This Day in Film History (Death of Ward Bond, Prolific Character Actor and Wayne Sidekick)

Nov. 5, 1960—Ward Bond, an actor with more than 200 credits on the big and small screen—including his starring role on the long-running TV western Wagon Train—died of a heart attack in Dallas.

Most likely, you have seen this busy character actor with the gruff voice and everyman persona in at least two films during the course of a year: on March 17, as a fishing- and boxing-loving priest in The Quiet Man; and, at Christmastime, in It’s a Wonderful Life, as James Stewart’s small-town cop friend Bert. 

In all, he appeared in 13 movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar (though he himself was never cited).

It is doubtful that Bond, when he heeded a recruiting plea by USC football teammate John Wayne to serve as an extra in the 1928 John Ford film Salute, expected to enjoy a three-decade Hollywood career.

Bond made 23 movies with Wayne and at least that many with Ford, and offscreen the trio would form a boisterous friendship marked by hijinks and epic drinking bouts, often on the director’s yacht. Ford even had Bond play his alter ego (a director named "John Dodge") in the 1957 film Wings of Eagles.

Despite their friendship, the cantankerous Ford gave Bond (and Wayne) endless grief while filming. At one point, during location shooting of The Searchers, Bond had pulled the plug on a camera in order to use his electric razor, unaware that a scene was being filmed then. 

Knowing the director’s explosive temper and penchant to humiliate cast and crew members for an offense, the cameraman didn’t tell Ford what Bond had done till several years after the actor’s death.

Bond’s collegiate athletic career and continued burly build in adulthood encouraged the illusion of a vigorous physical health that he did not possess. He was disqualified from serving in World War II because of epilepsy and suffered from high blood pressure during the four seasons he spent on Wagon Train.

You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who questioned Bond’s professionalism or work ethic. But he was not universally beloved in the industry, particularly after he co-founded the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals in 1944. 

In the postwar period, this organization became one of the most virulent forces behind the blacklists maintained to stamp out communist or even merely progressive views in Hollywood.

This right-wing activism turned off many Hollywood liberals so that, ironically, Bond found himself underemployed in any films that did not involve Wayne and Ford. 

It wasn’t until he secured the role of western scout Major Seth Adams on Wagon Train that Bond could reach something like his former presence on the screen. But at that point, his presence loomed larger than ever in Hollywood, as the NBC series placed #2 in the Nielsen ratings from its second through fourth seasons.

It came as a surprise in the industry, then, when Bond had his fatal heart attack. Wayne delivered the eulogy for his longtime friend, and, he observed not long before he died, he would think of what roles his friend and extremely versatile character actor might have played had he lived longer.

This Day in Film History (John Ford’s Silent ‘Iron Horse’ Makes Loud Noise at Box Offices)

August 28, 1924— John Ford might have exhibited contempt for studio bosses, but they just had to grin and bear it—especially when they saw the results for his silent western The Iron Horse, which premiered in New York City on this day.

Over the next four decades, whenever the western as a genre looked licked with audiences or critics, Ford came riding to the rescue, like one of his pistol-packing heroes. It even happened a mere 20 years after American cinema, for all intents and purposes, began with The Great Train Robbery, as audiences were already beginning to tire of the form.

Critics were turning up their noses at innumerable William Hart and Tom Mix shoot-‘em-ups when Paramount’s The Covered Wagon (1923) took a different tone: patriotic, focused on the nation’s Manifest Destiny. Fox Film Corp. decided to one-up its rival with a movie about the transcontinental railroad, to be made by its rising in-house filmmaker.

The Iron Horse not only was the movie that effectively made Ford an A-list director by virtue of making the top-grossing film of the year, but also the one that established his template for the rest of his career: dragging cast and crew hundreds of miles from studio bean-counters and nay-sayers, out on location, where he could act as a combination of general and summer camp director.

The 29-year-old was already carving out a niche as a cranky, go-my-own way helmsman, having been called back to a movie he’d been removed from, Straight Shooting (1917), after Universal head Carl Laemmle realized that, even with his penchant for breaking rules, Ford was a talented moviemaker.

Over the next six years, Ford would make for Universal and the studio he then moved to, Fox, more than 30 movies.

