In 1953, John Ford had directed more than 100 films, had won four Oscars and he was at the peak of his career. He was a well-known and respected member of the industry who always downplayed his merits and never considered himself an artist. What’s more, just three years earlier, in front of his colleagues from the Directors’ Union gathered to determine his position regarding Senator McCarthy’s witch hunt, he had said the phrase that would always be attached to his name almost like an epitaph: “My name is John Ford. And I make westerns. Without further ado.
Sullen curmudgeon who hated public life, hated talking about himself, hated giving interviews, hated talking about his films and, surely, would have hated becoming one of the most influential, important and greatest directors in the history of cinema, the truth is that Ford was also one of the most enigmatic directors of all time.
The thirteenth child of Irish immigrants who ran a tavern, he was born in the state of Maine on February 1, 1894. He felt deeply American, but he had a sincere union with his Irish roots and was always very sensitive to immigration, two very important topics. present in his cinema, which is full of films in which He made clear his idea of man, existence, God and America. However, despite the image of a rough, shady and difficult man that he projected, his cinema, which is as entertaining as it is complex, reveals that behind that image there was a sensitive artist.
He joined the new film business following in the footsteps of his brother, Francis Ford, and made his directorial debut in 1917 to, in ’39, change the history of cinema by making The diligencethe movie that changed the western, a genre already outdated and out of fashion by then, forever. From that moment until 1953 he had not stopped working, including war documentaries. Therefore, when the director of Fort Apache and The quiet man began to feel fatigue and fog in his eyes, he underwent a series of tests that concluded in a cataract surgery. Everything went well, but in the postoperative period, an impatient Ford removed the bandages early causing a hypersensitivity to light in his eyes that he mitigated with a patch. From then on he would always carry it in one of his two eyes, because he changed it from one to the other indifferently unleashing all kinds of speculation and immortalizing some masterful moments such as the one of himself contemplating Monument Valley in 1956 during a break from filming desert centaurs.
Three other directors patched
In addition to Ford, three other great filmmakers are also remembered for the patch they wore over one of their eyes. One was the New Yorker Roaul Walshdirector of The world in your hands and They died with their boots onwho lost an eye in a car accident in 1928 while acting as an actor in the film The fragile will. Another was the Viennese Fritz Langdirector of Metropolis either The woman in the paintingwhich unleashed all kinds of assumptions, since there are photos of him with a monocle in the same eye in which, on other occasions, he wore the patch. And finally, the director of Rebel without a cause and Johnny Guitar, Nicholas Rayhe used the patch as a result of an embolism that cost him his right eye, although many chroniclers of the time argued that he actually wore it because he liked it aesthetically. Come on, he wasn’t one-eyed, he was just cool.
What is undeniable is that these magnificent directors, perhaps thanks to the patch, are accompanied by an aura of mystery and that the image of John Fordparaphrasing Sabina, “with an eye patch, with the face of a bad guy, like an old scoundrel captain” is, thanks to him, mythical and imperishable. Although this, surely, would have made no difference to him.
