John Ford in Space

Like most people in the COVID era, I think a lot about space. Not outer space, like the wealthy elites preparing to flee the climate change they’ve brought on the world, but physical space, the kind we inhabit every day.

Perhaps more than any other film genre, it’s common to think of the western in those terms: space, interior vs exterior, closed vs open. For example, an article in The Atlantic advised viewers to “Escape From Quarantine With a Western Movie”, with author David Sims claiming he had been looking for “the least claustrophobic movie possible” and had found it in the western genre at large. Sims primarily cites Hawks’ Red River, but also mentions Ford’s Stagecoach, a film I’ve been obsessing over for the last several weeks. Today I want to combine these two threads and talk about space in the works of John Ford.

Let’s start not with Stagecoach but with Ford’s subsequent Young Mr. Lincoln, a film as hokey as it is gut-wrenching. Like many of Ford’s finest films, this not-quite-western is a series of juxtapositions: urban and rural, serenity and tempestuousness, law and chaos, truth and fiction, interior and exterior. Telling the story of the early law career of Abraham Lincoln (Henry Fonda), Young Mr. Lincoln hinges on a murder case in which Lincoln is tasked with saving the lives of the two young men accused of the crime. The film mixes the deep intensity of a lynch mob which attempts to hang the two boys before their trial with the quiet grace of Lincoln’s idyllic upbringing, even when visiting the gravestone of his childhood sweetheart Ann. In some ways Young Mr. Lincoln is the quintessential Ford movie, Searchers and Stagecoach be damned; the greatest productive friction in his entire career is the one between Lincoln as a young lawyer and Lincoln as the future president we learn of in the history books. Fonda makes for a better youthful, idealistic Lincoln than Daniel Day-Lewis made for a troubled and war-torn Lincoln 73 years later.

But the greatest collaboration between Ford and Fonda was yet to come, in the form of The Grapes of Wrath, an adaptation of John Steinbeck in which Fonda plays Tom Joad, who travels with his family from the Oklahoma Dust Bowl to California in search of prosperity and employment. Like the best road films, the journey itself is not taken for granted, and Ford highlights the perils of open space and the chasm that separates the Joads from their apparent salvation.

This is, of course, also the primary tension of Stagecoach, Ford’s masterpiece, in which a group of travelers make a dangerous journey to Lordsburg by titular stagecoach. Again, Ford refuses to take geographic space for granted; as in The Grapes of Wrath, not all will survive the journey.

But as much as Ford dramatizes the open space of the travel (filmed through Monument Valley, a favored location of Ford), Stagecoach hinges just as much on the interior space of the stage, a tight, claustrophobic arrangement in which the passengers (including a young John Wayne) “bounce off one another”, as David Cairns writes in the essay that accompanies Criterion’s release of the film. It is this tight spatial arrangement that hangs over Stagecoach and negates the sweeping scope of the iconic Monument Valley.

Ford’s films are constantly locked in clashes between aforementioned polar opposites (perhaps best exemplified by the conflict between Tom Doniphon and Ransom Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), including interior and exterior spaces. In spite of Ford’s long-time association with the wide-open vistas of Monument Valley, some of Ford’s most powerful moments come from closed, confined spaces, be they the titular stagecoach or the anxious, labyrinthine climax of My Darling Clementine.

The opening shot of The Searchers (1956) embodies this contrast: the rapid shift from the interior space to the wide open vista says all it needs to about Ethan Edwards. The final shot rhymes nicely with the first, pulling back inside and leaving Ethan out in the open. Like most Western heroes, he can’t live quietly inside.

In The Searchers, Ethan Edwards (played, of course, by John Wayne) and Martin Pawley search high and low for the kidnapped Lucy. Bookended as it is by interiority, The Searchers is, as the title implies, a film about exteriority: traversing vast open spaces to literally find a missing girl but also metaphorically to establish and protect white settlements; settler/Indigenous is another dichotomy that defines Ford’s films, and one that is highly connected to that of space. As in Stagecoach, the outdoors is associated with the native inhabitants of the region while interiority with that of the establishment of white American empire upon that same region.

The Searchers casts doubt upon the premise that the western is spacious; if anything, The Searchers is the most intensely claustrophobic Western ever made. In The Searchers, interior and exterior are inverted as the wide open spaces are where Wayne is most trapped.

Another of Ford’s post-war films, The Quiet Man (1952) is a mixture of idyllic, vibrantly photographed Irish countryside and broodingly low-lit cottages. Following the accidental death of an opponent in the boxing ring, Sean Thornton (Wayne again) retreats from the U.S. to his hometown of Inisfree, Ireland. One cannot help but picture Thornton as a returning American GI, traumatized by actions taken during the war, struggling to find a place to rest. But where much of Wayne’s career with Ford is the desperate quest for a quiet life with a roof over his head (a quest that fails in the final shot of The Searchers), The Quiet Man is much the opposite: the traumatic boxing ring (seen only in a flashback somewhere around the middle of the film) dominates the film’s visuals, and Wayne is instead attempting to escape to tranquil openness. When the mythology of American imperialism is not at stake, space takes on a much different meaning.

Taken together, The Searchers and The Quiet Man say a lot about the Ford project: when dealing with the American mythos, the so-called “wild west” must be brought under control and interior space (stable interior space, which excludes the stagecoach) must be established. But in The Quiet Man, that established space has become a site of brutality that traps the Ford man (aka John Wayne), and he must retreat back to the wilds, leaving the American project behind, as Sean Thornton does.

The Ford man is trapped in an infinite loop: he must establish (white) society, which he cannot live in, per the Western custom that the hero is too violent to exist in the civilization he is essential to establish; at the same time, that society traps him by the seeming inevitability of its expansion that he has set in motion. With The Quiet Man, Ford subtly expresses anxiety at the society whose establishment films like Stagecoach and The Searchers mythologize and elevate.

It is probably not a coincidence that Ford made The Quiet Man following his time in the U.S. filmmaking unit during World War II, something well-documented by Mark Harris in the book Five Came Back. Ford famously documented the Battle of Midway and cut the film into an electric propaganda piece, but as Harris notes, “he had chosen to end an account of America’s first great victory of the war on a note of elegy and loss”. To students of Ford’s work, this shouldn’t come as a surprise: as a director, he has always been acutely aware of the human costs of any endeavor.

Thus, when I look at the work of John Ford, I don’t particularly see the vistas of Monument Valley through which the stage travels or the California sprawl laid out before the Joads. Ford is a humanist first, although racism, particularly the anti-Indigenous racism of the American Western mythology, means that only certain people are fully human in Ford’s films. Ford is not about sprawling landscapes and characters nestled comfortably within them. Ford’s is a landscape of the human soul, and everything around the people in his narratives, including their environment, is internal and interior to the characters. 

It’s been said that Kubrick directed the fake moon landing. I’d have hired John Ford, but I’d have actually launched him into space to film it.