Wayne and Ford

by Nancy Schoenberger

  But by no means had Ford abandoned Hollywood filmmaking during this period. He won an Academy Award for Best Director for 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, an adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel about migrant workers during the Great Depression. And he followed that up the next year with Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, which he took over from director William Wyler, another celebration of working-class struggle set among miners in Wales. It’s worth noting that this was the first time Ford worked with two actresses he came to love and admire, Maureen O’Hara and Anna Lee, though he showed it in his usual combative and sometimes brutal style. Anna Lee had failed to tell her director that she was pregnant with twins when filming began, afraid he wouldn’t use her if he knew. At one of the film’s climaxes, when her character, Bronwyn, learns of her husband’s death, she screams and falls to the ground. The night after shooting that scene, Anna Lee suffered a miscarriage and lost one of the twins. She and Ford were both devastated, yet she continued to work with him and continued to be grateful for every John Ford movie she appeared in—as did Maureen O’Hara, despite her own problems with the director. One wonders if there was a kind of Stockholm syndrome at play in which the bullied and mistreated cast and crew identified with and forgave their abuser, or if the actors were so thrilled to achieve the artistic heights Ford brought out in them that such accomplishment was worth any price.

  As a child actor, Roddy McDowall had already appeared in twenty British films; his memory of being directed by the great, tyrannical Ford was mostly benign: “The thing that sticks out about How Green Was My Valley is that I never remember being directed. It just all happened. Ford played me like a harp.” Even so, McDowall remembers that he was “scared to death of him.”

  To me he was sort of like Moses. But I feared him in a good way. He was religion to me in a certain sense, which touched me and released me and did not inhibit me. Ford could be just terrible. If he chose to, he could destroy you in a minute. But he was marvelous to me.

  Ford would win his third Academy Award for Best Director for How Green Was My Valley, and the movie beat Citizen Kane in being awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. But by that time Ford was already on to other, and to his mind better, things. In September 1941, while at the top of his game as a director and producer of motion pictures, Ford had realized his childhood dream by entering active service in the U.S. Navy. As head of the Field Photographic Branch (the later name of the unit), Ford was stationed in June 1942 at Midway, where he was asked to film footage of young recruits going about their daily business on the base. Word came down that the Japanese were planning to attack, and Ford, who was lounging in his bunk at the time, quickly rose to the occasion and filmed the air battle with a 16 mm, handheld camera, sustaining shrapnel wounds while he filmed. He already had footage of many of the sailors and marines, so he was able to put together an eighteen-minute documentary, The Battle of Midway, on this pivotal engagement and on the men who fought in it, some of whom lost their lives.

  Ford knew that without an intimate story his film would be seen as mere propaganda or—worse, still—be censored by the military, so he used his narrative gifts to assemble a folksy look at young men in battle, fresh from their Ohio farms. The motherly Jane Darwell, who played the tough matriarch in The Grapes of Wrath just two years earlier, served as one of several narrators. In a “land sakes alive” voice, she identifies the young men—“why, isn’t that Junior Kenney from Springfield, Ohio?”—while Donald Crisp, who played the loving father in How Green Was My Valley, provided the complementary voice of a warm, loving patriarch. Henry Fonda also lent his voice to the homey tribute to the young men in battle. The voice-over narration is a little corny to contemporary ears, but the juxtaposition of these down-home American voices against the eerie, menacing beauty of bombs detonating in air—billowing black clouds of smoke slowly drifting over the Pacific—is indeed moving.

  But none of this recording was formally sanctioned by the military. When Ford returned to Los Angeles on June 18, 1942, he practically had to smuggle the footage into the country so that he could edit it before the navy brass could intervene, because there was concern that the footage showed the navy as unprepared for battle. Ford cleverly spliced in footage of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s son James, who was serving in the Pacific as a Marine Corps officer; when the eighteen-minute documentary was shown to the president, Roosevelt made sure that “every mother in America” would see the film uncensored. And Ford won his first Academy Award for Best Documentary, a new category created that year.

