John Ford and the American West Book

Legendary filmmaker John Ford made some 50 Westerns in a career that spanned more than half a century. From the silent classic Straight Shooting in 1917 to 1964's Cheyenne Autumn-and including such cinematic gems as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, and The Searchers-Ford's Westerns have entered movie history as imperishable examples of the human spirit. This groundbreaking book is the first to take a visual approach to these films, relating them to the paintings and sculptures of Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and other artists.Ford also drew inspiration from the primal beauty of the American landscape; so many of his films, such as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagon Master, are set against the untamed wilderness of the Southwest's Monument Valley that the area came to be known as "Ford country." Author Peter Cowie shows how this master filmmaker used a variety of visual sources to create his idealized view of frontier life, crafting films that capture the enduring essence of the national character and epitomize the mythology of the American West. AUTHOR BIO: Peter Cowie has written more than 20 books on the cinema, among them The Cinema of Orson Welles and biographies of Ingmar Bergman and Francis Ford Coppola. He is the founder of the International Film Guide, which he edited for 40 years. Cowie is sometime Regents Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.Read More