Lee Marvin on John Wayne and John Ford

A year before his death, Lee Marvin talked about John Ford and John Wayne in an interview. You can check it out here:

Francis Ford (1881-1953)

Francis Ford (August 14, 1881 – September 5, 1953) was a prolific film actor, writer, and director. He was the older brother of film director John Ford. He also appeared in many of John Ford's movies, including Young Mr. Lincoln and The Quiet Man . He starred in the 1912 two-reeler The Deserter by Thomas H. Ince and acted in over 400 films. He made his directorial debut alongside fellow Hollywood director Thomas H. Ince the same year with the Western dramatic short The Post Telegrapher, starring Ann Little and popular child actress Mildred Harris. Among his most memorable roles is that of the demented old man in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943). Francis Ford was born Francis Feeney in Portland, Maine. He was the son of John A. Feeney, who was born in the village of Spiddal, County Galway, Ireland, on June 15, 1854. By 1878 John had moved to Portland, Maine and opened a grocery store, at 42 Center Street, that posed as a front for a saloon. John opened four others in following years. His saloons became gathering places where John would greet new immigrants, help them settle, find jobs, and register them as citizens and voters. Francis's younger brother, John M. Feeney, was a successful fullback and defensive tackle on a Portland High state championship football team. He earned the nickname "Bull" because he would lower his leather helmet like a bull and charge through the line. Later Bull followed his older brother Francis to Hollywood, changed his name to John Ford and directed the classic Irish film, The Quiet Man among others (The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, etc.). Francis's son, Philip Ford, would also become a film director and actor.

The above is from Wikipedia. Here's a great scene from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, where Ford plays the bartender:

George O'Brien (1899-1985)

George O'Brien (April 19, 1899 – September 4, 1985) was an American actor, popular during the silent film era and into the talkie era of the 1930s, best known today as the lead actor in F. W. Murnau's 1927 film Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. Born in San Francisco, California, O'Brien was the oldest son of Daniel J. and Margaret L. (Donahue) O'Brien; O'Brien's father later became the Chief of Police for the City of San Francisco (Dan O'Brien ordered the arrest of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle in September 1921 at the scandalous Labor Day party held by Arbuckle). After his retirement from that office, Dan was the Director of Penology for the State of California.
In 1917 O'Brien enlisted in the United States Navy to fight in World War I, serving on a Submarine chaser. He volunteered to act as a stretcher bearer for wounded Marines and was decorated for bravery. Right after the war O'Brien became Light Heavyweight champion of the Pacific Fleet. O'Brien came to Hollywood in his early twenties hoping to become a cameraman and did work as an assistant cameraman for a while, for both Tom Mix and Buck Jones. He began his acting career in bit parts and as a stuntman. One of his earliest roles was in the 1922 George Melford-directed drama Moran of the Lady Letty, most notable for starring Rudolph Valentino. In 1924 O'Brien received his first starring role in the drama The Man Who Came Back opposite the English actress Dorothy Mackaill. That same year he was chosen by the famed movie director John Ford to star in The Iron Horse opposite actress Madge Bellamy. The film was an immense success at the box-office and O'Brien made nine more films for Ford. In 1927 he starred in the F. W. Murnau-directed Sunrise opposite Janet Gaynor, which won three Academy Awards. O'Brien would spend the remainder of the 1920s as an extremely popular leading man in films, often starring in action and adventure roles alongside such popular actresses of the era as Alma Rubens, Anita Stewart, Dolores Costello, Madge Bellamy, Olive Borden (with whom he was linked romantically during the 1920s) and Janet Gaynor. With the advent of sound, George O'Brien became a popular star of Westerns and rarely took parts outside of the Western film genre. Throughout the 1930s, O'Brien was a consistent Top Ten box-office draw appearing in scores of Westerns, often atop his horse named Mike. During World War II, O'Brien re-enlisted in the United States Navy where he served as a beachmaster in the Pacific and was decorated several times. He left service with the rank of commander. He later joined the United States Naval Reserve and retired with the rank of captain in 1962, having four times been recommended for the rank of admiral. Following his service in World War II, O'Brien would occasionally take feature parts in films directed by his old friend and mentor John Ford including Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Cheyenne Autumn. While serving in the Naval Reserve, O'Brien took on a project for the Department of Defense as part of President Eisenhower's "People to People" program. He was project officer for a series of orientation films on three Asian countries. One of these films, on Korea, was directed by his old friend, John Ford. The other two countries covered were Formosa (Taiwan) and the Philippines. O'Brien dated actress Olive Borden from 1926 until 1930. He married the actress Marguerite Churchill on July 15, 1933 and the couple had a son, Darcy O'Brien in 1939 who would become a successful writer and a daughter, Orin O'Brien who would become a double bassist with the New York Philharmonic. A third child, Brian, died in infancy. The couple divorced in 1948. O'Brien suffered a stroke in 1981 and was bedridden the last few years of his life. He died in 1985 in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, George O'Brien was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6201 Hollywood Blvd., in Los Angeles, California.

