He kept a soggy cigar clamped in a corner of his mouth as he went from actor to actor, lingering over their costumes and sprinkling a few last-minute words of encouragement. Even Wayne got the treatment: Ford carefully knotted and straightened Wayne’s bandanna before he began shooting.
Everyone stood silently, awaiting his or her turn. “It was a feeling of reverence on every set,” recalled Harry Carey Jr. “… You felt almost like you were in a church. It was something sacred, something beautiful going on.”
AFTER ARRIVING ON THE SET, Ford usually headed straight to Winton Hoch, his Oscar-winning director of photography, to discuss where best to place the camera for the morning shot. The two men had been partners and antagonists for nearly a decade. Hoch was a bushy-browed man with a patrician nose and the bearing of a field general. Ford respected Hoch’s impeccable skills but felt that Hoch was overly fussy and temperamental. He laid out his ground rules for Hoch in 1948 on their first day on location for 3 Godfathers, after Hoch had had the temerity to suggest a camera angle to Ford. “Do you want to go home right now?” Ford demanded. “Who in the name of Christ do you think you are talking to? I mean, Jesus, you’re going to lecture me about your pretty goddamned picture postcard shots? Well, we’re not having those kinds of shots in this picture! And I tell you where the camera goes.”
“Sorry, Jack,” Hoch replied evenly. And according to Carey, who witnessed this scene, “they never crossed words again.”
The most controversial moment of their tangled partnership was also one of their finest. It came on a late-afternoon during the shooting of a scene in Yellow Ribbon in which Captain Brittles leads a troop of cavalrymen through Indian Territory. Purple-black clouds were holding the sky hostage and a smattering of rain and lightning had begun. Ford ordered everyone back to Goulding’s, then suddenly changed his mind. The darkening landscape was rich and disturbing, and Ford wanted to capture it on film.
John Ford surrounded by cast and crew—including John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, and Danny Borzage, who played accordion on Ford’s film sets for four decades—on the set of The Searchers. A never-before-published photo by Allen Reed.
“Winnie, what do you think?” he asked Hoch.
“It’s awfully dark, Jack. But I’ll shoot it. I just can’t promise anything.”
Ford decided to try. “Winnie, open her [the lens] up and let’s go for it. If it doesn’t come out, I’ll take the rap.”
The result was a brilliant Technicolor moment: blue-clad troopers leading their anxious mounts through a gathering storm under a black roof of sky as lightning flashed and snarled. Hoch went on to win an Academy Award for cinematography, but he and Ford squabbled for years over who deserved the credit.
By the time he worked on The Searchers, Hoch had won three Oscars, two of them with Ford. Still, The Searchers was a particularly trying project for Hoch, who was using for the first time a complex new technique known as VistaVision. It produced a film image of extra depth and clarity, and enabled Ford to capture Monument Valley’s stunning beauty in long and medium shots while allowing for action to unfold within the frame. The result, wrote one observer, was “images that are so detailed that they seem to be painted on screen.” But the technique required more cameras and a larger crew, and while Hoch was intrigued with its possibilities, he was also distracted and chagrined by the intricate and costly details.
For all their quarreling, Hoch and Ford shared a visual sensibility about Monument Valley. Hoch appreciated Ford’s restraint. “In Monument Valley he avoided the temptation to shoot nothing but breathtakers,” Hoch recalled. “He had only an occasional beauty shot. It’s like diamonds. They are very valuable because they are rare. If the street was paved with then, then they would be worthless.”
AFTER HE CHATTED WITH HOCH, Ford would prepare the actors. This was the moment when he would tear up parts of the script and present the fresh ideas he had worked through the night before. “Too many directors are too concerned with camera angles, and don’t worry about anything else,” recalled Ken Curtis. “Ford worried about his actors. He would get them together in the morning … [and] we’d run through the scene while they were lighting. He’d get it exactly the way it seemed to work best. He always knew what he wanted and when he got it he would print the take. He never shot more than he needed, he never shot less.”
Ford believed that actors needed to be spontaneous. He didn’t give the actors line readings, and he seldom verbalized what he wanted. He just gave clues, opening bits, a word or two, relying upon chemistry and intuition.
