Directed by John Ford

1971 film by Peter Bogdanovich

Directed by John Ford

Directed by| Peter Bogdanovich
Written by| Peter Bogdanovich
Produced by| David H. Shepard
James R. Silke
George Stevens, Jr.
Frank Marshall
Starring| Peter Bogdanovich
Harry Carey, Jr.
Clint Eastwood
Henry Fonda
John Ford
Walter Hill
Maureen O'Hara
Martin Scorsese
Steven Spielberg
James Stewart
John Wayne
Narrated by| Orson Welles
Cinematography| László Kovács
Brick Marquard
David Sammons
Gregory Sandor
Eric Sherman
Patrick Alexander Stewart
Edited by| Mark Fitzgerald
Richard Patterson
Music by| Gaylord Carter

Production
company

American Film Institute

Release date

* October 6, 1971 (1971-10-06)

Running time

| 1971: 99 minutes
2006: 108 minutes[1]
Country| United States
Language| English

Directed by John Ford is a documentary film directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Originally released in 1971, it covers the life and career of film director John Ford.

## Production

[edit]

Bogdanovich first met John Ford in 1963, on the set of Ford's film Cheyenne Autumn, interviewing the veteran filmmaker for a piece in Esquire magazine,[2] one in a series of profiles of famous directors. Ford, who typically despised interviews, perversely decided to be accommodating after he witnessed a production assistant warning Bogdanovich and his then-wife Polly Platt about Ford's difficult nature.[3] Ford occasionally found himself exasperated by Bogdanovich's questions, but also enjoyed his company, and amused himself by needling the young man and pulling his leg.[4] Bogdanovich's Esquire piece temporarily produced some measure of friction between the two, as Bogdanovich did not remove the profanity from Ford's quotes in his initial draft, to Ford's displeasure.[2] Ford described it as "nauseating".[5] He was also unhappy with the tone of the piece, entitled "The Autumn of John Ford", because he resented the implication that his time as a director was nearing its end.[5] Despite this, Bogdanovich and Ford remained friends. In 1967, Bogdanovich completed an interview book about Ford, which was published in England.[6] Ford affected a lack of interest in the work, describing it as "a caricature" and claiming that he threw his copy away after reading the first three pages, though in reality, he purchased more than 200 copies.[7] The next year, Bogdanovich began working on Directed by John Ford.

Bogdanovich conducted interviews with actors Henry Fonda, James Stewart, and John Wayne, as well as Ford himself.[8] Orson Welles delivered an original narration, which was recorded in a Howard Johnson's while Welles was directing The Other Side of the Wind, during a 20-minute break in filming.[6] Bogdanovich also interviewed Ford in Monument Valley, a location Ford had used in some of his own films, producing footage that Bogdanovich described as "one of the funnier sequences in the picture".[9] Ford, who was partially deaf and who did not enjoy discussing his work, would routinely make interviewers sit on the side of his bad ear, and then indicate that he was unable to understand the questions he was being asked.[2] Whenever his interrogators ultimately succeeded in making themselves understood, he would deliver only monosyllabic responses.[2] Ford's behavior in his interview with Bogdanovich accordingly delivered little useful information, but it pleased Bogdanovich anyway because he felt that it was an accurate depiction of Ford's character.[9]

During production, the American Film Institute exhausted its funding and was unable to purchase the rights to the film clips of Ford's work used in the documentary.[9] As a result, the film could only be shown in non-profit venues, such as free screenings at film festivals or one fundraiser for PBS. For this reason, it was rarely seen after its initial release.[9]

## Revised version

[edit]

Bogdanovich had long been dissatisfied with the initial version of the film, for several reasons.[9] In addition to the rights issues, he felt that some of the film clips used came across as "a little long and lugubrious", and he was unhappy that the film did not go into sufficient depth when exploring certain aspects of Ford's personal life, which were either unknown at the time the film was made or too controversial to include during Ford's lifetime.[9]

