Verwandte Artikel zu Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford

Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford - Softcover

Eyman, Scott

 
9781476797724: Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1476797722 ISBN 13: 9781476797724
Verlag: Simon & Schuster, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” This line from director John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance serves as an epigraph for the life of the legendary filmmaker.

Through a career that spanned decades and included dozens of films—among them such American masterpieces as The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, The Quiet Man, Stagecoach, and How Green Was My Valley—John Ford managed to leave as his legacy a body of work that few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet as bold as the stamp of his personality was on each film, he was reticent about his personal life. Basically shy, and intensely private, he was known to enjoy making up stories about himself, some of them based loosely on fact but many of them pure fabrications. Ford preferred instead to let his films speak for him. What mattered to Ford was always what was up there on the screen.

Now, in this definitive look at the life and career of one of America's true cinematic giants, noted biographer and critic Scott Eyman, working with the full participation of the Ford estate, has managed to document and delineate both aspects of John Ford’s life—the human and the legend.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Scott Eyman is the author or coauthor of eighteen books, including the bestseller John Wayne and Pieces of My Heart and You Must Remember This with actor Robert Wagner. Eyman, formerly the literary critic at The Palm Beach Post, also writes book reviews for The Wall Street Journal, and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He and his wife, Lynn, live in West Palm Beach.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

The definitive biography of one of Hollywood's greatest film makers, five years in the making and written with the full cooperation of John Ford's estate.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One: From Maine to Hollywood

Today, western Ireland is a sparsely populated landscape, but in the early nineteenth century it was filled with people. John Feeney, the father of John Ford, was just one of four million people who abandoned Ireland in the long aftermath of the potato famine of 1846, when three-fourths of the potato crop was blighted and much of the western part of the country was threatened with starvation.

By 1851, Ireland had already lost about 2.4 million people, 1.1 million to death by starvation, 1.3 million to emigration. As the Irish dispersed to other lands, they took their country with them. Ireland has a very specific spiritual temper -- irreverent, socially conservative, with a booziness of almost manic proportions, and an authentic contempt for demagogues and politicians. The guile of the Irish fails to stem their self-destructiveness, the nihilistic alcoholism that often accompanies song, entertaining persiflage, historical reminiscence. The Irish know how to maneuver; they're a nation of factionalists and operators.

As a country that has been occupied for most of its history, the only power the Irish were allowed was over their families, their only self-expression dance, music, literature, and conversation. So Ireland became a land of indirection and duplicity, with a people wary of betrayal. The concept of victory in defeat, and the hero as stylish victim -- Parnell, Wilde -- are as ingrained in the Irish character as eloquence, and would come to their finely polished perfection in the work of John Ford.

John Feeney was born June 16, 1854, in Galway, the son of Patrick Feeney and Mary Curran. Spiddal, the town in which John grew up, was a little farming community. It was a time when, as one Galway man remarked, a local Catholic "would gladly embrace any pecuniary assistance that would take them anywhere they could make a living." That assistance came in the form of a visit from an uncle named Mike Connelly (some accounts spell it Connolly) who had gone to America more than a decade before, and done very well for himself.

At eighteen, John Feeney was a large, strong young man, not without intellect, not without ambition. The only opportunity to be had in Spiddal was eking out a living by farming on somebody else's land. He could see there was more opportunity someplace else. Someplace like America.

There was, in the western part of Ireland at that time, a tradition called an "American wake" that John Feeney might well have been accorded. It was a farewell party for the departing native -- food and drink and dancing to a vigorous fiddle into the wee hours, and then little or no sleep into the morning, when it would be time to make the rounds and say farewell. It was the kind of social ritual -- outwardly exuberant but with an underlying touch of valedictory sadness -- that John Feeney's son would portray better than anybody.

John Feeney arrived in America on June 8, 1872. The town was Boston, the ship a Cunard vessel he had boarded in Queenstown. The year John Feeney arrived in America, about 72,000 other Irish did as well.