But Ford was entrusted with an especially heavy responsibility at the end of that period with this new assignment. This, he understood, was going to be an epic, 2½ hours long.

The first thing he did was haul the 300 cast and crew members on circus trains out to Dodge, Nevada, more than 270 miles from Los Angeles. The location shooting would not only lend a greater sense of realism but, more important from Ford’s perspective, remove him from day-to-day scrutiny from Fox.

Not that the studio didn’t try. At one point, Ford read a message from Fox, urging him to shoot faster to stay within the budget. By way of a response, he held the message aloft and asked a sharpshooter to shoot a hole in it, sending the note back where it came from.

By starting location shooting right after the new year, Ford and his army of film professionals were also going to get some sense of the privation that 19^th-century pioneers had experienced.

“There was real suffering on that picture,” property man Lefty Hough recalled. “It was hard, tough, awfully primitive conditions. Christ, it was cold.”

They arrived just as a “baby blizzard” blew in. Temperatures dropped so low that crew members slept in the warm army uniforms the studio provided. (That didn’t prevent a dining car steward from dying from pneumonia he had contracted three weeks into shooting.)

(See Linda Laban's article this week in The Guardian for more details on the harrowing shoot.)

One morning, everyone awoke to find a fresh snowfall had blown in overnight. The shooting schedule had called for the ground to be barren of snow, so everyone set to work, successfully shoveling out within an hour.

What could have made matters worse was that there was no finished script as shooting began. That, in a way, suited Ford just fine: It made everybody on set even more dependent on him to finish the picture.

While the cameras were rolling, Ford could be crusty, even bullying and abusive. When they stopped for the day, he acted more like a benevolent dictator.  In the evenings, the small temporary city he had set up enjoyed dancing, songs (often featuring the mariachi musicians he loved), and even a bootlegger.

(Ben Mankiewicz's recent multi-episode entry in his "The Plot Thickens" podcast has great details on the fun after-hours set on this and other movies directed by "Pappy" Ford.)

The film’s young star, George O’Brien, would epitomize another aspect of Ford’s career: tapping a character actor with just a few credits for a career-making turn. Fifteen years later, Ford would do the same, with more lasting results, for John Wayne in Stagecoach.

But O’Brien shared some traits with Ford that The Duke couldn’t, including Irish-American ancestry and fierce pride in his naval service. Even when O’Brien’s career faded after WWII, Ford made room for him in his “stock company” of actors, including Fort Apache (1948) and the director’s last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

(More than a half-century after O’Brien and Ford worked together on The Iron Horse, the actor’s son Darcy O’Brien gave a starring role to his father and a supporting one to “Pappy” in his roman a clef about growing up a prince of Hollywood, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.)

When Ford was finished, he had miraculously brought The Iron Horse in under the $280,000 budget set by Fox (which itself was a bargain compared with the $500,000 allotted by Paramount for The Covered Wagon). It grossed $1.5 million, propelling him to the forefront of American filmmakers.

Ironically, of his four Oscar victories for Best Director, not one came from any of the 56 westerns he made throughout his career as Hollywood’s most honored filmmaker.

Quote of the Day (Sophocles, on Love)

“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.”—Ancient Greek playwright Sophocles (496 B.C.-406 B.C.), Oedipus at Colonus (401 B.C.)

The image accompanying this post, from John Ford’s classic 1956 western The Searchers, comes about as close as I can think of to embodying the power of that word “love.”

In the scenes just preceding this, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards has come across, after five years of fruitless searching, the niece seized in a Comanche attack that has left the rest of her family dead. Edwards is so revolted by the thought that she has become one of the wives of the fierce Indian chief Scar--and, implicitly, of the possibility of miscegenation from that union--that he vows to kill her. Now, as he sweeps the smaller, powerless Debbie (played by Natalie Wood) up in his arms, he has his chance.

But, in the end, Edwards—a bitter, bigoted loner—can’t go through with the act. Family ties—love—overcome the vengefulness and growing madness of this frontier Ahab.

“Let's go home, Debbie,” he says softly and invitingly.

