John Ford

Look up John Ford in a literary reference work, and you expect to find material on a Jacobean dramatist, not a Hollywood film-maker. So what is the director of My Darling Clementine doing here alongside the writer of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore? One plausible answer is that he directed screen adaptations of some respected works of literature, among them Liam O'Flaherty's The Informer and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Those films are indeed exemplary in the way they rethink and rework the originals for a cinema audience in cinematic terms — mistily expressionist visuals for O'Flaherty's Dublin, starkly realist ones for Steinbeck's America — and they won multiple Oscars in 1935 and 1940 respectively. But the