Word: forded
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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When movies depict the past, that past generally becomes the immediate present of the audience. We watch events of long-ago happen before our eyes, and are content to take a temporary departure from the Twentieth Century. But the films of John Ford make no attempt to take us into the past; they are about the past...
...Shot Liberty Valance, the newspaper editor says, "This is the West. When the fact becomes legend, print the legend," Ford's films show the legend. His world is diffused by time, by memory and nostalgia, by folklore and myth. In How Green Was My Valley, Ford's adaptation of Llewellyn's novel of Welsh coal miners, the story resembles a dream, seen in retrospect by a man who has had his entire life to romanticize the past: his childhood and his family. Ford is not interested in reality but in subjective viewpoint, not fact but romance and legend...
...Ford's greatest films are his westerns, a uniquely American art form he helped create, and a genre of which he is undisputed master. These westerns are memory films, filled with the traditions of the past, created from the anecdotes, fables, and songs that sprang from American history. But in addition to drawing on Americana, Ford created it; the characters and situations in his westerns, from The Iron Horse to Stagecoach to Ford Apache to The Searchers to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, have become as much a part of American tradition as those on which Ford originally drew...
...Shot Liberty Valance, made by the 67-year-old Ford in 1962, is unmistakably the director's final statement on the West. In it, Ford gives us a capsule version of the world it took him 40 years to create, and then shows us how it died. Liberty Valance is a film about death, about a sad but inevitable transition from an old social order to modern society as we know it today...
...Ford takes us into the past, to Shinbone before the coming of the railroad modernized the town. It is the Ford town, complete with a drunken doctor, a crusading newspaper editor, a cowardly marshall (brillantly played by Andy Devine), two saloons-one high class, and then the Spanish place down the street--and assorted cowboys and farmers. There is no formally enforced law and order; Doniphon says, "Out here a man settles his own problems...