Is Ethan freed of “all the weight and pain of life”? As we see him step away from the doorway of the homestead and walk alone  into the distance, the answer is clearly no. But his reconciliation with his niece is a profoundly redemptive act, one that ensures the climax of his search will not be the kind of cascading family bloodshed at the heart of Sophocles and so many other Greek tragedians. 

At least partly for that reason, this moment is one of my favorites in the entire history of American film.

Flashback, December 1945: ‘They Were Expendable,’ Ford Tribute to Naval Courage, Premieres

They Were Expendable, MGM’s somber, stirring tribute to the American PT-boat sailors who first battled skeptical military brass about their craft, then Japanese invaders in the Philippines in the first desperate days of WWII, opened at Loew’s Capitol Theater in Washington, DC, in December 1945, with an audience including many in the military it honored, such as Admiral Chester W. Nimitz.

Navy personnel also helped create the film, including screenwriter Frank Wead, a retired WWI pilot; director John Ford, a captain in the Navy Photographic Field Unit; and one of the two male leads, Robert Montgomery, a real-life PT skipper in the recently concluded war.

One key cast and crew member, however, was not involved in the war: the second male lead, John Wayne, who nevertheless used the movie to recast his image successfully as a towering American hero.

Ford and Wayne made 20 films over 35 years, but in certain ways this may have been the most pivotal. It certainly was the one that tested the most the boundaries of their working relationship and friendship.

Ford, who had enlisted in the Navy even before Pearl Harbor, had spent much of the prior four years in a documentary crew filming battles, including Midway (where he continued shooting even after being wounded, earning a Purple Heart for his gallantry). Throughout that time, he had been after Wayne to “get into” the fight.

But Wayne—34 and able-bodied at the outbreak of hostilities at Pearl Harbor—kept finding one reason after another not to join up. He had suffered an injury during college that continually hampered his function (though it hadn’t bothered him much while performing his own stunts several years before). He was the sole support of his family (though that status would change, as he was about to enter divorce proceedings). He couldn’t get out of a contract with Republic Pictures without triggering a lawsuit (though he didn’t test to see whether Republic head Herbert J. Yates was bluffing). He wrote Ford about joining his photographic unit but kept postponing joining until after his next picture.

In the end, Wayne was exempted from service due to his age and family status. That didn’t sit well with, for instance, Pacific Theater vets who, upon encountering Wayne on a USO tour, booed him raucously (an incident recalled in William Manchester’s WWII memoir, Goodbye, Darkness).

While not a draft dodger, Wayne had not pressed his case as vigorously as other stars had done. That rankled Ford, who before long was ridiculing him repeatedly in front of the entire crew.

The baiting was in keeping with the longtime on-set behavior of Ford, an alcoholic bully who would often pick one person on each film to abuse. The director had, in prior movies, taken Wayne to task for, among other things, “walking like a pansy.” 

Now, almost as soon as shooting began on Ford’s birthday in February—with co-star Montgomery serving inadvertently as a model of doing one’s military duty—Wayne found himself subjected to abuse on a subject that would haunt him for the rest of his life: the not-so-subtle imputation that he was a "shirker."

Ford may have reached his zenith in sadism when he asked why Wayne couldn’t even salute properly. Watching his co-star reduced to what another actor in the production called “a quivering pulp,” Montgomery had had enough. If Ford was subjecting Wayne to this treatment on his behalf, the director should stop the treatment right now, Montgomery said.

Ford eased up—but only on this movie. More than a decade and a half later, while shooting The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford asked James Stewart, a decorated pilot, what he had done in the war. Then he turned to Wayne to ask what he had done.

One has to ask why Wayne continued to endure this abuse—particularly by the early 1960s, the time of production on Liberty Valance, when he was a box-office institution. Gratitude to Ford for rescuing him from “B” Westerns with Stagecoach can only account for some of his forbearance.

True, there was also the possibility that Ford would offer Wayne the chance to play increasingly psychologically complex variations on the ideal of American manhood. But I think something else was involved, the same dynamic behind Montgomery’s work on this movie: the chance to learn from a master of movie-making.

