Doug Moe: Film scholar can say he found John Ford
LAST WEEK was pretty special for Joe McBride, a Wisconsin native who studied film at UW-Madison in the late 1960s and in 1970 went west to interview the great director John Ford.
McBride spent an hour with Ford, or, I should say, spent an hour in Ford's company. As a film scholar, McBride has actually spent decades with the famed director of such classics as "The Searchers" and "Fort Apache," and the association may have peaked last week.
McBride, who is currently teaching a film class on Ford at San Francisco State University, was intimately involved with the Dec. 4 release of "Ford at Fox," a DVD box that collects 24 of the 50-plus films Ford made for that studio. Last week also brought the publication in France of McBride's 2001 book, "Searching for John Ford: A Life," widely regarded as the definitive Ford biography. The French have a great appreciation of John Ford.
McBride's own appreciation began in Madison, where with fellow film buff Mike Wilmington he fought to show Ford's films through the campus Wisconsin Film Society.
Orson Welles revered Ford, and that was good enough for McBride. But Ford was not exactly in fashion on the UW-Madison campus in the late 1960s. His close identification with John Wayne, star of many Ford films, and Wayne's cheerleading for the Vietnam War, didn't help. Ford's themes of loyalty and honor, now seen as enduring, were deemed old-fashioned. McBride remembers students in a film class in Madison laughing during a showing of Ford's "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon."
McBride and Wilmington weren't laughing. "We were in a small group that took him seriously," McBride was saying this week, from San Francisco.
Seriously enough that the two undertook a book, a critical study of Ford's films. It was that project that took McBride to Los Angeles in August 1970. He had secured an interview with the great man, who was then 76. (The Ford interview, as we shall see, turned out to be a mixed bag, though on the same trip McBride not only met and interviewed Orson Welles, he wound up playing a role in the film Welles was shooting, the yet-to-be-released "The Other Side of the Win.")
Ford was famously crusty during interviews. When McBride noted he was a film student at the University of Wisconsin, Ford snorted: "Is that in Madison or Ann Arbor?" McBride thought Ford was putting him on -- as he likely was when the director claimed not to remember some of his films. "It was kind of comical," McBride said. "I was 23. I hadn't met many people in the industry."
Ford softened at points during their discussion, and in any case McBride felt the encounter highly worthwhile. "He was such an enigmatic, complicated figure," McBride said, "just having been able to observe him was important."
When the critical study was published -- first in Great Britain, then in the United States -- the next logical step was a biography. When McBride contacted Ford about it, the director didn't dismiss the idea out of hand. He asked for time to mull it over, and McBride began interviewing Ford's friends and associates. The question of Ford's own participation was answered when the director became seriously ill. He died in August 1973, three years after he and McBride first spoke.
Like the hero in a Ford movie, McBride persevered. He continued looking for the man behind the gruff legend -- while writing other books on other subjects, and living a life -- and then, in 1997, McBride finally felt ready to start writing the biography. It's exhaustive -- the French edition published last week is 1,168 pages -- and authoritative and it no doubt precipitated McBride's participation in the new "Ford at Fox" boxed set.
McBride wrote the text for a coffee table book included with the DVD set, and he's one of the principal interview subjects in a documentary on Ford that is also included. Finally, McBride did full-length commentaries for some of the films, including "The Grapes of Wrath" and "Pilgrimage," a 1933 feature that McBride calls Ford's "first great film."
Over the years a lot of people went in search of John Ford. Now, as much as anyone, Joe McBride can lay claim to having found him.
Heard something Moe should know? Call 252-6446, write P.O. Box 8060, Madison, WI 53708, or e-mail dmoe@madison.com