  Moved by the men he saw killed in action, Ford made another documentary short, this time an eight-minute tribute to the twenty-nine men (out of thirty) of Torpedo Squadron Eight who had died or were missing in action. He identified each man by name and sent copies of the 8mm film, called simply Torpedo Squadron 8, to all of the families of the deceased.

  Looking over Ford’s body of work, critics have noted that his wartime experience gave him the increased confidence to ignore public taste and follow his own inclinations. Film historian Mark Harris makes a similar point about John Huston and George Stevens, writing of the three men,

  Their experiences during the war had strengthened their resolve to let nothing compromise their work, not even popular taste….Ford, ever iconoclastic, chose to eschew the prestige of films like The Grapes of Wrath and instead embrace the degraded genre he loved best, shaping his own vision of America through the majestic, elegiac, morally complex westerns that, though they would win him no awards, would eventually form his most enduring legacy.

  But Ford had always followed his own instincts from the very beginning, willing to do battle with studio moguls whenever necessary. More to the point, his wartime naval experience, as well as his work filming alongside young fighting men he admired and came to know personally, was the most deeply satisfying period in a life studded with adventures, honors, and awards. And it was the ethos cultivated among fighting men that he would channel into the Cavalry Trilogy.

  FORT APACHE

  Fort Apache was filmed in Monument Valley, in scenes visually reminiscent of Stagecoach. It profoundly illustrates the meaning of honor, duty, and sacrifice and what it means to belong to a cadre of men, set against a landscape so immense in scale it both dwarfs men’s accomplishments and sets them in a mythological framework. Ford didn’t set out to film a trilogy, but the three Westerns—Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande, released between 1948 and 1950—all depict the struggles and challenges of the Seventh Cavalry division of the U.S. Army during the Indian wars from 1866 to 1881. Specific characters link these films as well: Duke plays Captain Kirby York in Fort Apache and returns as the promoted Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke (with an added e) in Rio Grande, while Sergeant Quincannon appears in all three. And all of the trilogy Westerns were based on Saturday Evening Post short stories by the Western writer James Warner Bellah.

  Bellah’s stories were militaristic and jingoistic, racist in their depictions of Native Americans. “My father was an absolute military snob,” James Bellah Jr. said about his father. “His politics were just a little right of Attila. He was a fascist, a racist, and a world-class bigot.” Bellah’s bigotry even extended to John Ford, whom he considered “a shanty Irishman.” He hated Hollywood, which he characterized as “full of Jews and crass commoners,” and he made no bones about being in it for the money. It’s interesting that Ford was drawn to Bellah’s stories for their subject matter and their cinematic qualities, but to his credit he backed away from Bellah’s depiction of Indians as rapacious killers.

  Further exploring Ford’s obsession with American history and tales of western conquest, Fort Apache was adapted from Bellah’s 1947 short story “Massacre,” but Ford clearly incorporates other allusions, particularly George Armstrong Custer’s disastrous Battle of Little Bighorn against the Sioux nation. Frank S. Nugent wrote the screenplay, which was nominated by the Writers Guild of America for a best screenplay award and which began a coll
aboration that would span eleven films. Nugent well knew that his screenplay was just the scaffolding for Ford and that Ford would provide much of the dialogue and dispense with exposition wherever possible. Ford was famous for ripping out pages of dialogue in his shooting scripts, and Nugent realized that “the writer had better keep out of his way. The finished picture is always Ford’s, never the writer’s.”

  This was true in nearly every aspect of Ford’s filmmaking. He took great pains, for example, to achieve a specific costume aesthetic even if it meant abandoning historical accuracy. When Bellah complained that “on the frontier, the troops didn’t wear those sloppy hats on garrison duty,” Ford reportedly looked him in the eye and answered, “They do now.” The cavalry hat turned up in the front was Ford’s invention. “The main thing with a Western is hats,” he believed. “If you have decent hats on people their character will come through.”

