The cinema of John Ford is rooted in history. He has steeped himself in those crucial periods of American history which have determined popular American consciousness: the colonization of the west, the waves of immigrants, the three great wars, the depression. Today America has emerged as the most prosperous and most powerful nation in the world. Yet, for Ford, something irretrievable has been lost. History for him has been a search, a long trek across hostile country towards the ‘promised land’ (Grapes of Wrath), the ‘New Jerusalem’ (Three Godfathers), the ‘Crystal City’ (Wagonmaster), ‘H-O-M-E: home’ (Cheyenne Autumn). More and more he has come to see the search as a delusion, the prospect of arrival as a cheat. In revenge, he has put back the golden age into the past; history has become tradition and hope memory. In the work of Ford we see the celebration of a vast panorama of the American past. We see the American dream as it inspired immigrants and pioneers: the dream of an ideal moral community. But we see also the renunciation of the American present, the corruption of the dream. Compare, for instance, the Wyatt Earp of My Darling Clementine—upright, devout, courageous—with the Wyatt Earp of Cheyenne Autumn, decadent, dissolute and cowardly. The drive westward, the major theme of Ford, has become the battle of Dodge City: a grotesque rabble, thrown into panic by the sight of one Indian. The victims become the heroes and the civilizers savages; when a group of starving Cheyenne, the last pathetic standard-bearers of the old west, stop and beg for food, they are shot and scalped.

Since Ford’s cinema is about history, it is also about politics. During the period of the New Deal, when critical orthodoxy leant to the left, Ford was discovered and thrust forward, but badly misunderstood. Critics saw what they wanted to see: the hardships of the masses, contempt for the rich, a cinematic expression of the social realist novel. By their premature judgements and unilateral approach, they contributed to Ford’s postwar critical ruin. When a new school of criticism emerged, Ford was discredited along with the orthodoxy which had extolled him. There is almost no mention of Ford, for instance, in the whole collection of Cahiers du Cinema. Cahiers, in its polemic, concentrated, not on capturing old masters for its new methodology, but in building up new masters. Consequently Ford was completely neglected. Eventually he was abandoned even by those who used to praise him or, at best, honoured as the ‘classic’ of a bygone era. In recent years only Andrew Sarris has made a serious attempt to evaluate Ford’s work. Today it seems likely that Ford’s long career is over; he was forced by illness to leave the set of his latest project, Young Mr Cassidy. For almost 50 years, since Cactus, My Pal in 1917, Ford has been making films, over a hundred in all. The time has now come to judge his work in its entirety, to outline the continuities and transitions of its fundamental themes.

Ford’s work is full of contradictions. Perhaps this is true, above all, of its politics. Ford’s political thought springs from Jacksonian populism, reflecting its criss-crossing strands of liberalism and conservatism. Populism is not a system of ideas but a melange of paradoxes, vacillating and unstable: the individual and the people, the golden age and the utopian future, for private property but against big business. The peculiarly American current of Jacksonian populism has produced thinkers as diverse and antagonistic as Wright Mills and Barry Gold-water, forced as they attempt to transcend the contradictions in their thought into positions they do not fully understand. Most critics were quick to label Cheyenne Autumn as ‘liberal’. But further reflection suggests that it might almost have been made by Barry Goldwater himself, who is, after all, a great expert in Indian lore, censor of moral decay and opponent of the crude pork-barrel interests of big business. The same contradictions emerge in the interpretation of Ford’s great hero, Lincoln, The Lincoln of Neruda’s Let the Rail-Splitter Awake? Or the Lincoln of expanding Yankee capitalism? Populism is troubled by the dilemma, but has no answer.