John Ford

Charles Barr (St. Mary's College)
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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 they hardly represent John Ford's main strength, or his main interest for the…

2751 words

Citation: Barr, Charles. "John Ford". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 August 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4983, accessed 19 March 2024.]

4983 John Ford 1 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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