In John Ford, The Man Who Invented America ( John Ford, l'homme qui inventa l'Amérique 2019), French filmmaker Jean-Christophe Klotz has no magic wand to solve the riddle of John Ford, let alone explain how he 'invented' America. His selected film clips instead offer a specific political assessment of the filmmaker's grand contradictions. But if John Ford does represent a true America, it's a dream that refuses to be defined.
Klotz began as a foreign correspondent for news agencies. He has made several documentaries and at least one dramatic feature about genocide in Rwanda. His essay film The Man Who Invented America makes the case for Ford as a champion of liberal ideas. Film clips and interviews alternate with speeches about Ford's bold Westerns, backed by beautiful on-the-road scenery. The narration celebrates John Ford's American values, without defining what they might be.
The auteurist thesis of director Klotz and his co-writer Francois Bringer asserts that Ford's films are an autobiography, that they can be taken as his unspoken philosophy. The fact that these films were collaborations with other writers is not mentioned. Film clips are chosen to illustrate Ford's assumed liberal values, and the narration calls him 'conflicted' and 'ambiguous' when the clips don't cooperate. Bankers are villains in Stagecoach (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), but that doesn't mean that Ford hated banks. His dispossessed Oakies, worried homesteaders and soldiers in harm's way express traditional values of honor and family, not intellectual arguments. If Ford's pictures had ideological messages, they were indirect.
Klotz frames his film with a road trip through picturesque Monument Valley, the fantastic landscape on the Arizona-Utah border immortalized by Ford's Westerns. One of Klotz's first film clips is the famous door-opening shot from The Searchers (1956), and Klotz uses its dream-like beauty to color the rest of his film. In clips from Peter Bogdanovich's interview film Directed by John Ford (1971), the director comes off as a curmudgeon, a senior-citizen juvenile delinquent. Good questions are given insulting one-word answers. We later see some polite English interviewers suffering similar uncooperative abuse.
Preeminent Ford biographer Joseph McBride characterizes the director as a well-read intellectual who rarely if ever acknowledged himself as a film artist. McBride addresses Ford's contrarian belligerence and attempts to understand the director's self-contradictions. Home movies taken on Ford's sailboat show him partying with associates; McBride adds that when he wasn't filming, he's often drinking to excess. He draws attention to Ford's actions during the blacklisting years. After serving his country with bravery and distinction in WWII, Ford was investigated by the FBI as a possible subversive. He famously opposed the right-wing director Cecil B. DeMille in public yet supported him in private. Even as Ford's later work seems to express liberal values, his personal views turned more conservative. What we mainly learn is that the 'real' John Ford remains unknowable.
Other interviews do not add clarity. Historian Michel Cieutat describes the director's mentoring relationship with his star John Wayne. Philosopher Cécile Gornet suggests that Ford was repressed and that his films express masculine and feminine conflicts. Ford's grandson Daniel dismisses the philosophical angle. He feels that his grandfather simply held the values of a grateful son of immigrants.
A ranching couple in Texas assert that Ford's Westerns reflect true American values, that the country was founded on John Wayne's simple ideas of right and wrong. Director Klotz then cuts to President Donald Trump at a political event at John Wayne's birthplace. American Literature professor Nancy Schoenberger notes that Trump's use of fact-challenged storytelling relates to the famous 'print the legend' theme of Ford's elegiac Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), wherein Ford questions the American habit of turning convenient hero stories into history, even when they contradict the facts.
The narration script sees film history through a PC filter, calling on Ford's Sergeant Rutledge (1960) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964) to support Ford's non-racist, inclusive credentials. At Monument Valley's Goulding trading post, present-day Navajos watch clips of Ford's Westerns and identify relatives and friends. We then meet Navajo filmmaker/activist Angelo Baca, who uses his on-screen time to protest the Trump administration's efforts to override protections and open Monument Valley for mining and construction.
The film's visuals are beautiful, but its conclusions about John Ford are debatable. Is John Wayne's old soldier in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) really a pacifist? Did Wayne and Ford really have differences about the political content of their movies? The classic The Searchers is held up as an unequivocal statement against racism, when its message can also be interpreted as a nonpartisan, 'this is just how things are.' John Ford, The Man Who Invented America goes so far as to suggest that the director strove to 'deconstruct his own legend': "Something had broken in John Ford. He seemed no longer to believe in the America that he had glorified through all his films."
By Glenn Erickson