The original version of Directed by John Ford was shown at the 1999 Telluride Film Festival, garnering a strong positive reaction, and this success led Bogdanovich to believe that a re-edited version might be a viable option.[9] He delivered a pitch to producer Frank Marshall, an old friend with whom he had first worked on the 1968 film Targets, promising to "use all the good stuff and do some interviews with new people and jazz it up a little bit and make it more commercial, faster and incisive, and also more revealing."[9] Marshall, in turn, brokered a deal with Turner Classic Movies and Warner Home Video.[9]

When re-editing the film, Bogdanovich started with the original set of interviews with Fonda, Ford, Stewart, and Wayne, as well as the Welles narration.[8] To supplement them, he conducted additional interviews with actors Harry Carey, Jr., Clint Eastwood and Maureen O'Hara, and directors Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Walter Hill.[8] He also recorded some additional commentary of his own.[8]

On 7 November 2006,[10][11] the revised documentary was aired on the Turner Classic Movies channel, as part of a month-long tribute to Ford.[8]

On 15 September 2009,[12] the revised documentary was released on DVD.

## Critical reception

[edit]

### 1971 version

[edit]

An unattributed review in Time characterized the initial cut of the film as a "piece of lightweight scholarship", in which Ford's "every blemish is a virtue, and no detail is too trivial to examine."[13] Though dismissive of Bogdanovich's critical analysis within the film, the reviewer was more positive about the interview segments, in which Fonda, Stewart, and Wayne displayed the "terror and awe" of young and callow actors when discussing Ford.[13] Reviewing the film for The New York Times, critic Roger Greenspun praised it as "workmanlike, amusing, [and] instructive," and noted that on several occasions he was "moved literally to tears" while watching it.[14] However, he also expressed disappointment that the film did not place the end of Ford's career into what he felt to be the proper context, ignoring films such as Donovan's Reef and 7 Women, and glossing over the modest critical and box-office reception that characterized the end of Ford's career.[14]

Ford was honored at a high-profile Hollywood event on November 23, 1973, which included a showing of Directed by John Ford. When asked what he had thought of the film, Ford had said that it was "long, and the print was bad".[15]

### 2006 version

[edit]

In a review published in Variety, Todd McCarthy was largely positive. He praised the interviews with Fonda, Stewart, and Wayne, describing them as "possessing an extraordinary here-and-now immediacy", and found the interview with Ford "hilarious".[16] He was less enthusiastic about some of the newer interviews, which were shot on video, feeling that they lacked the "vibrant look" and "elegant mobility" of the earlier interviews, recorded on film by a dolly-mounted camera.[16] He did, however, single out Lindsay Anderson's 1992 interview with Maureen O'Hara, a deathbed recording of Ford speaking with Katharine Hepburn, and a more honest treatment of Ford's personal life illustrated by scenes from How Green Was My Valley as worthwhile additions to the updated version.[16]

## Bogdanovich and Ford

[edit]

According to Bogdanovich, Ford was instrumental in breaking up a planned film, The Streets of Laredo (after the song of that name), that Bogdanovich would have directed.[8] It was to have starred Fonda, Stewart, and Wayne, but Bogdanovich claims that Ford talked Wayne out of participating, causing the project's collapse.[8] Bogdanovich voiced the belief that the work "would have been my masterpiece," but was unwilling to speak about Ford's motives in acting as he did.[8] The screenplay, written by Larry McMurtry, author of the source novel of Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show, would become the basis of McMurtry's novel Lonesome Dove.

Bogdanovich later developed a one-man stage show called Sacred Monsters, in which he related anecdotes about his filmmaking career and performed impressions, including one of Ford.[17]

## See also

[edit]

* List of American films of 1971

## References

[edit]

