You Have A Mother Don’t You?
Andrew O’Hagan
- Searching for John Ford: A Life by Joseph McBride
Faber, 838 pp, £25.00, May 2003, ISBN 0 571 20075 3
It’s odd to think that Abraham Lincoln was killed by an actor, because most of the memorable American Presidents to follow him were actors in their blood. Eisenhower excelled in the part of the sturdy veteran who’d come home to tidy the porch, and Nixon was every part in The Godfather rolled into one. But it took Ronald Reagan to drive the matter past the point of absurdity: president of the Screen Actors’ Guild as well as star of Bedtime for Bonzo. The person who today seems most like a real President is Martin Sheen, who plays one in The West Wing.[1] George W. Bush – the less real real President – has settled for the part of a B-movie cowboy, and takes his role very seriously. Only the other day he was talking about ‘riding herd’ with the Middle East peace process.
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[1] The favourite TV programme of Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s hot-water-friendly chief of staff. So much does Powell love it, according to the Guardian journalist Marina Hyde, that ‘when the actors from the show were in town he summoned John Spencer, who plays the President’s fictional chief of staff, to Downing Street for a chat.’
[2] Pelosi’s film, Journeys with George, is essentially a home-movie of Bush with the press corps, drinking fake beer with fake friends on the way, as it turned out, to a fake mandate. But the film affords several moments of great political insight. Pelosi: ‘If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?’ Bush: ‘I’m not, I’m a Bush.’
[3] This is not just a matter for the Indians. Hollywood’s treatment of Arabs is described by Jack Shaheen in a valuable new book, Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People (Arris, 574 pp., £14.99, May, 1 84437 019 4), as ‘cinema’s systematic, pervasive and unapologetic degradation and dehumanisation of a people’. The book at one point focuses on Ford’s The Lost Patrol, in which British troops are said to be engaged in ‘fighting an unseen Arab enemy who always struck in the dark, like a relentless ghost’. The Victor McLaglen character speaks of Arabs that ‘hide like sandflies’, and another soldier fantasises about ‘the joy of killing Arabs . . . sneaky Arabs. Those dirty, filthy swine.’ ‘The scenario,’ Shaheen remarks, ‘never describes why Arabs fight the British, or shows an Arab soldier dreaming of home, being with friends and family.’
[4] A striking book about such friends in trouble, The Memory of All That by Betsy Blair (Knopf, 352 pp., $25, April, 0 37541 299 9), was published this year. There we learn how the Blacklist could be repelled in an instant only by the very few – Blair’s then husband Gene Kelly was one. The book tells wonderful stories and had a good reception, but that didn’t stop it from being opposed on political grounds in one or two Hollywood quarters, showing how Anti-Communism lingers on.
[5] The story, called ‘John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, is a sort of dialogue drawing on the Jacobean dramatist and the film-maker. In a note to the story she Carterishly underscores the political point: ‘The Old World John Ford made Giovanni cut out Arabella’s heart and carry it onstage; the stage direction reads: Enter Giovanni, with a heart upon his dagger. The New World John Ford would have no means of representing this scene on celluloid, although it is irresistibly reminiscent of the ritual tortures practised by the Indians who lived here before.’
Letters
Vol. 25 No. 19 · 9 October 2003
From Clancy Sigal
Andrew O'Hagan is less than fair about John Ford's role during the period of the Hollywood blacklist (LRB, 11 September). I speak as a blacklistee. Ford could be brutal, sexist and cantankerous. But he was no coward. As the anti-Red purge was gathering steam, and men and women of goodwill (and bad conscience) were scattering to the Malibu hills in fear, Ford attended a Directors' Guild meeting where Cecil B. DeMille was haranguing his colleagues, urging them to expel certain of their liberal members like Joseph Mankiewicz or force them to sign a loyalty oath. Against the current of the times, Ford stood up and told DeMille to go to hell.
Clancy Sigal
Los Angeles
Vol. 25 No. 20 · 23 October 2003
From Andrew O’Hagan
I admire Clancy Sigal's attempt to be fairer to John Ford on the Red-baiting front than I was (Letters, 9 October), but surely he knows that artists are likely to be more than one thing. Ford may have distinguished himself by telling Cecil B. DeMille to shut his trap, but he was not always so clear when it came to the question of Communists in Hollywood.
'While he was fighting the blacklist at the Directors Guild,' Joseph McBride, Ford's biographer, said in a recent interview, 'he was also part of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, which was the ringleader of the blacklist. It was a dangerous game, playing both sides of the fence to protect himself.' Ford was clearly one of those men whose hatreds were so general and so brutal that any softening on his part could be taken for a declaration of moral support. He didn't like DeMille's haranguing of Communists, but that doesn't mean he liked Communists; the fact is he liked Communists much less than, say, Elia Kazan, who still managed to be an informer, and who died last week not entirely forgiven. It was a frightening and confusing time, and my point was that John Ford, for all his bluster and passion, did not show himself to be immune to such fears and such confusions. He made no attempt to oppose Ward Bond and John Wayne in their persecution of people on the left – he never, for a second, shied from giving those two actors work – and it seems to me that his position on the blacklist is mostly a history of wilful fudging.
There may be another truth hiding in all this. Like his friend Frank Capra, Ford would appear to have had a good instinct for what it would take to make liberal films in Hollywood, i.e. a director who was not thought to be a Communist. Another blacklistee, the writer and director Abraham Polonsky, pointed out in the 1970s that the studios would only really allow moderates to make political films. Capra 'could do anything he liked', Polonsky said, 'and Ford', by remaining right-wing, 'might do something tremendous like The Grapes of Wrath.'
That's Hollywood. And on that fact I wholeheartedly defer to Mr Sigal, who once captured the place in a sentence. 'Too many freeways, too much sun, too much abnormality taken normally, too many pink stucco houses and pink, stucco consciences.'
Andrew O’Hagan
London E8
From Edward Buscombe
According to Joseph McBride, John Ford did indeed argue against Cecil B. DeMille's attempt to force a loyalty oath on the Screen Directors Guild, but mainly because he feared it would split the Guild and reduce its effectiveness. Ford didn't exactly tell DeMille to go to hell at the meeting. Instead, he said of his fellow director: 'I think he is a great guy … I admire him. I don't like him, but I admire him.' Afterwards he sent DeMille a letter, calling him 'a magnificent figure … I have never seen such courage as you displayed Sunday night. God bless you, you're a great man.' It seems as though Ford, having stuck his neck out, hurriedly back-pedalled. The end result, in any case, was that the Screen Directors Guild did vote to enforce a loyalty oath, thus ensuring that blacklisting prevailed, a decision it rescinded only when forced to do so by the US Supreme Court in 1966.
Edward Buscombe
London NW6