Feeney was typical in every sense, for the immigrants of Feeney's time were predominantly young, predominantly Catholic, predominantly from poor rural or western districts. They were laborers and farmers who had little capital -- a couple of pounds at most. But they didn't need a great deal of capital to make the voyage. Because of the volume of traffic, and the rise of steamships that could carry a thousand or so people in steerage, the fares were surprisingly affordable -- an Irishman could travel to America for as little as $8.75.

The great majority of the Irish sailed to either New York or Boston. The dangers on the long voyage were typhus and cholera from overcrowding; the dangers upon landing were only marginally less -- gangs of "runners," Irish hustlers who stole baggage and cheated countrymen trying to make their way from the port. Confused and broke, many Irish immigrants got no farther than the tenements of their landfall city.

John Feeney was made of sturdier stuff. There was no work in Boston? Very well, he'd go someplace else, someplace where there was family, a cousin or two, and plenty of work to be had -- Maine. John Feeney, like his youngest son, had a knack for finding his way.

If the famine was the defining event of the nineteenth century in Ireland, it turned out to be one of the defining events of America as well. The influx of the Irish in various Northern cities strengthened institutions -- the Democratic Party, Tammany Hall -- but it also traumatized immigrants like Feeney. No matter where they settled, they remained more intimately connected to their native land than many other European immigrants, who were only too glad to come to America. For the Irish, it was a forced march, and their ambivalence would infect their children.

As soon as John Feeney emigrated, he followed in the emotional footsteps of millions of his countrymen. The harshness, the dourness, the malice of his native country was forgotten, and all that was remembered was the beauty, the whimsy. Ireland became a green place where joyous people had an endless party and uttered memorable aphorisms. The inherited Ireland, the Ireland of the imagination, became far more important than the often disillusioning reality.

In time, John Feeney's son would come to know and like Joseph Kennedy and support Jack Kennedy in his political rise, but that family's carefully constructed country club fantasy held no charms for him. John Ford's Irish were and would always remain hard-drinking peasants -- raffish, tough sons of bitches -- as well as generous, funny, curiously honest, and complex people.

Despite the success to be found by so many of the Irish in America, many Irish-Americans never overcame deep-seated feelings of inferiority and insecurity; emotional conflicts were often internalized, and resulted in self-destructive behavior -- overwork, apostasy, alcoholism.

In 1875, three years after John Feeney came to America, he married Barbara Curran, who would be known to family and friends as Abby. Barbara had been born in the town of Kilronan on the island of Inishmore, one of the ferociously hostile Aran Islands, a limestone reef at the mouth of Galway Bay, unreclaimable rock separated by a profusion of crude stone walls. For Abby, life in Maine would have been a year-round Christmas compared to the insular hardships of Kilronan.

The year after they were married, the children began arriving, eleven of them -- Mary Agnes in 1876, Della in 1878, Patrick in 1879, Francis in 1881, Bridget in 1883, Barbara in 1888, Edward in 1889, Josephine in 1891, Joanna in 1892, John in 1894, and Daniel in 1898.

Of these children, five died in infancy, leaving Mary Agnes (known as Maime), Patrick, Francis, Edward, Josephine, and John -- six brothers and sisters. Despite the dreadful infant mortality, which couldn't have been much of an improvement over Spiddal, America seemed to suit the Feeneys; eight years after his arrival in America, on September 11, 1880, John Feeney became an American citizen.

John Ford always claimed to have been born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna -- or some small variant -- on February 1, 1895. For ninety-odd years, he was taken at his word. But the registry of births for Cape Elizabeth, Maine, clearly records the birth of John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894. That is the date on his birth registration, on his school records at Portland High School, and on his death certificate. When young John -- family and friends always called him Jack -- was born in Cape Elizabeth, an agrarian community a few miles outside of Portland, his father was working as a farmer.

The subtraction of a year from Jack's age stemmed from a childhood bout with diphtheria that caused him...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Simon & Schuster
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1476797722
ISBN 13 
9781476797724
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
672
Kontakt zum Hersteller
preigu GmbH & Co. KG
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
Niedersachsen
49078
Deutschland