1. ^ McCarthy, Todd (7 September 2006). "Directed by John Ford". Variety. Retrieved 28 June 2025.
2. ^ a b c d MacNab, Geoffrey. "John Ford: Ford focus", The Independent, July 14, 2006.
3. ^ McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford: a life, Macmillan, 2001, p. 655. ISBN 0-312-24232-8
4. ^ McBride, p. 656.
5. ^ a b McBride, p. 660.
6. ^ a b McBride, p. 684.
7. ^ McBride, pp. 684-685.
8. ^ a b c d e f g h Modderno, Craig. "Director Bogdanovich Revives His John Ford Film", Reuters, November 23, 2006.
9. ^ a b c d e f g h i Lammers, Tim. "Bogdanovich Points 'John Ford' In Right Direction - Documentary About Film Icon Restructured 35 Years After Original Archived 2012-02-17 at the Wayback Machine", WESH.com (WESH TV, Orlando, Florida), November 7, 2006.
10. ^ "Directed by John Ford". The Kennedy/Marshall Company. Retrieved 28 June 2025.
11. ^ Stewart, Susan (Nov 7, 2006). "An Ode to Filmmaking's Master of the Western Horizon". nytimes.com. Retrieved 28 June 2025.
12. ^ "Directed by John Ford". Rotten Tomatoes. Retrieved 28 June 2025.
13. ^ a b "Festival (Contd.)", Time magazine, October 8, 1971.
14. ^ a b Greenspun, Roger. "Directed By John Ford", The New York Times, October 7, 1971.
15. ^ Levy, Bill. John Ford: A Bio-Bibliography, Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, p. 35. ISBN 0-313-27514-9
16. ^ a b c McCarthy, Todd. "Directed by John Ford", Variety, September 6, 2006.
17. ^ Lemire, Christy. "Bogdanovich on Filmmaking and `Sopranos'," The Associated Press, November 8, 2006.

## External links

[edit]

Directed by John Ford (1971)

* Directed by John Ford (1971) Original version (Films Incorporated) uploaded by the American Film Institute on archive.org
* Directed by John Ford (1971) reconstruction of the film by publicspiritedcitizen on archive.org
* Directed by John Ford (1971) at IMDb
* Directed by John Ford (1971) at the TCM Movie Database
* Directed by John Ford (1971) at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films

Directed by John Ford (2006)

* "Directed by John Ford (2006)". Rotten Tomatoes.
* Mikulec, Sven (23 October 2016). "Directed by John Ford". Cinephilia & Beyond.

* v
* t
* e

Peter Bogdanovich

Filmography

Feature films|

* Targets (1968)
* The Last Picture Show (1971)
* What's Up, Doc? (1972)
* Paper Moon (1973)
* Daisy Miller (1974)
* At Long Last Love (1975)
* Nickelodeon (1976)
* Saint Jack (1979)
* They All Laughed (1981)
* Mask (1985)
* Illegally Yours (1988)
* Texasville (1990)
* Noises Off (1992)
* The Thing Called Love (1993)
* The Cat's Meow (2001)
* She's Funny That Way (2014)

Documentary films|

* Directed by John Ford (1971)
* Runnin' Down a Dream (2007)
* The Great Buster: A Celebration (2018)

Television films|

* To Sir, with Love II (1996)
* The Price of Heaven (1997)
* Rescuers: Stories of Courage: Two Women (1997)
* Naked City: A Killer Christmas (1998)
* A Saintly Switch (1999)
* The Mystery of Natalie Wood (2004)
* Hustle (2004)

Books|

* Pieces of Time (1973)
* The Killing of the Unicorn (1984)
* This Is Orson Welles (1992)

Other|

* The Wild Angels (1966)
* Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968)
* One Day Since Yesterday (2014, documentary)
* Wait for Me (2018, unproduced)