“He didn’t want any rehearsing” until the morning that a scene was ready to be shot, Pippa Scott recalled. “I was new but it was fine for me. I just blithely stepped off the plank and went with whatever he wanted.”
The last thing Ford wanted was for the actors to act like actors. He didn’t mind mistakes, but he despised dramatic gestures and studied line readings.
“The actors get tired, they get jaded and lose their spontaneity—so that they’re just mouthing words,” he told Bogdanovich. “But if you get the first or second take, there’s a sparkle, an uncertainty about it; they’re not sure of their lines, and it gives you a sense of nervousness and suspense.”
When Ford shot the emotionally powerful climactic scene of The Grapes of Wrath when Tom Joad, preparing to flee the police coming to arrest him for murder, says good-bye to his mother, Ford refused to allow Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell to rehearse. “He never let us get into the scene,” Fonda recalled. “He knew, as well he should, that Jane and I knew our dialogue. He also somehow instinctively knew that he should get the first take, the first emotion.”
Ford made the actors sit for two to three hours while the technicians set up and rehearsed the mechanics of the scene. “By this time [we] were like race horses at the wire,” said Fonda. “We were ready … Finally we were allowed to. We began that scene and it went. We both went with the emotion. The emotion was there in the face, in the eyes, and in everything else. That was it.”
LUNCH WOULD BE SERVED PROMPTLY at noon and Earl Grey tea at 4:00 p.m., usually marking the close of shooting, although sometimes Ford would shoot as late as 6:00. At dinner later in the evening no one was allowed to discuss work at the risk of banishment from the table. It was one of Pappy’s many rules, enforceable according to Himself’s whim. After dinner there would be poker, gin rummy, and a coin-toss game known as pitch. Ford would bring an old sock stuffed with silver dollars. People tried hard to let Ford win, a mark of deference he both expected and despised. “Oh God, how the man would cheat,” recalled Ace Holmes, the property man. “But they would never call him.”
Chuck Hayward, who had worked for Ford ever since Yellow Ribbon, said the Old Man was never more relaxed than on the Searchers set. “He had all his people there, they had no place to go except there,” Hayward recalled. “Every night you played hearts, cards or whatever, and it was just like a little kingdom … He had his ship—Monument Valley—and he had a big crew and he was it—so he really enjoyed it.”
The Searchers was indeed a family affair. Ford’s son Pat served as associate producer, and his brother-in-law Wingate Smith was an assistant director, as was his brother Edward O’Fearna. He cast Ken Curtis, his son-in-law, as Charlie McCorry, and his daughter Barbara came along as an unofficial script girl. Ford gave John Wayne’s fifteen-year-old son Patrick a part, as he did Natalie Wood’s sister Lana, and he cast Merian Cooper’s wife, Dorothy Jordan, as Martha Edwards (the Coopers donated her salary to charity), Olive Carey as Mrs. Jorgensen, and her son Harry Carey Jr. as Mrs. Jorgensen’s son Brad.
Yet the spirit of generosity did not always overflow. While Ford insisted that Frank Nugent write parts for Harry Carey Jr. and Ken Curtis, he also told Nugent, according to the writer’s widow, Jean, “Don’t make them too good.”
18.
The Valley, Part Two (Monument Valley, June–July 1955)
John Ford had allotted himself just four weeks for the Monument
Valley film shoot, and he quickly fell behind due to high winds and overcast skies. He knew he had to speed things up, and he started driving his crew hard, shooting anywhere between twelve and nineteen scenes each day, including Sundays.
He took full advantage of Monument Valley’s infinite facets. As sprawling as it appears on film, the valley is actually fairly compact—just 144 square miles in total, with its most recognizable features stuffed into an area less than half that size. Ford could pivot the camera and be rewarded with a series of differentiated and breathtaking vistas. Within a five-mile radius he was able to film scenes at the Jorgensen and Edwards ranch houses, the long “forty-mile” ride of the Texas Ranger posse into Indian Territory, two dramatic horse chases in which the searchers are pursued by Comanches, and the standoff in a cave between the searchers and Scar’s men. Ford filmed the final attack on Scar’s village on a flat plain directly in front of the Jorgensen ranch house.
