JOHN FORD

Orson Welles was once asked which directors he most admired He replied The old masters By which I mean John Ford John Ford and John Ford A legend in his own time John Ford 1894 1973 received a record four Academy Awards for best director and two of his World War II documentaries won Oscars for the US Navy He directed 136 films in a career that lasted from the early silent era through the late 1960s Ford is celebrated throughout the world as the cinema s foremost chronicler of American history the leading poet of the Western genre and a wide ranging filmmaker of profound emotional impact His classic films including Stagecoach 1939 The Grapes of Wrath 1940 How Green Was My Valley 1941 The Quiet Man 1952 The Searchers 1956 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 1962 remain widely popular and he has been acknowledged as a major influence on filmmakers such as Jean Renoir Ingmar Bergman Akira Kurosawa Howard Hawks Frank Capra Samuel Fuller Elia Kazan Sidney Lumet Martin Scorsese Steven Spielberg and George Lucas In this groundbreaking critical study Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington provide an overview of Ford s career as well as in depth analyses of key Ford films Analyzing recurring Fordian themes and relating each fi