* v
* t
* e

Films by John Ford

Silent films|

* The Tornado (1917)
* The Trail of Hate (1917)
* The Scrapper (1917)
* Cheyenne's Pal (1917)
* The Soul Herder (1917)
* Straight Shooting (1917)
* The Secret Man (1917)
* A Marked Man (1917)
* Bucking Broadway (1917)
* The Phantom Riders (1918)
* Wild Women (1918)
* Thieves' Gold (1918)
* The Scarlet Drop (1918)
* Hell Bent (1918)
* A Woman's Fool (1918)
* The Craving (1918)
* Three Mounted Men (1918)
* Roped (1919)
* The Fighting Brothers (1919)
* A Fight for Love (1919)
* Rustlers (1919)
* Bare Fists (1919)
* Gun Law (1919)
* By Indian Post (1919)
* The Gun Packer (1919)
* Riders of Vengeance (1919)
* The Last Outlaw (1919)
* The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1919)
* Ace of the Saddle (1919)
* Rider of the Law (1919)
* A Gun Fightin' Gentleman (1919)
* Marked Men (1919)
* The Prince of Avenue A (1920)
* The Girl in Number 29 (1920)
* Hitchin' Posts (1920)
* Just Pals (1920)
* The Big Punch (1921)
* The Freeze-Out (1921)
* The Wallop (1921)
* Desperate Trails (1921)
* Action (1921)
* Sure Fire (1921)
* Jackie (1921)
* Little Miss Smiles (1922)
* Silver Wings (1922)
* The Village Blacksmith (1922)
* The Face on the Bar-Room Floor (1923)
* Three Jumps Ahead (1923)
* Cameo Kirby (1923)
* North of Hudson Bay (1923)
* Hoodman Blind (1923)
* The Iron Horse (1924)
* Hearts of Oak (1924)
* Lightnin' (1925)
* Kentucky Pride (1925)
* Thank You (1925)
* The Fighting Heart (1925)
* The Shamrock Handicap (1926)
* 3 Bad Men (1926)
* Upstream (1927)
* Four Sons (1928)
* Strong Boy (1929)

Sound films|

* The Black Watch (1929)
* Men Without Women (1930)
* Born Reckless (1930)
* Up the River (1930)
* Seas Beneath (1931)
* The Brat (1931)
* Arrowsmith (1931)
* Air Mail (1932)
* Flesh (1932)
* Pilgrimage (1933)
* Doctor Bull (1933)
* The Lost Patrol (1934)
* The World Moves On (1934)
* Judge Priest (1934)
* The Whole Town's Talking (1935)
* The Informer (1935)
* Steamboat Round the Bend (1935)
* The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)
* Mary of Scotland (1936)
* The Plough and the Stars (1936)
* Wee Willie Winkie (1937)
* The Hurricane (1937)
* Four Men and a Prayer (1938)
* Submarine Patrol (1938)
* Stagecoach (1939)
* Young Mr. Lincoln (1939)
* Drums Along the Mohawk (1939)
* The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
* The Long Voyage Home (1940)
* Tobacco Road (1941)
* How Green Was My Valley (1941)
* They Were Expendable (1945)
* My Darling Clementine (1946)
* The Fugitive (1947)
* Fort Apache (1948)
* 3 Godfathers (1948)
* She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)
* When Willie Comes Marching Home (1950)
* Wagon Master (1950)
* Rio Grande (1950)
* The Quiet Man (1952)
* What Price Glory (1952)
* The Sun Shines Bright (1953)
* Mogambo (1953)
* The Long Gray Line (1955)
* Mister Roberts (co-d, 1955)
* The Searchers (1956)
* The Wings of Eagles (1957)
* The Rising of the Moon (1957)
* Gideon's Day (1958)
* The Last Hurrah (1958)
* The Horse Soldiers (1959)
* Sergeant Rutledge (1960)
* Two Rode Together (1961)
* The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
* How the West Was Won (1962)
* Donovan's Reef (1963)
* Cheyenne Autumn (1964)
* 7 Women (1966)

Television|

* "Rookie of the Year" (1955)
* "The Colter Craven Story" (1960)
* "Flashing Spikes" (1962)

Productions|

* The Iron Horse (1924)
* The Blue Eagle (1926)
* Mother Machree (1928)
* Hangman's House (1928)
* Riley the Cop (1928)
* Salute (1929)
* Flesh (1932)
* The Adventures of Marco Polo (1938)
* Young Cassidy (1965)

Documentaries
and training films|

* Torpedo Squadron (1942)
* Sex Hygiene (1942)
* The Battle of Midway (1942)
* December 7th: The Movie (1943)
* Undercover (1943)
* This Is Korea (1951)
* Korea: Battleground for Liberty (1959)
* Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend (1970)
* Vietnam! Vietnam! (1971) (produced and co-wrote)

Related|

* Directed by John Ford (1971 documentary)
* Five Came Back (2017 documentary)

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