Joseph McBride

Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge by Joseph McBride is everything one could hope for in a critical biography of a major figure. While many biographies make for fun rereads they don't often reward them with new insights, yet this is one biography I expect to read again and gain new perspective on both Wilder and human nature in general.

Yes, my opening paragraph might seem a bit hyperbolic at first glance but I think it is justified. I tend to look at biographies of celebrities in a couple of ways, basically what it did do and, sometimes more importantly, what pitfalls (for my tastes) it avoided. This book scored high marks in both broad categories.

I want a biography, especially a critical biography, to encompass the person's whole life and to make connections that might otherwise go unnoticed when just reading a timeline type biography. By timeline type I mean the ones that may well include a lot of detail but does little more than say what happened and then what happened next and then, well, you get it. They are useful biographies for those writing or researching the subject but serve as little more than a chronology. McBride casts a wide net and then proceeds to connect the various elements that are pulled in.

I particularly appreciated the way he kept the chronology of the biography throughout (no, he did not jump around on whims) but brought in connections when they presented themselves. This did mean addressing some future events (though not in detail, more as letting us know that this will be mentioned again later) and sometimes referring back to an event, which was usually covered in detail earlier in the book. But the flow, the basic chronology of Wilder's life, was structurally apparent to any active reader, though some lazy readers may get a little confused and feel lost.

While this can be considered an academic book (just because a university press publishes a book doesn't mean it is always what the general public would think of as an academic book) it is also quite accessible to anyone with an interest in film and media history. Those who simply enjoy good biographies will also be able to appreciate this book as well.

Now for what I was thankful not to see, which is what many books, even good ones, do far too much, and that is spend too much time on the sensationalized topics or events in a person's life. McBride includes things that could, in lesser hands, have devolved into several chapters of gossip and sensationalistic biography. And many readers want that in a biography of a public figure. I happen to just want to know what happened, how it might have been portrayed or understood at the time, and how it affected the subject. McBride gives me that information without making me feel like I'm reading a gossip rag.

I would highly recommend this to readers who like Wilder's work, like classic Hollywood cinema, and those who like to read about 20th century history in general. This is an engaging read that will entertain and inform. I also think that, in understanding how Wilder responded to the events in his life we can better understand other people, celebrities or not, who have lived through personally difficult times.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.… (meer)

SEARCHING FOR JOHN FORD was another tome that sat on my shelf for too long without being opened, but after reading Glenn Frankel’s excellent book on the making of THE SEARCHERS, I thought it was time to read Joseph McBride’s in depth look at man who routinely makes every Top Five list of greatest American directors of all time. At more than 700 pages, it is truly an in depth look at the man and the dissection of a career that began in the early days of silent movies and ended in the tumult of the mid 1960’s. In between we get the lowdown on the making of such classics as THE INFORMER, YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, STAGECOACH, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, FORT APACHE, THE QUIET MAN, THE SEARCHERS and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE along with a host of other films beloved by movie buffs the world over. The book is also the portrait of a man who could be called “difficult” on his best days as the reader is treated to stories of his legendary irascible temperament on the set.

McBride is a critic and film historian who clearly did exhaustive research for this biography, truly doing a search for the man behind the image, a search that included speaking with the director himself late in his life despite Ford being a notoriously bad subject for an interview. Far more revealing were the many friends and close associates of Ford that McBride was able to talk to while they were still alive, many of whom, like Olive Carey, the widow of actor Harry Carey, and Admiral John Bulkeley, the real life hero who THEY WERE EXPENDABLE was based on, were able to offer truly revealing insights into Ford’s character and his life, often seeing through the public persona the man worked so hard to project and giving us a glimpse at the vulnerabilities and insecurities that lurked underneath. McBride does offer a lot of opinion on Ford’s work, breaking down and deconstructing his films to reveal what this most visual of film makers was trying to convey. There is a lot of supposition and arm chair analysis, and if I didn’t necessarily agree with all of it, I will give McBride credit for backing up his arguments.

The book begins in Ireland, the land from which his parents immigrated to America from in the 1870’s, and the place that gave Ford his firm identity as an Irish American; born in Portsmouth, Maine, in 1894 with the name John Martin Feeney, his origin would bequeath him an outsider’s keen eye for hypocrisy and injustice, as well an understanding of human nature and its attendant flaws. He was also a young man with a sensitive artistic streak, one that he would spend a lifetime trying to hide behind a macho facade. He followed an older brother’s path to the stage and from there to the fledgling film industry, where he learned the business from D.W. Griffith himself – Ford is a Klansman in BIRTH OF A NATION. He eventually settled into directing and found his niche, making his first classic western, THE IRON HORSE, in 1924. By the time sound arrived, Ford was well on his way to becoming a one of the top directors in Hollywood, winning the first of his record four Academy Awards for THE INFORMER in 1935. He would come to see himself as a chronicler of American history with such films as DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK and YOUNG MR. LINCOLN, but it would be the western genre where Ford’s talent would really shine, starting with STAGECOACH in 1939, the movie that made John Wayne a star. It would be the western where Ford would really shine, ultimately producing a string of classics in the years after World War II that would seal his reputation as the foremost master of the horse opera. Yet one of his greatest films, and the one for which he won his second Academy Award, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, was set in contemporary times and tackled an urgent social issue. When asked about his films, Ford would shrug them off as “a job of work” as if he were nothing more than a journeyman director.

