John Ford

Before he shot Stagecoach, John Ford had made films set in submarines, in prisons and in Scottish castles, in Mesopotamia, in colonial India and in the Caribbean; it is David Cairns, writing for Criterion, who lists them out. By Cairns's account, when Ford took the project to David O. Selznick his boss both counted the thing an unimportant B picture and regarded Ford as a capricious talent in need of holding tightly; in those years the whole industry looked on the western with an indulgent condescension. David Jenkins, writing on My Darling Clementine, describes Ford's cinema by what lies outside the frame: every nuance in the film seems loaded with information about a world that exists beyond the limits of the square. The forty-six films under his name in the catalogue spread between 1920 and 1965, and The Grapes of Wrath, The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Quiet Man and How Green Was My Valley are among them.