By the mid-1940s, Montgomery—more famous these days, as I indicated in a prior post, as the father of Bewitched’s Elizabeth Montgomery—was a highly regarded actor with his eye now trained on behind-the-camera work. A year later, he would finally have the chance to direct his first film, an unusual adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s detective novel The Lady in the Lake.  

But as he was playing the lead in They Were Expendable, Lt. John Brickley (based on the real-life war hero Lt. John Bulkeley), the actor—a bit nervous about not being in front of the camera for three years during the war—was thinking about the next turn in his career. He didn’t protest when Ford, after filming a scene according to his suggestion, then told him to take the reel home with him, as they wouldn’t be using it.

Weeks later, after Ford suffered an injury while on location in Florida, he had Montgomery film action sequences while he was recuperating. In what must have thrilled the actor, Ford later claimed that he couldn’t tell the differences between these scenes and those he had filmed.

As for Wayne: Playing Brickley’s second-in-command, Lieutenant "Rusty" Ryan, was not only a chance for a high-profile role in something besides a western, or even for making sizable elements of the public forget his less-than-glorious part in the war, but also an opportunity to learn lessons in directing from the universally acknowledged master of the art.

By this time, a project of his own was germinating in Wayne’s mind: making a film about the Alamo. Over the next 15 years, he would hire researchers and put much of his own money behind this account of the legendary last-ditch stand against Santa Ana. Even now, he was absorbing by osmosis how to frame shots and other aspects of film.

The Alamo was similar to They Were Expendable as a study of sacrifice in the face of overwhelming odds. But, if film could be likened to song, Wayne had learned the words but not the music that would make the experience indelible.

Over the course of his long career, Ford assembled a de facto stock company of actors who, for better or worse, were willing to endure his on-set dictatorship. He knew their talents and fit roles to them, and had learned to work even more smoothly with screenwriters such as Wead and Frank Nugent (a former movie critic who would write the script for The Searchers and other classic Ford westerns).

Wayne could not count on the same assets in making The Alamo. He could not secure actors he had hoped for principal roles (Clark Gable, Charlton Heston), so he had to hope that the ones he did secure (Richard Widmark, Laurence Harvey) would mesh well with each other under his direction—a hope unfulfilled in the final product. 

More fatally, for all his interest in recreating the Alamo with almost documentary exactness, Wayne lacked Ford’s intense psychological identification with his material. From Midway to D-Day, Ford had not just filmed men under fire but also, as one himself shooting amid the roar of battle, he had imbibed their attitude toward war as a matter of stoic grace under pressure rather than an exercise in jingoism.

Some of the best moments in They Were Expendable are of men suddenly facing awesome odds with silent, grim but certain resolution: being told, one by one, at a social gathering that Pearl Harbor has been attacked, or, through a fluke of fate, losing one’s place on the plane taking select sailors to the comparative safety of Australia. The Alamo exhibits none of this fatalistic attitude. It is more committed to waving the flag than in honoring the qualities that led men to carry it in the face of death.

The result: while They Were Expendable did not lure a war-weary public to the box office, it has increasingly won critical acclaim as one of the best WWII movies, while The Alamo is a long epic that, for all its admirable intentions, lacks the psychological insight, pacing or extraction of actors' best talents so characteristic of Ford classics.

This Day in Film History (Birth of Maureen O'Hara, ‘Queen of Technicolor’)

Aug. 17, 1920— Maureen FitzSimons—better known to movie fans as Maureen O'Hara, nicknamed “The Queen of Technicolor” for the flaming red hair that made her a natural for this film process—was born in Ranelagh, County Dublin, Ireland.

Even the most casual movie fans are likely to catch an O’Hara performance at least twice a year: on St. Patrick’s Day, in The Quiet Man (1952), and at Christmastime, in Miracle on 34th Street (1947). But her other thirtysomething films—with the great bulk made between 1939, when she initially signed with RKO, and 1968, when she began her third and happiest marriage—are worth seeing throughout the year.

In 2014, less than a year before her death, the beloved star was finally awarded a special "Lifetime Achievement" Oscar. As tends to happen with this special honor, the award was less a recognition than an atonement.

