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Overview"John Ford remains the most honoured director in Hollywood history, having won six Academy Awards and four New York Film Critics Awards. Drawing upon extensive written and oral history, Ronald L. David explores Ford's career from his silent classic, ""The Iron Horse"", through the transition to sound, and then into the pioneer years of location filming, the golden years of Hollywood and the movement toward television. During his career, Ford made such classics as ""Stagecoach"", ""The Grapes of Wrath"", ""How Green Was My Valley"", and ""The Searchers"" - 136 pictures in all, 54 of them Westerns. The complexity of his personality comes alive here through the eyes of his colleagues, friends, relatives, film critics and the actors he worked with, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara and Katharine Hepburn." Full Product DetailsAuthor: Ronald L. DavisPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press Imprint: University of Oklahoma Press Edition: New edition Volume: No. 10 Dimensions: Width: 14.00cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 21.50cm Weight: 0.408kg ISBN: 9780806129167ISBN 10: 0806129166 Pages: 384 Publication Date: 01 February 1997 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsReviewsThis new biography of one of America's greatest filmmakers places great emphasis on the nasty side of his personality. As Davis (History/Southern Methodist Univ; The Glamour Factory, 1993, etc.) shows, Ford was a difficult man to know and to work with, a cantankerous, irascible genius with a penchant for hard drinking and verbal abuse of actors and technicians. That doesn't, however, dim the brilliance of his films, as Davis points out: Ford won six Oscars, and his filmography boasts some of the greatest achievements in American cinema, including Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, How Green Was My Valley, My Darling Clementine, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. A first-generation Irish-American, Ford fancied himself as a tough, working-class son of the Ould Sod and wasn't above mythologizing his roots. Davis traces his life and career in equal parts, from his Maine childhood (on which this book is refreshingly enlightening) to his silent-movie days in the budding film industry and on through his many triumphs. Davis appears to have interviewed virtually every surviving member of Ford's informal stock company, eliciting often disturbing stories of his off-set alcoholism and on-set temper. The story of the director's physical and emotional decline toward the end of his career makes for particularly painful reading. However, while Davis has added some brush strokes to the existing picture of Ford, his book is repetitive and frequently dull. Davis has little of interest to say about the films themselves, adding nothing to the already voluminous critical literature, and his occasional excursions into psychobiography are off-target (as in the fatuous, casual suggestion that Ford might have been a repressed homosexual). Although not without its useful contributions to the Ford story, this book does not fill the need for a definitive biography of this major American artist. (Kirkus Reviews) Author InformationRonald L. Davis is Emeritus Professor of History at Southern Methodist University, where he was Director of both the Oral History Program on the Performing Arts and the De Golyer Institute for American Studies. He has written many books on the performing arts in America, including the best-seller Hollywood Anecdotes. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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