John Ford

Many moons ago I wrote to Clive James disagreeing with a review he had written of a TV version, with Stanley Baker if memory serves me well, of "How Green was my Valley". I told him I thought it wasn't a patch on the film version directed by John Ford. Wonder upon wonders, he wrote back saying he was not as great a fan of Ford as evidently I was. Today he has written in his TV column for the weekend Telegraph a piece about "Donovan's Reef": "How does a movie get quite as bad as Donovan's Reef? Directed by John Ford, this horrible mess was made in 1963, at just about the time that all the bright young film critics were trying to get Ford hailed as infallible. No doubt he was an efficient technician but his view of the world was like some endless recruiting commercial for the US cavalry." He doesn't like John Wayne either: "I always loathed John Wayne."
Well, I am not going to write a spirited defence of John Ford because there are only a few of his hundreds of films that I like - and, I have to agree with Clive James here, "Donovan's Reef" ain't one of them. But there's "The Searchers" and there's "The Man who shot Liberty Valence" and there's "The Grapes of Wrath" just for starters. Do you need to admire Ford for all he did when these marvellous ones are worth lauding his talents for. And there are great scenes in most of his films from the pit disaster in "How Green was my Valley" to "The Horse Soldiers" to "Sergeant Rutledge".
As for John Wayne - how can you loathe him with his smile and his drawl and the way he walks: he's not so much an actor as a physical presence on the big screen that you can't help admiring - unless you are Clive James.
In the same article he wrote appreciatively of "Billy Connolly's Route 66".... now there's a man worth loathing.