Not only was O’Hara never nominated for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress, but her longtime studio, 20th Century-Fox, steered her towards roles that capitalized on her stunning beauty and athleticism (her equestrian and fencing skills led to her casting in westerns and swashbucklers, respectively), not the intensive, wide-ranging training in classical theater and operatic singing she had in her youth in Ireland.

But given the right role, O’Hara invariably measured up to the challenge. In this, she resembled her friend and frequent Fox co-star Tyrone Power. Their talent and comfort with each other might be seen to best advantage in The Long Gray Line, John Ford’s twin valentine to the U.S. military and his Irish-American heritage, in a true account of an emigrant who became a longtime athletic trainer at West Point.

She may have chafed at the narrow range of her roles, particularly how her studio contract restricted any possibility of working with European directors who could have better brought out her versatility. 

But, if she never got to be a “chameleon actor” who could change radically depending on the role, O’Hara was indisputably a “personality star” who left her imprint on each picture she graced.

Her roles invariably reflected her forthright, fearless nature as a self-described “tough Irish lass”—a woman no easy match for the men who came into her orbit but eminently worth the wooing.

Powerful males in the Hollywood community could come away burned by encounters with her:

*Director John Farrow (Mia’s father) was almost punched in front of an entire film set when he made a pass at the starlet;

*Walt Disney, forced by O'Hara to honor a contract, referred to her as “that bitch” (telling this years later, O’Hara said she’d rather be called that than “that wimp”); and

*The scandal sheet “Confidential” (The “National Enquirer” of its time), forced to settle after O’Hara sued it for libel for reporting that she had been spotted cuddling with a Latino in Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. (At trial, O’Hara produced her passport, which showed she was shooting on location abroad at the time of the alleged incident.)

The one figure she was careful in dealing with was John Ford, with whom she made five films. At one point, the director found a way to abuse every single one of the actors who formed a de facto stock company on his films, and O’Hara was no exception. 

“That devil,” as O’Hara called him, actually struck her once, and she claimed she could still smell the field filled with dung where he filmed her for a scene in The Quiet Man. (Perhaps the only time she responded in kind was when, after he unmercifully cursed her for squinting when hair repeatedly blew in her face in one windy scene, she answered, "What would a bald-headed son of a bitch know about hair lashing across his eyeballs?")

Why did she tolerate such abuse? It could not have been simply because she recognized he was in the grip of alcoholism. (That realization did not stop her from divorcing her second husband, screenwriter Will Price, who was guilty of violence, fraud and adultery during their 12-year marriage.)

Part of it may have involved her understanding that he actually displayed what she called “a schoolboy crush” on her. This may have climaxed when the married Ford sent her a Valentine’s Day card, expressing his love and thanking her for the five months they had just spent filming together. (The undated message appears to have been sent during production of The Quiet Man.) If her great friend (and most frequent co-star) John Wayne was Ford’s ideal of a tough, strapping male, then O’Hara was his ideal woman.

But O’Hara undoubtedly also realized that Ford’s genius was capable of translating that love into high art. Two memorable scenes, filmed roughly a decade apart, make the point.

The first, from How Green Was My Valley (1941), shows the wind playing with O'Hara's hair as her character, Angharad, leaves the church after her wedding, with the veil forming a circle around her head.

The second, from The Quiet Man, depicts the moment that Wayne’s “Yank,” Sean Thornton, first lays eyes on O’Hara’s Mary Kate Dannaher. He stops, transfixed—and so is the viewer, momentarily forgetful of the beautiful countryside because of the redheaded dazzler spotted in the middle of it.

Flashback, December 1936: Ford’s Irish Project, ‘Plough and the Stars,’ Misfires

Eighty years ago this week, RKO released the passion project of one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded directors, starring one of its best young actresses. But The Plough and the Stars, once highly anticipated, pleased none of the principals involved: the studio, director John Ford, star Barbara Stanwyck, and the Irish playwright whose work was adapted, Sean O’Casey. It raised legitimate questions over how faithfully the film industry would treat complex, provocative subject matter.

Probably Ford’s most famous utterance, at a legendary 1950 Screen Directors Guild showdown over the blacklist (“I am John Ford and I make Westerns”), could just as truly have been rephrased as “I am John Ford and I am Irish-American.” Ireland was second only to the West as a favorite subject.

