Manly Characteristics in Film: John Ford Movies

Exploring the Manly Characteristics of John Ford’s Westerns

The overt masculinity of the leading men of John Ford’s Westerns has long been recognized as a major part of their success. He is credited with creating many enduring classics in the genre, including Stagecoach, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Searchers.

Even though Ford directed no more than 32 films, many of which were Westerns, critics and film historians consider him one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of American cinema. He won six Academy Awards, was a member of the American Film Institute’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and was hailed as a “legend” by President Nixon.

Although he became famous for his Westerns, Ford’s career included numerous comedies and historical dramas. He was also a prolific writer and often adapted his own stories into films. He was known for his “Stock Company” of actors and crew, a large group of professionals used in his films, including names like Will Rogers, Henry Fonda, and Maureen O’Hara.

In many of his Westerns, Ford emphasized the contrasting values that can exist between civilization and nature. He argued that it was up to the individual to choose whether he would be a good or bad person; if he decided to be a good person, he should do what was right for others.

He pushed his Westerns to explore issues like racism, the moral fallibility of violence, and the delineation of male and female roles in society. These eloquently written films cross-examined the conventions of the Western and their implications and the myth-making process behind them.

Examples of Ford’s exploration of racism, violence, and gender roles can be seen in The Searchers, where he portrays Native Americans as complex characters, and in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, where he examines the consequences of violence.

Ford’s best-known Westerns include The Searchers, The Informer, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In all these films, Ford conveyed the essence of real men through their actions and attitudes.

The search for true love, the struggle to find a mate, and to protect those closest to you are manly characteristics and themes that permeate Ford’s films. He also explored the nature of friendship and loyalty, showing how much one person can do for another when willing to give up everything they hold dear.

Examples of Ford’s exploration of themes such as love, friendship, and loyalty can be seen in The Searchers, where Ethan Edwards searches for years for his niece, and in The Informer, where Gypo Nolan risks his life for his friend.

Characteristics of a Good Man

John Ford is known as a director of Westerns, but he also directed several other acclaimed films. These included 2 and 3 reel silent films starring Harry Carey, as well as several more modern sound movies. He is also credited with being the first Hollywood director to use stock footage; many of these films still exist.

The good man character is the central motif in many of Ford’s Westerns. The protagonists often appear as stereotypical caricatures, but their humanity is discovered as the film progresses. This humanistic dimension makes John Ford one of the most enduringly popular and cherished directors of all time.

In addition to his Westerns, Ford also made numerous films based on American historical events. This includes such noteworthy titles as Drums Along the Mohawk (Universal, 1917), a New York state story about militia men who defend their town from attack by Native Americans during the American Revolutionary War, and The Black Watch (Universal, 1929), which was a colonial army adventure set in the Khyber Pass.

These films are all regarded as bona fide Hollywood / John Ford classics. They feature some of the most memorable actors in Hollywood history, such as Henry Fonda and John Wayne, who starred in the iconic western The Searchers (1956). They are some of the most critically acclaimed films ever made.

When asked to describe his ideal director, John Ford famously said that “the secret is to make films that please the public and allow the director to reveal his personality.” These were not just sentimental Westerns; they were evocative and heartfelt depictions of America as the greatest place on earth.

Despite the fact that these sentimental and heartfelt films are hardly in fashion today, they still have the power to make audiences cry with abandon. They also feature some of the most evocative and heartwarming moments in cinema.

For all the action, violence, and excitement that Ford’s Westerns offer, they are ultimately about the bonding of men to each other. It’s a bond that is both physical and emotional. In many of his films, the most touching scenes involve characters reuniting after a long time away or having fallen in love with a good woman.

Examples of this include the iconic scene in The Searchers where Fonda and Wayne’s characters reunite after a long time apart and the heartwarming moment in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) when the townspeople come together to honor a hero.

Characteristics of a Bad Man

Ford was a very moral and aesthetic man, and he often made big social and political statements in his films. He understood the west (specifically Monument Valley) and its inhabitants better than most of his contemporaries, allowing him to make big themes like right and wrong and a struggle for survival in this rugged landscape come alive on screen.