(From Wikipedia)

On this Day in 1961...

John Ford's Two Rode Together was released, starring Richard Widmark and James Stewart. Stewart plays a cynical marshal who repatriates Indian captives, and Widmark the cavalry officer who accompanies him on his journeys. This is altogether the weakest of Ford's later Westerns, which depicts "a nightmare vision of the frontier overrun by hysteria and hypocrisy, a frontier in which even the Indians are seen as primtive entrepeneurs" (Encyclopedia of Western Movies). But even the weakest Ford movie has a great scene. Here it's Widmark and Stewart having a conversation by the riverside about nothing in particular. It's a great human moment that only Ford could capture. (Lore has it that The Searchers was originally supposed to be named Two Rode Together.) Here's the trailer for the movie:

On this day in 1924...

John Ford's The Iron Horse was released. A grand epic dealing with the building of the transcontinental railroad, this movie placed Ford in the first rank of American directors.

Harry Carey and the Western

Here's a nice clip about Harry Carey and Straight Shooting. John Wayne talks about Carey's influence on him and other Western stars.

On this Day in 1917...

John Ford's first full length movie, Straight Shooting, was released. Prior to these he had made several short films, but this ws his most ambitious project to date. Starring Harry Carey, with whom he would make some 25 Westerns over the next four years, this is the only film from that collaboration to survive. It was rediscovered in a Czechoslovakian film vault in 1966. Fernando Martín Peña has a nice essay on the film at Fipresci, the the International Federation of Film Critics website:

What makes a man to wander? Where does Ethan Edwards come from in The Searchers (1956)? Probably from Straight Shooting (1917), as many have already noticed. Cheyenne Harry (Harry Carey) is a carefree outlaw hired by a cattleman to kill a farmer who does not want to leave his land. When he is about to do it, he's moved by the sight of the old man, mourning the death of his son, and decides to reform. The ending of the film is confusing — there are parts obviously missing or misplaced — and the titles are not reliable, because the print was found in Czechoslovakia and they had to be reconstructed from the Czech titles. However, it seems clear that Cheyenne Harry sets things right, feels unworthy of the farmer's offer to stay with him and replace his son (by becoming his son-in-law) and goes away. Fade out and some decades later we have Ethan Edwards.

But there are many more elements in Straight Shooting that prefigure future Ford films, which is quite bewildering given the fact that it actually was his first feature. How can a film be Fordian before Ford? Where does John Ford come from? Surely from David Wark Griffith and William S. Hart. The climax of Straight Shooting finds the ranchers besieged by the cattlemen in a cabin, much as in The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Ford always kept a direct link with the Master through the frequent casting of Mae Marsh (as Lindsay Anderson pointed out). The change that undergoes Carey's character is very close to the pattern set up by Hart in many films, and the austere, dusty western town in Straight Shooting is very close to Hart's imagery. But those obvious links don't explain it all because the film also contains at least three things that cannot be attributed either to Griffith or to Hart.

In the first place, the legendary "eye for composition," that natural gift that defined Ford's visual style, is already quite developed here, as Lindsay Anderson proved in his book.
In the second place, we already find here the somewhat tragic character who assumes the mediating role between the wild and the civilized and who will reappear over and over again in Ford's future westerns, notably in films like My Darling Clementine (1946) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Like Fonda and Wayne in those films, Carey is not motivated only by virtue (like Hart). He's part of both worlds, but in fact, he's mostly wild: he rides with a band of outlaws, gets noisily drunk with the cattleman's main henchman, seems very happy at the prospect of killing for money and mainly survives by violence, unlike the civilized settlers who don't exactly know how to do that and therefore get killed. So Carey (like Fonda and Wayne) is the one who can exert violence against the violent and help wipe them out with the rest of the wild things, including himself, who feels out of place when the work is done.

And finally, Straight Shooting is devoid of the strong racism that permeates not only Griffith's work but also Hart's. In films like The Aryan (1916), Hart's hero degrades himself by joining an outlaw band exclusively formed by Indians and Mexicans (and quickly becomes their leader, which is presented as the natural thing that happens to a white man in that context). In Straight Shooting, Carey rides with — but does not lead — an outlaw band composed of Mexicans and Indians and afterwards gets their help to fight against the cattlemen and break the cabin siege. Everybody mixes happily in that climax, the outlaw band saves the day, and they even become equated with the settlers when Carey leaves them as well, probably in search of himself, as he finally rides away.