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 Clementinedoing 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 Informerand 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…
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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 13 December 2024.]