In the mid-1930s, his most recent Irish project had given him a virtually unrivaled reputation as an artist. The Informer, adapted from the Liam O’Flaherty novel, not only brought him a Best Director Oscar but, for a few decades, a distinction that has since gone to the likes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: critical acclamation as the greatest film of all time.

In other words, he was now close to the hottest director in Hollywood. Within the strict bounds of the studio system of the time, his RKO bosses wanted to make him happy.

From the first, everyone should have known that problems would need to be surmounted in translating the material from stage to screen. The Plough and the Stars, like the other parts of the “Dublin Trilogy” by Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, is a tragicomedy about boastful, cowardly or delusional men and their long-suffering women, set in the tenements of Ireland’s largest city amid the nation’s war of independence and civil war.

The Irish themselves were divided over the meaning of the play, as indicated by a riot during its initial 1926 run at the Abbey Theatre (an event described in this prior post of mine). Certain scenes—including an off-screen orator using phrases from a leader of the Easter Rising, Padraig Pearse, the Irish tricolor brought into a bar, and a prostitute soliciting business—had aroused the ire of the patriotically correct. If the Irish, the people with the most direct knowledge of the events depicted, couldn’t agree about it, how could one ever expect the band of callous outsiders in Hollywood to make sense of it?

John Ford would have none of that.   

What could go wrong? As it turned out, way too much:

*Pleasing the Puritans. One source of the Dublin rioters’ anger was O’Casey’s prostitute character Rosie Redmond. Such fallen women, they complained, were not emblematic of Irish womanhood. No matter how much O’Casey complained about these critics and the censorship they advocated, however, they did not succeed in significantly diluting Rosie’s depiction on stage; only Hollywood managed to do so. It might be argued that this did not affect the political stance of the movie. But it did soften the Marxist O’Casey’s picture of the desperate lengths to which Dublin’s tenement dwellers would go in order to live to tomorrow. Nor was the cantankerous playwright happy about satisfying British censors who requested the removal of any references to God.

*Miscasting of leads. Ford got his wish to hire four members of the Abbey Theatre (including Barry Fitzgerald, who would go on to an Oscar-winning career of his own as a character actor). In return, however, RKO insisted that he hire American stars for the leads in order to assure some box-office revenues. The result was two markedly different acting styles: the stage-based, naturalistic emoting of the Abbey players, vs. the broader manner, honed for the big screen, of Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster as, respectively, Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Stanwyck looked particularly out of place, despite the fact that, consummate pro that she was, she threw herself into the role, including trying to get her Irish accent just right. But, according to her biographer Victoria Wilson: “One night, in the projection room, one of the producers decided that somebody had to be understood. The Abbey players couldn’t change their dialect. Barbara was chosen, but the early sequences in which she used a heavy brogue were never reshot.”

*Disagreement over politics. Playwright, director and studio held sharply different views on the justice and effectiveness of the Easter Rising, leaving the point of view of the finished film a muddled mess. O’Casey, at one point a member of the Irish Citizens Army, eventually parted ways with the republican movement for putting nationalist goals above socialist ones. Surviving family members of Irish executed during the rising believed he was ridiculing the patriot cause. On the other hand, the opportunity to plead that cause was part of what drew Ford to the project. His nocturnal scene of Irish soldiers listening to their commander lent the troops an ineradicable dignity. “Events and actions which are only reported in the play (the meeting, the occupation of the GPO) all now appear on the screen,” observe Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill in their 1987 study, Cinema and Ireland. “Inevitably, these additions undermine the importance of the domestic sphere as the central site for action and with it the virtues that are to be found there.” But Ford’s views clashed with Sam Briskin, RKO’s recently hired production chief, who couldn’t understand what the Irish wanted in the fight. To Ford’s reply—“What did George Washington want? They wanted liberty”—Briskin responded in a way that could only have made Ford bristle: “They’ve got liberty.” In the end, Hollywood’s requirement for a happy ending made a hash of O’Casey’s point about the futility of Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” for nationalism when ordinary human needs for food, shelter and dignity went unmet.

