Quentin Tarantino Is Wrong
The writer-director doesn't get John Ford, and it steams my clams.
Note: I am thrilled to partner with Charlottesville, VA’s Alamo Drafthouse to host a screening of John Ford’s legendary Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance on Saturday, November 4th. Be on the lookout for tickets—I hope to see you there!
Most Americans today don’t know who John Ford is — but they know his Westerns.
The industry loved him. He still holds the record for most Academy Award wins for Best Director with four.
His fellow filmmakers loved him. Swedish director Ingmar Bergman called him “the best director in the world.” Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa admitted to being influenced by Ford’s films. Indian filmmaker and essayist Satyajit Ray once compared Ford’s greatness to Beethoven’s acclaimed middle period.
A young Steven Spielberg famously met an elder Ford on a California studio lot and, to this day, still cites him as his most significant cinematic influence.
When Orson Welles was asked to name the directors who most appealed to him, he replied: "I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
But he does not come without his critics.
While many have lionized Ford, several filmmakers have found much to criticize the director for — the most articulate being writer-director Quentin Tarantino.
In a 2012 interview while promoting Django Unchained, the two-time Oscar winner didn’t mince words about his perception of the filmmaker.
One of my American Western heroes is not John Ford, obviously. To say the least, I hate him. Forget about the faceless Indians he killed like zombies. It really is people like that that kept alive this idea of Anglo-Saxon humanity compared to everybody else’s humanity — and the idea that that’s hogwash is a very new idea in relative terms. And you can see it in the cinema in the ’30s and ’40s — it’s still there. And even in the ’50s.
Tarantino took the chance to criticize Ford several times in his book “Cinema Speculations.” Tarantino looks at Ford's filmography and sees an attempt to cover up “America’s history of fascism, racism, and hypocrisy,” criticizing Ford and company for “whitewashing” the harsher reality of our shared past.
So, is Tarantino correct to assert that Ford spent decades trying to cover up the great injustices of America’s past and replace them with Anglo-Saxon domination?
In short, no. It’s a “hot take” to be a hot take.
It’s an absolutist decree that, much like Tarantino’s own pictures, lacks any semblance of nuance.
The accusation that Ford disposed of Indians like “zombies” is not unfounded. Still, the blanket statement that his filmography is some monolithic entity devoted to glossing over America’s checkered past and upholding “jingoistic white supremacy” is intellectually dishonest and bankrupt of any substantial evidence.
1939’s Stagecoach is where Tarantino’s criticisms are most founded. In the third act, Apache tribesmen attack the titular stagecoach in a dramatic, well-staged chase before the U.S. Calvary intervenes and saves the day.
Like much of early Hollywood, it does not show the Apache favorably.
The Apache are a threat from the beginning, hanging over the film like an ominous cloud about to burst. They are not characters but plot devices. Never shot in close-up, save for three or four at the beginning, the Apache are captured almost exclusively in wide shots as a single mass of barbarity.
As Roger Ebert said in 2011, "The film's attitudes toward Native Americans are unenlightened. The Apaches are seen simply as murderous savages; there is no suggestion the white men have invaded their land. Ford shared that simple view with countless other makers of Westerns.”
Looks like Ebert and Tarantino agree.
But that makes the rest of Ford’s career fascinating and Tarantino so misguided.
In the days before Pearl Harbor, Ford built up the archetype Western hero: John Wayne’s Ringo Kid — hard-nosed and upright (even when on the wrong side of the law). Over the past century, the character has been the template for hundreds of Ringo Kind wannabes.
Ford’s first attempt to question the Western hero came with Fort Apache, often called one of Hollywood’s “first ‘pro-Indian’ Westerns.”
Fort Apache depicts the clash between Captain Kirby York (Wayne) and the glory-mad Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) in dealing with the Apache tribe living in the lands around the titular fort.
Lieutenant Colonel Thursday is prejudiced and arrogant, hell-bent on achieving glory and chomping to wipe out the tribe, calling them “savage, illiterate, and uncivilized.” In the end, Thursday leads a disastrous attack on the tribe, which ends with Thursday and most of the regiment being slaughtered.
Several years later, York is asked if Thursday really was as noble as he’s portrayed in Death. York lies and says that the noble depictions are accurate.
Knowing the power of stories, York ties the posthumous glory of Lt. Col Thursday to the memory of the fallen and the memory of the lost to the regiment's survival. He holds up Thursday to be the shining ideal of the Western man, much like Wayne’s Ringo Kid in Stagecoach, even though the bitter truth is that he was an evil man.
The future of the regiment is built on propping up Thursday’s memory. It is a lie, but, in York’s eyes, it is a necessary one.
And contrary to what Tarantino suggests, Ford’s treatment of the Apache people in this film is lightyears above their portrayal in Stagecoach. The film is thoughtful and nuanced, offering great respect to the Apache people. The tribesman are not stereotypes, and while the depictions aren’t perfect either, they are nonetheless presented as noble and intelligent.
With Fort Apache, we see Ford begin to question the truth behind the Western myth, which, in reality, is a lens of America itself.
Twenty years later, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance goes even further.
In the film, Jimmy Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard, a U.S. Senator who became revered for killing the outlaw Liberty Valance as a young man, returns to the town of Shinbone with his wife, Hallie.
