# What makes John Ford a great director? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 16, 2004, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-john-ford-a-great-director/229551 "2004-02-16T21:41:42Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![lissener](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lissener/32/6139_2.png) [@lissener](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lissener)\ **Post date:** [February 25, 2004, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-john-ford-a-great-director/229551/41 "2004-02-25T16:03:33Z")
> [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . MR AND MRS SMITH is Hitchcock’s comedy, it takes itself seriously, and it’s not very funny. . . . MR. AND MRS. SMITH was NOT Hitchcock’s only comedy; it was just his only comedy without a suspense plot. Almost all of Hitchcock’s films were comedies, with exceptions like Rebecca and The Paradine Case. Family Plot is an entire hoot; ditto NxNW and the Boids. > [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . I would argue that one of Ford’s great strengths, like Dickens’, is the wonderful “bit” characters. Ford creates real people, whether heroic or comic. . . . . . . or artificial and archetypical. Dickens is a good analogy: his characters had depth and range, but only his protagonists had any real humanity; all else were foils. Ditto in Ford: great supporting ensembles–comic choruses–but Ford was hardly a realist. I’d argue that Peckinpah, coming after the Italian Neorealists, was the first director to move the Western off of the soundstage (stylistically speaking; I know Ford shot on location) and into the dust. > [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . Maureen O’Hara being dragged along: Come on, you’re forgetting all the shit she put John Wayne through. Wayne didn’t want to fight, and she forced him to. She needed some come-uppance, some recognition that her behaviour was mean and horrible. And she’s obviously not being hurt by the dragging scene – she hops along putting on her shoe, she thanks the person who hands her the shoe, and at the end she’s happy with what Wayne has done. > > That may not be the way YOU’D react, but that’s CLEARLY the way she reacts and what she wants. . . . That’s my point EXACTLY. Sorry if I wasn’t clear. What makes that sequence so misogynist is the O’H is complicit in her degradation: she lacks the basic human dignity to protest. Or perhaps more accurately, her (and her culture’s) brand of female dignity included such abuse; did not see such treatment as anything a woman would have a right or a reason to object to, even to herself. > [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . Remember that most of Ford’s movies are set in an earlier era. The mythos of the West is that the home was the woman’s domain and the wilderness/polis was the man’s domain. There were clearly defined roles within the mythos. Ford uses those roles, and usually transcends them. . . . . That argument would be valid if I were saying that Ford was “required” to make films specifically about female empowerment, which I’m not. I’m saying his films specifically bought into and reinforced women’s position as a second-rates species. > [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . No, he doesn’t have women riding shotgun on the stagecoach or killing buffalo, and when he does do role-reversal (Jimmy Stewart in an apron being a waiter in LIBERTY VALANCE), it’s significant for the character and the plot. When Valance makes fun of the Stewart character, Stewart knows (and the audience knows) that he’s making fun of human dignity. . . . Not quite: Ford puts Jimmy Stewart in an apron to degrade his dignity: the apron is a symbol of Stewarts’ emasculation. His use of the apron reinforces my position, rather than undermining it. The apron is a symbol of weakness and ineffectualness. > [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . And I don’t know why the role of women should have anything to do with the greatness of a director. . . . . Not gonna say this again: I never said it did. _I_ said Ford was a great director, and _I_ said that his misogyny was worth noting. I never suggested they were mutually exclusive. I do not have a litmus test for artistic “greatness,” which is what you’re suggesting. Chaplin’s women are certainly anything but independent or strong-willed, and I don’t think anyone would deny Chaplin’s greatness. Where’s a strong woman in Hitchcock’s work? . . . . [/QUOTE] I would deny Chaplin’s “greatness.” I use the word as a kind of synonym for “genius,” and I don’t use it lightly. Chaplin was important and influential, but for greatness or genius there’d have to be a kind of transcendance of the medium, which I see in Ford, but not in (personally) in Chaplin. _Monsieur Verdoux_ almost achieves greatness, but not quite, IIMHO. (Chaplin’s habit of constantly addressing the camera with his eyes is extremely problematic for me; it seems to serve no purpose, and breaks the flow for me. It also constantly impresses upon me a sense of Chaplin’s _smallness_, his subconscious need for reassurance and approval, which diminishes his work for me a little.) Hitchcock’s characters were stylized, but his subtext was almost ALWAYS about the strength and power of women. The Birds is about Woman as a force of nature; most of his other films revolve around a woman–often surrounded by weak or cruel men–who must rely on her own strength and resolve to rise above her situation. (This is why I tend to link Hitchcock to Sirk and Verhoeven.) > [@C K Dexter Haven](#): > > . . . Great directors, like other Artists, are products of their times, and it’s unfair to charge them with failing to rise above their times. . . . Unfair? I don’t think it’s unfair to distinguish those artists who DID rise above their times from those who didn’t. Again, I still think of Ford as a great director, a great artist–personally, I place him above Hitchcock. In any case, you seem to contradict yourself. You can’t have it both ways, CK: either Ford DID in fact portray strong, complex human characters, or he didn’t; either he DID rise above his times, or he didn’t. By suggesting he didn’t rise, you excuse for his misogyny, which you’ve already denied. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-makes-john-ford-a-great-director/229551.md?page=2)