*An ornery director. “Terse, pithy, to the point,” actress Mary Astor once characterized Ford’s directing style. “Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal.” Astor understood him well, and Katharine Hepburn, whom he had directed earlier in 1936 in Mary of Scotland, did more than that: she loved him. Stanwyck did neither. Her early remark about her role—that it was so insubstantial that she could “walk through” it—led Ford to continually taunt her later on with, “Come on, Barbara, and walk through.” After filming was completed, Ford departed for his boat and refused to come back to supervise any additions. That opened the door to Briskin, never comfortable with such a political picture, to changing Jack and Nora Clitheroe from a married couple to lovers, necessitating additional scenes shot without Ford’s approval.

According to Scott Eyman’s biography of Ford, Print the Legend, the movie cost nearly a half-million dollars but only grossed three-quarters of that. That failure made the studio reluctant to take on future potentially prestigious projects, even low-budget ones, if they couldn’t promise a predictable revenue stream. (One of those was another O’Casey masterpiece that had caught Ford’s eye, Juno and the Paycock.) RKO’s post-production alterations led Ford both to depart for Twentieth Century Fox, where he would have a somewhat freer hand, and to become a driving force at the Screen Directors Guild (later the Directors Guild of America) as a counterweight against studio interference.

Ford was in no way done with Irish subject matter, however. In 1940, he wove several Eugene O’Neill one-act plays into The Long Voyage Home. Throughout his Westerns of the 1940s, Irish characters frequently appear as soldiers who perform lonely and dangerous duty on the American frontier. And, in the same year he suffered through one of his most frustrating projects because of his passion for an explicitly Celtic subject, he optioned another short story that, when he finally filmed it 15 years later, netted him his fourth and final Best Director Oscar: The Quiet Man.

Amazingly, for all his negative experience with The Plough and the Stars, he wasn’t done with O’Casey, either. Shortly before the latter’s death in 1964, the playwright agreed to allow filming proceed on the portion of his autobiography dealing with his early life. Unfortunately, Ford could not bring his vision to pass in this case, either. When he fell ill, Young Cassidy fell into the hands of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Ford, in declining health, made only one other movie thereafter.

This Day in Film History (Death of George O’Brien—Honored Vet, Western Star, Inspiration for Novelist Son)

September 4, 1985—George O'Brien, decorated veteran of two world wars and a Western star long forgotten by movie audiences who had made him a star in the Twenties and Thirties, passed away at age 86 in Tulsa, Okla., his once-magnificent build a casualty of a stroke six years before that had left him bedridden.

Well, in that last sentence, “largely forgotten” might be more correct than “long forgotten.” For anyone the least bit interested in John Ford movies, O'Brien is remembered for his appearances, even after his star faded, in the informal “stock company” that “Pappy” kept from one production to another. 

For fans of fine literature, through son Darcy O’Brien, he inspired one of the saddest but most uproarious Hollywood coming-of-age novels, A Way of Life, Like Any Other.

Since the theater and film worlds love to transfer stories to far more modern settings (e.g., The Tempest becoming Forbidden Planet), let’s try something similar here. 

Only this time, let’s imagine pre-revolutionary France translated to Hollywood in the late 1930s and early 1940s, when O’Brien and wife Marguerite Churchill, a former actress,  were living like Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette at Versailles and son Darcy was fawned over like a dauphin. It was paradise.

It couldn’t last, of course. Just as a revolution and their own personal failings led to the royal family’s flight from the palace, so the O’Briens saw their comfortable way of life end because of their own personal circumstances and a studio system no longer able or interested in finding a place for them.

The son of the San Francisco Chief of Police, George had been an excellent athlete (football, baseball, track and swimming) in high school and college, and during WWI won the light-heavyweight Pacific fleet boxing title. 

He parlayed his deep knowledge of horses (he’d been raised around police stables) and build to become successively a movie cameraman, stunt man, part-time actor, then a leading man.

O’Brien’s best-regarded and most prominent nongenre role might have been as the young country husband who, manipulated by another woman, plans to murder his wife in F.W. Murnau’s 1927 Sunrise. But his most conspicuous success came in westerns. 