He didn’t bother writing down personal notes about how a scene would look or what the characters would say. He kept it all in his head, cutting bits of dialogue and scenes from the final shooting script as he went. Early on, for example, he added a moment when Ethan, forced to rest his weary horse, looks off anxiously in the distance, aware that forty miles away his brother’s family—including Martha, the woman he loves—are the likely target of a Comanche murder raid and there’s nothing he can do to stop it. The way Ford framed Wayne’s reddish-brown face against the mesa monument behind him makes it appear as if Wayne, too, is carved from the same stone, and it makes his worried expression all the more powerful.
The average film director would do a master shot of a scene, then re-shoot from various angles and trust the studio’s film editor to cut and paste it together in a satisfying way. At minimum, there would be a master shot, two over-the-shoulder shots, and two individual close-ups, plus multiple takes of each setup. A simple two-page dialogue scene, which might run less than two minutes on the screen, could be the end product of three thousand feet of exposed film—slightly more than a half hour’s worth of footage.
For many directors it was all about coverage: the more film you shot, the more choices your editor had in assembling the final cut. Overshooting was an insurance policy for the weak willed and supercautious.
Ford couldn’t abide the process. Whenever possible, he shot only one take. Part of it was his artistic sensibility: unlike Hitchcock and a number of other visual storytellers, Ford never relied on storyboards to outline a scene before the actual shoot. Yet he knew exactly what he wanted on the first take. “John Ford shoots a picture in his mind before he ever turns on a camera,” said Wingate Smith, the assistant director.
Part of it was about keeping the actors fresh and spontaneous. And part of it was about control. The less film he shot, Ford knew, the less material there would be for the studio bosses to cut or reshape. “If you give them a lot of film ‘the committee’ takes over,” he told the author Tag Gallagher. “They start juggling scenes around and taking out this and putting in that. They can’t do it with my pictures. I cut in the camera and that’s it. There’s not a lot of film left on the floor when I’m finished.”
ON SUNDAY, JUNE 19, Ford and Harry Goulding, accompanied by Pat Ford and the stunt coordinator Cliff Lyons, drove along the valley floor selecting locations for the Indian encampment to be attacked near the end of the film. Then they headed up to Mexican Hat, twenty miles north, to choose spots along the San Juan River for the scene in which a small band of Texas Rangers is chased across the river by Comanches and makes a stand on the far side. The following day they filmed most of the battle in fifteen setups, working from 9:00 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. in temperatures that approached 120 degrees. On Tuesday they came back again, punching out seventeen additional setups and nine scenes in a day that lasted nearly nine hours. The work was sometimes ragged: Ward Bond fell off his horse during the chase across the river and dragged his horse to the other side while Ford kept filming. When the posse reaches the far side, a soaking-wet Sam Clayton, Bond’s character, asks to borrow a pistol from Ethan and then flings his dusty top hat at Ethan in a comic gesture that caught an amused John Wayne by surprise. That moment remains in the final cut of the picture. At another point, as the Indians mass on the far side of the river, someone loses control of the camera, which jerks upward and then down again. No matter: this inadvertent movement is also in the final cut.
Wherever in the valley Ford and his actors roamed, an elaborate convoy of men and machines followed. Technicolor and VistaVision required massive setups and a far larger crew than Ford had used in previous Monument Valley film shoots. There were thirty-three drivers, five five-ton trucks, a three-ton truck, two horse trucks, one truck equipped with a camera crane, a large van specially designed to hold wardrobe, two medium-size trucks, a generator truck, a camera car, a sanitary truck, a radio jeep, three large tourist buses, three station wagons, three twelve-passenger vans, five jeeps, a water wagon, a hay truck, and a hot meals wagon. The traveling crew consisted of two 35mm cameramen, two camera operators, two technicians, three assistant cameramen, one mechanic, one 16mm cameraman, one assistant 16mm cameraman, one stills man, and a sound crew of one sound mixer, one recorder, one cable man, two boom men, and three radiomen.
On any given day, the shooting of action scenes needed a minimum of 65 horses. Lunch was served to 150 people.
