Searching for John Ford

Searching for John Ford
Author: Joseph McBride
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 983
Release: 2011-02-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1496800567

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.

John Ford

John Ford
Author: Ronald L. Davis
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Total Pages: 401
Release: 2014-12-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0806174323

John Ford remains the most honored director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards. Drawing upon extensive written and oral history, Ronald L. David explores Ford’s career from his silent classic, The Iron Horse, through the transition to sound, and then into the pioneer years of location filming, the golden years of Hollywood, and the movement toward television. During his career, Ford made such classics as Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and The Searchers-136 pictures in all, 54 of them Westerns. The complexity of his personality comes alive here through the eyes of his colleagues, friends, relatives, film critics, and the actors he worked with, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara, and Katharine Hepburn.