “B” Westerns, but he was strapping and handsome, and Ford saw his potential. In 1939 Ford made Wayne a star in Stagecoach, and from there the two men established a close, often turbulent relationship. Their most productive years saw the release of one iconic film after another: Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. But by 1960 the bond of their friendship had frayed, and Wayne felt he could move beyond his mentor with his first solo project, The Alamo. Few of Wayne’s subsequent films would have the brilliance or the cachet of a John Ford Western, but viewed together the careers of these two men changed moviemaking in ways that endure to this day. Despite the decline of the Western in contemporary cinema, its cultural legacy, particularly the type of hero codified by Ford and Wayne—tough, self-reliant, and unafraid to fight but also honorable, trustworthy, and kind—resonates in everything from Star Wars to today’s superhero franchises. Drawing on previously untapped caches of letters and personal documents, Nancy Schoenberger dramatically narrates a complicated, poignant, and iconic friendship and the lasting legacy of that friendship on American culture.