“An aunt who was a bit of a feminist”

The politics of John Ford and the script of "Fort Apache"

Abstract

John Ford has often been seen, sometimes liquidated, as a ‘patriarchal’ author: an Irish-American filmmaker deeply connected to his Catholic heritage specialized in ‘masculine’ genres such as westerns and war films; an enthusiastic Navy officer, during and after Second World War; the director who launched John Wayne, one of the most openly reactionary Hollywood stars. It is not only now, in times of woke culture, that the figure of Ford is problematic from a political point of view. Even when he was alive, John Ford was often referred to as a conservative, if not a racist. This kind of reading, inevitably, does not hold up to careful analysis, even for the simple fact that the Fordian corpus consists of about 150 titles. Many of Ford’s movies offer stories and characters full of interesting ideological nuances. After a general presentation of the political dimension of Ford’s filmography, the essay focuses on a specific case study, Fort Apache (1948), working in particular on materials from the John Ford Papers (story line, character biographies, screenplay), examining which the progressive and even feminist nature of the film, already evident on screen, becomes even clearer and more disorienting.