Besides the huge logistical challenge and the blazing heat, Ford had another problem to contend with. On Sunday evening, Sonny Whitney and his third wife, Eleanor, arrived by Cessna to oversee his project and be entertained as Hollywood royalty. This was part of the devil’s bargain Ford had struck. By relying upon Whitney’s money, Ford had avoided being beholden to the studio system, with its extra layers of demands and constraints. But it meant he had to put up with Whitney’s whims and suggestions, or at least carefully divert them. Whitney, after all, was paying most of the bills.
Alerted in advance by Cooper, Ford was prepared. As Sonny and Eleanor sat down at the head table for dinner that evening, a fistfight broke out between Chuck Roberson and another stuntman, Fred Kennedy. Eleanor was horrified. “Crockery flew, tables and benches overturned, men punched, tackled, rolled and shouted,” she recalled. “Then abruptly the fracas stopped as suddenly as it had begun.” It was all an act, staged by Ford for the benefit—and obvious embarrassment—of the Whitneys.
After fourteen years, Sonny and Eleanor’s marriage was in trouble. While he liked to portray his film production venture as a patriotic enterprise designed to celebrate and promote the spirit of America to an ignorant and cynical world, Sonny was bored with his life and with Eleanor. Earlier, in the preproduction phase of The Searchers, he insisted to Cooper that Ford find a role for Virginia Copeland, a buxom twenty-five-year-old actress and singer who had caught Whitney’s eye when he saw her working onstage in New York. There was a cantina scene in the second half of the picture when Ethan and Martin find a Mexican trader who is willing to take them to the Comanche encampment where Debbie may be living. Whitney pressed to give Copeland a feature moment in this scene. “I would surely like to give her this spot,” he wrote to Cooper. “A very good song could be found or written for the occasion … I would ask you please to give this your urgent attention and discuss it with John Ford.”
He enclosed a number of Copeland’s photos and concluded, “If you don’t like them, then I can only conclude that you have lost your eye for sex.”
Copeland got neither the song nor the part. Still, Eleanor knew things had soured with Sonny and she was turning increasingly to her Christian faith for solace. With all the fervor of a new convert, she lamented the spiritual hollowness of their wealthy lives even while continuing to occupy her spousal seat on Sonny’s private plane. The superrich, she wrote, “look upon everything in their lives as possessions and hope to find happiness or satisfaction from them, but emptiness, worthlessness, or inner loneliness is their constant reality.” She clearly felt she was writing from
personal experience.
With a wary Eleanor constantly by his side, Sonny had no opportunity to avail himself of the possibilities for female companionship on the film set. Still, Ford was taking no chances. He assigned his son Pat to entertain the Whitneys and keep them out of harm’s way. Pat resented the duty but had no choice. He got Vera Miles to chaperone Eleanor, while he himself took Sonny on long horse rides through the stunningly picturesque valley.
“Whitney had been a polo player; well, I had been too,” Pat recalled. “And Whitney would love to ride. He couldn’t ride. I mean, how a man could be a polo player and not ride any better … ? But anyway, he loved to go on long rides with me.”
Still, Whitney was restless. Ford had studiously ignored all of his suggestions for the film. But Sonny had paid $1 million for this movie and he wanted a piece of the action. “That was the worst thing about Whitney and his money,” said Pat. “He had to be right in the middle of everything.”
Ford gave Eleanor a small walk-on as a hymn-singing mourner by the grave site of the Edwards family. Sonny was not so easy to placate.
Ford devoted Wednesday and Thursday to filming the climactic raid on Scar’s camp, set up on a flat plain at the entrance to the valley. It was a massive affair, with 130 Navajos as extras and 15 more dressed as Texas Rangers. Each work day started at 7:00 a.m. The stuntmen did numerous horse falls, and a camera truck raced back and forth past teepees and fleeing Indian men, women, and children, capturing two dozen Rangers riding at breakneck speed as they rampaged through the camp. Whitney, who despite Pat’s disdainful critique fancied himself a fine horseman, asked Ford for permission to join the riders. The director issued an emphatic no. Much too dangerous, he told Whitney. It didn’t matter. Sonny Whitney decided to ride anyway. The wranglers, who knew Sonny was ultimately responsible for their paychecks, abetted his stunt.
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