John Ford Silents 1917-1929

WORK IN PROGRESS

“If Ford’s career had ended in 1929, he would deserve at most a footnote in film history, and it is doubtful that scholars would even bother excavating too many of his Twenties works from the Fox vaults. However, a few marginal observations are in order even in this primitive period of film research. Ford can be very profitably studied before 1930 purely in terms of studio policy. In his years at Universal (1917-1921), only two of Ford’s thirty-eight feature films did not qualify as some sort of horse opera…. By contrast, Ford’s output at the fancier Fox studio between a920 and 1929...