I was not terribly impressed with this documentary, in which the great filmmaker's works are dissected to figure out what he felt and thought and was.
First, there was the essential problem of analyzing his films and what they mean to modern intellectuals. There is no doubt that for a work of art to survive, it must appeal to later generations for their own reasons. Yet Ford was not making these movies to comment on whether one twenty-first century American president was better than another, or whether in splitting his lead characters into representatives of one side or another in a conflict, that Ford was making it a matter of being "afraid of his feminine side". Sometimes, particularly in his later westerns, he made them in part to comment on contemporary issues that troubled him. He always stood with the underdog, but is that an expression of his personal Fenianism, or good story telling? After the famous DGA meeting in which Ford stood up, said "I'm John Ford. I make westerns. Mr. Demille, you make great pictures, but you're wrong", Ford called Demille. Is that nowadays considered so bizarre, to let your political opponent know you disagree with him, but respect him? If so, we live in parlous times.
Some of the statements offered in this documentary are clearly false, like Ford inventing the "Good Bad man" in STAGECOACH, as if William S. Hart were not the biggest Western star when Ford was directing his first movies, or being the first director to star John Wayne, as if Walsh's THE BIG TRAIL in 1930 and dozens of leads in B westerns did not count. If you ignore the world in which he lived and worked, how can you understand the man?
The conclusion offered is that John Ford was a man of conflicting impulses; he expressed his conflicting impulses in his movies, and he grew more overtly strident and angry with the America he saw as he grew older and his powers began to fade. Is this so unusual or noteworthy?
In the end, this movie is not about John Ford as a man, or even his movies. Ford is dead, and his movies must find their modern audience based on their virtues as this day and age perceives them. The documentary is about respectability, and respectability of the most irrelevant type. It is about academic respectability. To a business about selling tens or hundreds of millions of tickets to people of every stripe, academic respectability is of importance only to academics. I'm sure this particular work means a lot to them.