At first, the purpose of their visit is unknown. But when local reporters seek the Senator out to learn more about his visit, they find he and Hallie are attending the funeral of an old friend, John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon. Stewart’s Stoddard reveals to the journalists that he was not “the man who shot Liberty Valance” but Wayne’s Doniphon.
Most of his life — and Shinbone’s history — is built on a lie.
Liberty Valance is not a happy movie. It’s a tragedy.
Much like the history of the West.
Like Apache, Liberty Valance makes us confront the truth that societies put great men on pedestals, but how often are the men placed there of their own accord? Ford explores this with nuance and grace while reminding us that sacrifices must be made for “progress,” no matter the personal cost. In the final scene, Stoddard and Hallie suffer because the truth now lives only with them and the dead.
Soon, they’ll be gone, too, and the facts will die. But the legend will live on.
With Apache and Liberty Valance, Ford deconstructs the myth of the West and the heroes at its center. The heroes are held up by lies and the myths are more potent than any tribe, cavalry, or government.
Alongside his exploration of the Western mythos, Ford also examines the role of racism in the genre.
One can’t talk about either the Western or the exploration of racism within the genre without acknowledging the Monument Valley-sized titan in the room: The Searchers.
A nasty and brutish film, it’s unapologetic in exploring the reasons to hate another and how hate can drive people to do horrible things.
The racist acts that John Wayne’s Ethan Hunt carries out in his odyssey to save his niece from the Comanche are too numerous and gruesome to mention, the least of which is his treatment of his adopted nephew, who happens to be one-sixth Comanche. Here’s one instance:
In Tarantino’s reading of the movie, The Searchers upholds Anglo-Saxon supremacy by not appropriately punishing the Ethan Hunt character for his vile acts. Yes, characters throughout the film attempt to stop him from carrying through his most horrific acts of madness, but no sentence is handed down.
But that in no way means Ethan’s madness goes unpunished.
Take a moment to watch the final scene of the movie.
Having saved his niece, Ethan receives none of the absolution Tarantino implies.
His madness drove everyone away. And, although he accomplished his mission, he finds no forgiveness for what he did along the way.
Ford’s ending of The Searchers does not vindicate the actions of its racist protagonist. In fact, it gives him a punishment worse than death.
In the first clip from the movie, Ethan maliciously shoots out the eyes of a Comanche corpse killed during a gun battle. Comanche tradition believes that without eyes, they cannot enter the spirit land and must wander forever between the winds.
Ethan’s hatred and bigotry towards the Comanche blinded him.
The film’s ending condemns Ethan to the same fate as the one he gave that Comanche corpse—to be exiled from his community and wander the West aimlessly and alone.
And that’s a far worse punishment than any I could imagine.
For someone who watches movies so prodigiously as Tarantino, it’s impressive how thoroughly wrong he is about this picture.
After The Searchers, Ford continued to explore the role of racism in the West in films such as Sergeant Rutledge, which made movie history as one of the first American westerns to star a Black man. The movie revolves around the fictional court-martial of 1st Sgt. Braxton Rutledge has been accused of the rape and murder of his commanding officer’s daughter.
Uncommon for its day, the film’s characters see racism both openly and internalized. It’s remarkable how the person who directed Stagecoach also directed this picture. While Ford’s movies reveal him to be a man of deep respect for political and military institutions, he is not blind to the realities of the disenfranchised.
But the most fascinating of Ford’s late-career movies is his final Western.
Cheyenne Autumn explored the great Cheyenne Exodus of 1878-79, in which the Cheyenne people left their reservation in the Oklahoma Territory and made the dangerous trek north to their ancestral homeland of Wyoming.
With a beautiful irony, Ford’s last western is the exact opposite of Stagecoach. Ford made a 154-minute apology to tribes that Hollywood, the American government, and Ford had mistreated.
In fact, Ford himself declared the movie to be an “elegy” for the Native Americans.
Imperfect as the film is, it’s an indictment of Hollywood and the myth of the West. In this final epic, we see how much Ford matured and grew as a filmmaker—and proves how wrong his critics like Tarantino are.
John Ford is both a creator and destroyer of America’s Western mythology.
In Stagecoach, he helped solidify the troubling troupes of a genre that, as Tarantino has pointed out, has often been accused of jingoism. Tarantino fails to see how Ford turned the camera toward the people seen as expendable in his early career with Sergeant Rutledge, The Searchers, and Fort Apache. And if those pictures were the kill shots, then Cheyenne Autumn was the eulogy to the legend Ford helped build.
And, as if he was reflecting on his role in creating the cinematic myth of the West, Liberty Valance dared to ask why we even created shared myths in the first place. Ford seems to suggest that—good or bad—people need something to rally around. And what better to rally around than a story?
The film famously declares, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Over his career, Ford reckoned with the reality that he printed both legend and fact.
This is not to say that either was perfectly told. Ford’s work had some real duds, and even his greatest pictures don’t always fire on all cylinders.
But by putting his internal reckoning on the silver screen for all to see, Ford encourages the audience to think about how they view our past and engage with it. For a notoriously personal man, his films give us a deeply intimate look into the maturation of a master storyteller and his understanding of America.
For a man claiming to love movies, it doesn’t seem like Tarantino bothered to pay attention to Ford’s pictures. Maybe he was too busy thinking about feet.