He also used his Westerns to explore themes like racial identity, Irish identity, and the plight of the underclass. For example, in The Grapes of Wrath, Ford depicted the struggles of the Joad family, a poor family from Oklahoma, as they travel to California in search of a better life. He also explored racial identity in his film Cheyenne Autumn, where he showed the struggles of Native Americans as they were forced to relocate to reservations.

His most well-known Western, The Grapes of Wrath, was a classic that was also awarded the Best Director Oscar in 1940.

In a few of Ford’s early movies, he made an effort to portray a more realistic depiction of Native Americans. This was a particularly important aspect for Ford because he loved the Navajo tribe. He was keen to ensure that the characters spoke in their native language, but he would sometimes change this when filming on location and using actors who were not Native Americans.

One of his first films, and the oldest surviving of his career, Straight Shooting, stars Harry Carey, and it depicts a battle on the western prairie between farmers and cattle men. It was a very popular picture, and it helped Ford establish his reputation as a filmmaker.

Another starring Carey, one of the most famous of Ford’s early Westerns, is Wagon Master (1943). It encapsulates many of the themes that Ford would later explore in his best films and is an excellent example of how he would use the stagecoach as a vehicle to highlight the importance of fraternity and community in the wild west.

This film also highlights the idea of Stockholm Syndrome, which describes how captives can be drawn to their captors and begin to love them. This is a common theme in many of Ford’s Westerns, and it’s one that we see again here with the three bad men who take a young girl in during a battle.

The other major character in the film is a drunk town doctor (Thomas Mitchell) who is forced to leave town when he’s caught drinking in front of a morality committee. This is an interesting choice for Ford, as it shows how he was aware of the social and emotional impact that alcohol had on people. He also shows how alcohol could cause moral problems, another theme that he would continue exploring in his later films.

Characteristics of a Good Woman

Ford often portrayed the West as a world in process, from a more primitive state to one more receptive to law and order. This is true of many of his Westerns, but The Searchers is the most explicitly Hegelian of them all.

The savage and rugged frontiers of the Old West were the cradle of American culture and, in turn, of the Western genre, which emerged in the early twentieth century. Its enduring appeal was largely due to the image of an idealistic, yet competent, untamed hero who, sometimes willing to use violence to express his fervor, never strayed far from the law.

Early Western films followed the standard formula: rugged, likable hero, foreign opponent who acted as a foil to his virtuous persona. He was often a Native American or, less frequently, a well-dressed man from the East.

The woman in these films was almost always a passive, sexual object. She was usually called the town whore, dance hall girl, or good-time gal. She was euphemistically labeled as the woman of the town, but she inevitably slipped into the category of the bad woman or, at worst, was jilted and shunned by those who took the moral high ground.

Ford, however, readjusted these roles in his Westerns, such as in Stagecoach (1939) where the female character Dallas (Claire Trevor) is a complex and independent woman. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), Hallie (Vera Miles) is a strong-willed woman who stands up for herself and her beliefs.

In addition, many of these women acted as auxiliary or comedic support for the hero. In the end, their stories tended to follow the same predictable path as the hero’s: they were jilted in favor of a virtuous woman, shunned by those who took their moral high ground, or killed for some unnamed and fatal moral malady.

What was surprising about Ford’s work in the Western genre was that he rarely fell into the routine of presenting these female characters as passive, sexual objects. Instead, he often played with these roles and readjusted them so that they were not simply the “good” women of the town but characters who drove the story along and made significant plot-related decisions.

The most obvious example of this is Ford’s portrayal of the hero Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in The Searchers. Like Aeschylus’ Oresteia, he is a hero who implacably pursues the Indian tribe that nearly killed his family and kidnapped his niece. He also shows us an eloquent but often misunderstood representation of the underlying tension between the pursuit of revenge, and the pacifying influence of religion, which is mirrored in Oresteia’s central conflict. It is a theme that runs through Ford’s entire career, and it helped him achieve such widespread popular recognition.