  Ford’s deepest sense of belonging and satisfaction was working with those core members of his stock company—screenwriter Dudley Nichols, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Dobe Carey, and, of course, Duke Wayne. Except for Anna Lee and Maureen O’Hara, it was a mostly male club with its own rituals, rules, expectations, and punishments. Happy unions between men and women are few and occur early in Ford’s oeuvre, increasingly replaced by the celebration of male camaraderie. Especially in his Cavalry Trilogy and his World War II movies, such as They Were Expendable and The Wings of Eagles, army life is presented as a preferable alternative to traditional marriage, a paean to male nobility, cohesiveness, sacrifice, and ritual, with little romance but lots of comic relief thrown in. These films are strongly homosocial—men working and living together in harmony—and what we might identify today as man-crushes or bromances abound, but homosexuality is unrealized and unspoken. Only glimpses filter through in some of the horseplay among men, including the extended brawls usually initiated by Victor McLaglen.

  Jack Donovan, the conservative extoller of hyper-masculinity, wrote, “Masculinity is about being a man within a group of men. Above all things, masculinity is about what men want from each other.” But because these are John Ford movies, the toughness of men living and fighting alongside men is softened by touches of domesticity and humor, often achieved by feminizing the burliest and most pugnacious actor. In 3 Godfathers, Ward Bond is wearing an apron and spritzing the roses when we first see him, and Duke Wayne clumsily diapers, feeds, and protects a newborn. In all three cavalry movies, Ford’s reliable character actor and favorite stock Irishman, Victor McLaglen, an ex-prizefighter who matched Wayne in sheer size and physical presence, supplies those lighter touches with comic drunkenness.

  Henry Fonda as Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday and John Wayne as Captain Kirby York in 1948’s Fort Apache.

  Ford’s interest in feminizing his heroes often pairs with an interest in order and structure. Fort Apache celebrates a certain kind of necessary order and the ritualistic observance of that order, beginning with its opening shots of the outpost’s officers and NCOs at a formal dance with their wives. Ford’s movies almost always include indigenous music and often include dancing, which serves two purposes: to illustrate the beauty and communal cohesiveness of formally choreographed movement, and to show, sometimes comically but often gracefully, tough men in the feminine act of dancing.

  In Ford’s My Darling Clementine, filmed two years before Fort Apache, lean, crane-like Henry Fonda dances stiffly, and he would be a comic figure if it were not for the solemnity he employs as he dances, or rather marches, his mate across the floor. In Fort Apache, bulky Ward Bond and towering John Wayne are surprisingly graceful on their feet. Their physical grace and courtliness toward the women living on the outpost mark them as superior men, able to fulfill the masculine requirements of their military calling but also willing to participate in—and enjoy!—the civilizing activity of dance. Through niceties of social behavior and dancing skill, Ford manages to feminize his manliest characters, rescuing them from stereotype. Or, looked at another way, real men do dance.

  In Fort Apache, John Wayne portrays Captain Kirby York, an admired Civil War veteran who is replaced as Fort Apache’s commander by West Point veteran Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, played by Henry Fonda. Thursday—a character roughly based on the infamous and ill-fated George Custer—has been demoted from his Civil War rank of general to take command of the Seventh Cavalry. He resents being sent to the desert outpost as much as he resents his demotion; he’s arrogant and officious and doesn’t understand the tight-knit culture of the men he must lead. He neither understands nor respects the culture of the Apache nation, who are threatening war. He woefully underestimates the strength and power of this enemy, considering them savages without honor, and thus he dooms his company to an ill-conceived and bloody slaughter.

  Duke’s Kirby York couldn’t be more different. He has an easy command of himself and other men. He loves and understands his soldiers, allowing them a certain amount of freedom in dress and deportment, which he feels is appropriate considering the remoteness of the outpost they are duty-bound to protect. Colonel Thursday, on the other hand, is a martinet—despite his objections to the contrary—who insists on West Point spit and polish on all occasions and is ruthless and ignorant in his dealings with the Apaches, unlike Captain York, who knows their chief to be a man of his word. A widower, he ends up derailing his daughter’s budding romance with the young second lieutenant Michael “Mickey” Shannon O’Rourke, who is just returning to the fort, where he was raised, after graduating from West Point. Thursday considers O’Rourke beneath him socially, even though the young soldier, like Thursday himself, has West Point credentials. Surprised that a man of low class would be awarded an appointment to the august military academy, Thursday is informed that Mickey’s father, Sergeant Major Michael O’Rourke, played by Ward Bond, won the Medal of Honor while serving in New York’s Irish Brigade during the Civil War, and thus earned his son’s appointment. But that’s not good enough. Blinded by class prejudice, Thursday refuses to see Mickey as the soldier and gentleman that he is: a good match for a commander’s daughter.

