The Quiet Man

Directed by John Ford

Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

Fans of John Ford’s Western panache know the unique flourishes of his movie landscape: As magnificent silhouettes ride horseback across a desolate horizon—their heroic forms outlined with the gorgeous palette of a setting sun, their cadences set to a glorified soundtrack—he creates a fantastical vision of the American frontier. Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary, Directed by John Ford, extracts this aesthetic from the director’s half-century career, essentially making clip-show pornography. You couldn’t ask for a better subject. Ford’s movies speak for themselves as relics of sincerity from a forgotten age; the ’70s introduced us to Clint Eastwood’s lone rider, and the genre began a slow decline toward self-parody and cynicism. The regular faces that populate Ford’s oeuvre—particularly John “Duke” Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda—battled to uphold a moral system in a world suffering from disrepair. They weren’t always successful (“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a steely-eyed reporter retorts to Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), but the messages were unmistakable. 

That’s a good thing for Bogdanovich, because Ford’s profound filmmaking is far more illustrative than he was during interviews. The documentary, premiering on Turner Classic Movies on Nov. 7 in an updated version of the original 1971 cut, features brief excerpts from discussions with Ford near the end of his life. His answers are moody and curt. When asked how he shot a specific scene, he abruptly replies, “with a camera,” then puffs his cigar and sits in silence. 

Other interviewees fill in the gaps: The Duke discusses how Ford got him interested in motion pictures, Stewart recalls Ford’s strict set dynamic and Fonda, delivers anecdotes as his wide eyes fill with nostalgia. The occasional narration by Orson Welles fleshes out a grandiose aura. All this material was recorded roughly 30 years ago; Bogdanovich brings us into the present through new interviews with equally iconic filmmakers, notably Eastwood and Steven Spielberg, who recall the influence of Ford’s mythmaking on their own artistic development. Spielberg shares a wonderful anecdote from his teen years, when he wandered into a studio office and received a sudden lecture on proper camera positioning from Ford himself. It makes an easy case for connecting the dots between Young Mr. Lincoln and Spielberg’s upcoming biopic on the assassinated president. 

Although there’s hardly enough information to get a sense for Ford’s life, Bogdonavich provides so many excerpts from the movies that the directorial talent is unmistakable. That makes it a perfect introduction to TCM’s month-long schedule of Ford films beginning after the documentary debuts, in addition to a similar retrospective at BAM Rose Cinema kicking off on Nov. 22 with The Searchers. It’s no coincidence that Bogdanovich closes his tribute with the memorable final shot from that classic Duke vehicle exploring American-Indian crossbreeding; in a gorgeous frame-within-frame composition, Ford demonstrated that the power of cinema was a dialect of its own.