Ford plucked him from obscurity to cast him as the lead in perhaps the archetypal silent western, The Iron Horse (1924), and he made the successful transition to talkies, including in an adaptation of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage and a whole slew of B-westerns made for Fox and RKO. 

Beefcake shots of him shirtless, virtually guaranteed to please his many female fans, won him the nickname “The Chest” in Hollywood.

The activity that may have meant the most to O’Brien, however, was service in the Navy. Already a recipient of five decorations for bravery under fire as a stretcher-bearer in WWI, he didn’t even wait for Pearl Harbor to re-enlist again for WWII service. 

(RKO had to issue a press release announcing the news to irate fans wondering why one of their favorite stars was no longer appearing on the big screen.)

Once again, O’Brien served with distinction, and in even more important engagements this time, as a "beachmaster" involved in a dozen or more island invasions. 

But the war wreaked havoc on his career and his marriage, with Churchill complaining that her husband had been “changed radically” by it. George's roles largely dried up, and their finances became pinched. 

They divorced, after 15 years of marriage, in 1948, with Marguerite winning custody of Darcy and his sister Orin.

A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a roman a clef. or "novel with a key." The title comes from a remark that the Irish poet Seamus Heaney made about O’Brien’s childhood on the family estate (called "Casa Fiesta" in the novel). 

The irony, of course, is that this upbringing was anything but "like any other.” How many people, after all, become used to the likes of Ford and Charles Laughton coming to the house?

Darcy O’Brien does not provide names for the narrator’s parents, but the details of their lives do coincide closely enough with those of George O'Brien and Marguerite Churchill to leave little doubt whom he is writing about. There are even enough clues about background characters to permit guesses about their real-life counterparts.

(For instance: as an adolescent, the narrator spends considerable time with the family of “Sam Caliban,” a colorful writer-director with a penchant for gambling. Caliban, we are told, had directed the narrator’s mother and Will Rogers onscreen. As it happened, Marguerite Churchill and Rogers had been directed in Ambassador Bill by Sam Taylor, who had also adapted Shakespeare’s The Tempest, featuring a character named…Caliban.)

Both O’Brien and his ex-wife emerge as rather pathetic figures after the divorce in their son’s account (which won the P.E.N.'s Ernest Hemingway Award for the best first novel of 1978). 

Marguerite Churchill attempted without success to resume the acting career she had given up to raise a family. After a handful of appearances on film and TV after the divorce, she lived abroad. 

Darcy depicts her drowning in promiscuity and drink, oblivious of the effect of her lifestyle on her tween son (she is even proud that, age 12, he can mix virtually any drink for guests at parties).

George O’Brien emerges somewhat more sympathetically, but still troubled: no longer maintaining the handsome looks that had sustained his career for so long, yet—even as his financial prospects continued to wane—painfully slow to shed the illusion that his career was over. 

(Old friend Ford continued to toss minor assignments his way from time to time, including a bit part, as late as 1964, in Cheyenne Autumn.)

By Darcy O’Brien’s account, his father was able to achieve something of a measure of grace at last, courtesy of a renewed interest in Catholicism and a deep pride and connection to the Navy. George O’Brien went back on active duty during the Korean and even Vietnam wars. 

By the time he retired, he had not only achieved the rank of captain, but had been recommended four times for promotion to admiral. He was buried at sea off the coast of San Diego. 

That was, I think, an appropriate metaphor for his career. In the postwar period, because of an anti-trust case lost before the Supreme Court, Hollywood had left him adrift. 

The one Tinseltown figure who continued to find room in his films for him was the one who, because of his own wartime service, had the deepest affinity for naval men: Ford. 

It is sadly instructive to compare O'Brien's career trajectory with that of another college athlete propelled by Ford to stardom, John Wayne. 

While O'Brien was off the screen for five crucial years, serving his country, Wayne was capitalizing on the sudden leap to fame he had taken, after a dozen years as a bit player, in Ford's classic western Stagecoach. 

During WWII, Wayne took every deferment to which he was entitled as a father in his thirties, while others--very much including O'Brien and Ford--chose a different route. 

The price those Hollywood figures paid--Ford, a wound incurred while shooting the Battle of Midway, and O'Brien, a dimming career--stands in sharp contrast to "The Duke."