TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gives us an incisive inside look at the filmmaker who made John Wayne a star and helped shape our view of the American West.
Now, as radio commentator Paul Harvey used to say back in the day, the rest of the story.
For the current season of The Plot Thickens, the consistently fascinating and compulsively listenable Turner Classic Movies podcast, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz goes behind the scenes and beyond the myths to give us Decoding John Ford, an ambitious, extensive and altogether highly addictive contemplation of the great American director’s life and films.
All seven episodes are now available for binging wherever you get your podcasts. And yes, before you ask: John Wayne looms large in many of the anecdotes and interviews harvested for this project. Especially in the episode devoted to the making of The Searchers.
“John Ford is a mercurial figure” Mankiewicz said in a press release. “Not surprisingly, given his stature, the stereotypes about Ford are incomplete. This is a man defined by contradictions: he revered the military and envied those who served yet bristled at authority; Ford became known as one of Hollywood’s leading conservatives, yet one of his finest films is 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, one of the most progressive films of classic Hollywood; and he preached loyalty yet frequently berated and degraded his actors during the production of his movies, particularly his most famous leading man, John Wayne.
“Despite all of that, Ford was also contemplative, playful, and a genuine artist. This season of The Plot Thickens has been spent trying to find out what is true about John Ford and what isn’t. It hasn’t been easy getting to the bottom of John Ford, but as you’ll hear, it was worth the trip.”
Cowboys & Indians: You repeatedly describe John Ford throughout your podcast as the most influential American filmmaker of the 20th century. Why?
Ben Mankiewicz: I’m glad you focused on that, because it was not a line that I took lightly. When I look at 21 years almost that I’ve been introducing movies at TCM and listening to [Robert Osborne] and other hosts — and mostly myself — there’s a lot of excessive phrasing hyperbole, right? Everybody’s the best. Everybody’s the most important. There are a lot of words I try not to use. I don’t use “epic.” Or I only use it to describe a movie if it’s an epic movie, literally. If it’s Dr. Zhivago — an epic, right? But I don't like “legendary.” I don’t like these grand statements when there’s so many other enormously talented people out there plying their trade really well. So I’m hesitant to use these excessive platitudes.
C&I: And yet, in the case of John Ford…
Mankiewicz: I think the term is true. I’m thinking of Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson — those are the big three who’ve helped us in the last year. We’ve been on so many calls with them, and I’ve had so many conversations with them about movies and the future of TCM, and how they love what we’re doing and want to know how they can help. They, of course, end up talking about movies, and they talk about their movies. I hope I’m not betraying anything, but I was privy to a conversation — I was really just listening as those three talked, about which one of them had made the “most John Ford movie.” It was really a lovely moment to experience as these three guys who admire each other’s work so much all clearly thought it was really cool that they all had made movies that were John Ford-esque. Because it seemed like they didn’t think you could pay any other filmmaker, any other director, a higher compliment.
And I was thinking, “What these guys like is John Ford movies.” [Laughs] They love other directors too, but his influence is so profound and crosses continents that we thought that this was not only a safe thing to say. But also a really important thing to say the top of every podcast, to give people a sense of how important we think John Ford is, and that they should think the same thing. We thought “influential” was the right word. Obviously, “best” is totally subjective. But I actually I think “most influential” American director of the last hundred years — I think that’s indisputable.
C&I: Going all the way back to the 1939 Stagecoach — and arguably even further back, to The Iron Horse in 1924 — and going all the way to such later films as The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford certainly established the templates for depictions of the American West.
Mankiewicz: And Ford is universally considered the foremost Western director. All these Western TV shows and all these other Westerns that came after Ford’s films — for a lot of people, those were their entry to classic movies. All these shows like Wagon Train and Wanted Dead or Alive and Bonanza — all these shows just borrowed as cheaply as they possibly could to [recreate] the West that they had seen established by the films. And the films were all influenced by the most prominent Western director, John Ford.
C&I: And even now, you can spot the Ford influence in everything from Deadwood to Horizon: An American Saga.
Mankiewicz: They did their research deep into clothing and other things, but it’s still this image of the West that was crafted by John Ford. So that means that a great part of our own image of what it means to be an American conquering the West, that our image of mostly men in our image who are responsible for our westward movement and then taming this wild frontier — again, the image that we’ve been given, comes from John Ford. That is quite an impressive legacy.
Look, we don’t really know how the Old West looked, right? John Ford decided for us, and we’ve tinkered with it. We’ve made it sometimes much more crackling and alive in many ways, like in Deadwood — and Yellowstone to some extent. There are still some great Westerns. But I just think every idea of the West, and what the West means in America, owes a debt to John Ford. Like I say, that is a pretty powerful legacy to be carrying as we move well into the 21st century.
C&I: Would you agree, though, that in the later films you cover in your podcast — specifically, films like The Searchers and Cheyenne Autumn — that Ford might have been self-critical in regard to his earlier Westerns?
Mankiewicz: I don’t know if it’s self-criticism. That's possible — certainly, there's some criticism in it. But, overall, it’s self-awareness, right? He changed as he got older, and he seemed to feel some regret. I don’t think this was a guy plagued by regret, or certainly not openly. He probably had more regret than he let on to others. But maybe he thought, “We didn't quite get this right.” And also, I think he realized, “There’s a bigger story to tell than the ones that I told in Stagecoach.” It was a more complicated story, and he liked complicated stories. It’s why, especially as he made his best films, he didn’t give us generally these unqualified, happy endings. He knew life was complicated. It turns out he also really understood that heroes were complicated.
C&I: Finally, are there some John Ford films you regret not having sufficient bandwith to cover?
Mankiewicz: Well, we barely talk about The Quiet Man. The Searchers episode was initially half Searchers and half Quiet Man. But then we heard it, and we just thought, “It feels like we’re forcing this with The Quiet Man. We’re forcing the importance of The Quiet Man when The Searchers... Come on, it’s The Searchers. The Searchers deserves basically its own episode.” So we changed it. Obviously, The Quiet Man is a super important movie to understand John Ford, and we did talk about it. But [Decoding John Ford] doesn’t go film by film. This is about Ford more than it is about Ford’s movies.
But, obviously, those things are pretty interchangeable.
