How Green was My Valley: A Second Look

Well, technically a third. I'd seen it before. The only John Ford film that won Best Picture still ends up feeling like lower-tier John Ford work. Of course, that I still think How Green was My Valley is okay is just a testament to how strong Ford's body of work is. A lot of the…

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John Ford – A Retrospective

"John Ford is really great...When I'm old, that's the kind of director I want to be."-Akira Kurosawa "Ford - I esteem him, I admire him and I love him."-Federico Fellini "He is the essence of classical American cinema. Any serious person making films today, whether they know it or not, is affected by Ford."-Martin Scorsese "I…

The Men Who Tread on the Tiger’s Tail

#17 in my ranking of Akira Kurosawa’s filmography. This is one of those films that has a really interesting historical footnote. It was in the middle of filming that Emperor Hirohito announced the surrender of Imperial Japan to the US Forces in the Pacific, also meaning that this was being filmed when two atomic bombs were…

John Ford: The Definitive Ranking

The largest body of work I've done so far, John Ford's filmography spans nearly fifty years. Also, nearly a third of the entire output is considered lost, mostly films from the 1910s and 1920s. I would have watched them too if they still existed. What's remarkable about Ford's work is twofold. First is the sheer…

7 Women

#45 in my ranking of John Ford's filmography. John Ford ended his narrative feature filmmaking career with something different, a story about women instead of men. It's a bit of a mixed bag of a film, showing a lot of the errant storytelling that had become more prevalent of Ford's film in his final decade,…