One of the revelations of this book is Ford’s service during World War II; he had joined the naval reserve in the mid 30’s and was commissioned an officer after Pearl Harbor. During the war, he would come under fire at the battle of Midway and on D-Day, in both cases leading teams of film makers on the front line to get some of the finest and most harrowing footage ever taken from combat, footage used in documentaries made to boost the war effort and to explain to the public in a pre television era what the war was all about. His years of service to his country were undoubtedly the high point of Ford’s life and would cast a shadow over his work for the remainder of his career. It would also color an increasingly bleak vision of America in the post war years.

For film buffs like me, McBride’s book gives us a fascinating look at Ford’s creative process and his collaborators, including frequent screen writers Frank Nugent and Dudley Nichols, along with producers Merian C. Cooper and Sonny Whitney, not mention studio heads like Daryl F. Zanuck. We are treated to such tidbits as how Ford would routinely cross out lines exposition from each script as soon as it was in his hands; how he instinctively knew how to stage a scene, whether it be set around a table in a log cabin or an Indian attack in the open country of Monument Valley; the tricks he would use to make sure a movie would be edited in the way he wanted it be by the studio. We meet the many beloved members of the “John Ford stock company,” including Victor McLaglen, Ward Bond, Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald, Harry Carey Jr., Mildred Natwick, John Qualen, Hank Worden, Ben Johnson, Woody Strode, Jack Pennick, Andy Devine, George O’Brien, Ken Curtis, not to mention the biggest star in the history of Hollywood, John Wayne, who started out a prop man on one of Ford’s silent movies in the late 20’s. In his director’s role, Ford clearly saw himself as the commanding officer, there to lead his crew of actors, stuntmen, and technicians to the successful completion of their mission. And in this he was not a gentle commander, for to work for Ford was to feel the lash of his sharp tongue and be on the receiving end of his short temper; the two most frequently y to get the rough treatment being Wayne and Bond, “Pappy” Ford’s surrogate sons. Yet there was always a method to the man’s madness as he made one classic movie after another and got terrific work out of all of his actors, who always returned for the next picture because to work for Ford was a guarantee you’d do your best. With few exceptions, he was loved by all who worked with him and considered their films made with him to be the high point of their careers.

The family is often at the center of many of Ford’s films, and it figures in the themes of most of them, yet in real life, he was a failure as a husband and father, a man who only felt at home on a movie set or the deck of his yacht; as the years went by, his increasing alcoholism would result in benders once a film was completed. The close bonds of the Joads in THE GRAPES OF WRATH or the Mogans in HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY could not be replicated in reality. It was one of the many contradictions McBride documents well. So too Ford’s politics, for the man could be a staunch liberal, voting for FDR and Truman and publicly taking a stand against loyalty oaths in Hollywood during the McCarthy era, yet becoming conservative enough later on that he remained silent as Wayne and Bond led efforts that blacklisted many in the movie industry and overseeing the production of a pro Vietnam War documentary for the Johnson Administration in 1968.

In the later years of his career, Ford took an increasingly pessimistic view of modern America, his last great western, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is one of the saddest movies to ever come out of Hollywood, yet unlike The Duke and Ward Bond, he did not retreat into reactionary super patriotism and publicly support politicians who promised to turn the clock back, he seemed to sense that what was lost was gone for good. But to his credit, he took chances in his old age, starting with THE SEARCHERS and continuing through CHEYENNE AUTUMN, he tackled to subject of racism in his own way. And for this director who is most famous for his male dominated films, his last movie, 7 WOMEN, has a mostly female cast, with one character clearly suppressing lesbian tendencies; hardly the stuff of an old man chasing past glory. Even though Hollywood considered him over the hill and no longer box office, Ford was still trying to get back behind the camera and get another project going right up until terminal illness struck him down in the early 70’s.

Yet as his career behind the camera faded into the sunset, his influence only grew larger, as a new generation of directors watched and learned from the master; Sergio Leone, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese are among the few who would openly pay homage to Ford in their films, many made long after the man had left the scene. For us movie buffs, his gallery of vivid characters, live and breathe still, as real today as the first time we were introduced to them: Gypo Nolan from THE INFORMER; The Ringo Kid and Dallas from STAGECOACH; the Joads from THE GRAPES OF WRATH; Huw Morgan and his coal mining father from HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY; Ole and Drisk from THE LONG VOYAGE HOME; Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday and Chihuahua from MY DARLING CLEMENTINE; Colonel Owen Thursday from FORT APACHE; Kirby and Kathleen Yorke from RIO GRANDE; Travis Blue and Elder Wiggs from WAGON MASTER; Sean Thornton and Mary Kate Danipher from THE QUIET MAN; Ethan Edwards and Martin Pauley from THE SEARCHERS; Liberty Valance and Tom Doniphon from THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. In the course of reading this book, I ran across most of them at one time or another on TCM, AMC or any of the other movie channels in my cable package. Blu Rays and DVDs of his films can found in every true cinephile’s library. More than that, when I saw HELL OR HIGH WATER (released in 2016) a few months ago, I could see echoes of John Ford’s poetry in nearly every scene. In the great hereafter, I’m sure Ford would be mightily pleased by all this, not that he would ever let you know it.

Joseph McBride’s biography, first published in 2001, is the definitive book on John Ford, truly doing justice to the man and his vibrant legacy. A must read for anyone who loves movies.… (meer)