  Shirley Temple, whose childhood glory days included Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie—another film depicting the workings of a military outpost, this one set in India—is a winsome young woman by 1947 and appears as Colonel Thursday’s daughter, Philadelphia, who accompanies her stiff-necked father to his new post. She immediately falls in love with Mickey O’Rourke, played by her real-life husband at the time, John Agar. In a reversal of the standard romantic recognition scene, it’s the girl who is overwhelmed by her first sight of the boy’s beauty. Thursday and his daughter stop at a way station on the road to the cavalry outpost, where they encounter Mickey, also en route to Fort Apache. When they arrive, O’Rourke has stripped down to his trousers to wash up. The sight of the handsome, bare-chested, blond soldier mightily impresses Philadelphia, so when O’Rourke later makes his de rigueur duty call on his new commanding officer, the officer’s daughter is already smitten. His youthful but distinctly masculine appearance also delights his fellow soldiers, all of whom he has not seen in some years. Led by Sergeant Festus Mulcahy, played by Victor McLaglen, they have come to escort O’Rourke back to the outpost, whereupon Mulcahy immediately turns the youth over his knee and spanks him, a kind of initiation rite that acknowledges their friendship as well as O’Rourke’s new, manly status—as in, this is the last time O’Rourke will ever be spanked. This is but one of numerous scenes with an obvious homoerotic element; in others, Ford’s handsome young actors strip down to their bare, smooth chests.

  Former John Ford actor George O’Brien returned from movie obscurity in a small but important role as Captain Sam Collingwood, who is retiring from the army but still on the post awaiting a transfer to West Point, where he will become a teacher—a much-desired appointment. He will be the most tragic victim of Thursday’s wrongheaded battle with the Apaches, slaughtered just as his new orders have arrived. The athletic O’Brien had been, like Wayne, a former
property boy and stuntman at Fox. He had been a boxer and a lifeguard, and he knew how to ride a horse. Described by actress Joanne Dru as “poetic” and “beautiful,” he had been cast as the lead in The Iron Horse, according to his son, the novelist Darcy O’Brien, because “he demonstrated he was able to pick up a hat off the ground at full gallop.” Ford and O’Brien made six more movies together in the 1920s and early 1930s, but in 1947 they had barely spoken during the previous fifteen years, a deep schism caused by an ill-fated trip to the Philippines.

  In January 1931, Ford invited O’Brien to accompany him on a trip to the islands, one he’d originally planned to take with his wife, Mary. At the last minute, deciding to rough it and travel by freighter, he essentially gave O’Brien Mary’s ticket, and the two men set off on what was to be a grand adventure. Mary reportedly showed up to see the men off at the dock, weeping at being so summarily replaced as a traveling companion. But once they were there, it was a grinding sojourn, including twelve days in the grip of a typhoon, and the two men fell out. Ford grew bored and began drinking heavily; he was disappointed in O’Brien’s intellectual capabilities, calling him “Muscles.” Ford was a surly drunk, and by February, O’Brien continued the trip to Shanghai alone, leaving Ford to fend for himself.

  The rupture badly damaged O’Brien’s career. Like Wayne after his setback with Ford, O’Brien found work in B Westerns, but unlike Wayne his life as a leading man was virtually over. In 1947, O’Brien was hurting; his whole career had stalled out. His wife at the time, actress Marguerite Churchill, begged Ford to give O’Brien a part in Fort Apache. Ford reportedly answered, “I wouldn’t give that son of a bitch a part if he were the last actor on earth after what he did to me in the Philippines.” It was only when Marguerite appealed to Ford’s Catholicism, which Ford still clung to in spirit if not practice, that he decided to cast O’Brien in the small role of Captain Collingwood.