The Poetry of Dispossession: The Irish-American Cinema of John Martin Feeney - Part 2
This is the second instalment in a three part series of articles on the films and worldview of the Irish American auteur, John Martin Feeney - better known by the cognomen, John Ford.
Part 1 may be found here.
Part II: The Ambivalent Politics of John Martin Feeney
John Martin Feeney's politics have been a source of infinite confusion to critics. He is seen as right-wing and left-wing, racist and anti-racist, an outsider and a defender of the establishment. The simplistic view is that he went through a phase of progressivism in the 1930s that “darkened” into conservatism in the 1950s. The reality is that Feeney was Irish. Like probably most Irish in America of that era he was roughly left on labour issues as a survival mechanism while at the same time harbouring what to his critics seemed a deep reactionary sensibility. It is the sense of place and longing for rooted community that makes Feeney “right-wing” just as it is a sense of being displaced and an outsider that makes him “left-wing.” His military service during the 1940s where among other things he led an army photographic unit at the Battle of Midway probably gave him more of a sense of American identity. The army and navy as a source of community is something he went on to explore in such underrated films as The Thin Gray Line (1955) and The Wings of Eagles (1957). Military ritual and tradition became for him the proverbial fixed points in a shifting world.
The Grapes of Wrath: Feeney's “Marxist” Masterpiece
His most overtly “left-wing” (it is more accurate to say “anti-capitalist”) film is the 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath which he made for Daryl F. Zanuck at Twentieth Century Fox. Some of his more conservative friends like the actor George O'Brien thought Feeney was wrong to have accepted the project at all. Worse still to have made one of the great American films out of such explosive subject matter. But really the way Feeney relates to this material is not through left-wing politics as such but, as critic Joseph McBride suggests, through his race-memory of the Famine and of Irish peasants being thrown off the land.
The most powerful images in the film are those of small farmers being uprooted and dispossessed by an impersonal bureaucratic machine. With the sundering of ties to the land and to a locality, the family itself begins to disintegrate on a doomed expedition to California. The climax in which Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda, abandons his loved ones to become a fugitive and revolutionary is made ambivalent by the breaking up of the family it entails. More so perhaps than in the hands of another filmmaker. The dissolution of the family, rather than class struggle, becomes the heart of the story. Orson Welles, who was highly influenced by Feeney, chastised him for ruining Steinbeck's book, turning something politically radical into a story as he thought about “Mother Love.” Though Welles was reputedly raised Catholic, this criticism feels like a typically Anglo-Saxon response to Catholic art. Not for the first time, Feeney's Irish Catholic sensibility had confounded and frustrated some of his own admirers. Steinbeck, strangely enough, disagreed and thought the film was an improvement on his book.
Rio Grande: Feeney's Jingoistic Classic
At the other end of the scale, a film like Rio Grande (1950) is considered a right-wing probably “xenophobic” work and only begrudgingly accepted as a masterpiece. Its screenwriter James Kevin McGuinness was actually having trouble getting work at the time in Hollywood because of his right-wing politics. Feeney nonetheless was prepared to hire him. The result is probably one of Feeney's best treatments of Irish characters in an American setting, with Maureen O'Hara's Kathleen and General Philip Sheridan (played by J. Carrol Naish) being coded as Irish. The film even features an anachronistic rendition of Down By the Glenside, a song that did not exist during the period the film is set in.
You could say it is a film about Irish American Yankees and ex-Confederates reconciling over the slaughter of “savage” Indians to tunes of Irish rebel songs. But that would be too crass a generalisation. It is a film filled with evocative images of duty, sacrifice and comradery. The reassembly of a broken family within the rigid discipline of army life gives the otherwise carefree vignettes a tight efficient structure. Despite Feeney passing off the film as a casual effort (with minimum takes, delivering under schedule and under budget) every set-up is perfect. Every sparing close-up of John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara and Claude Jarman Jr. (as their rebellious son) is lovingly composed. Father, mother and son are each rendered in strong confident characterisations without ever being clichés. This is not a cinema concerned with undermining masculinity or military life or national duty, nor does it suffer for any lack of complexity on that account. The relationships are human and affirmative.
It has been said of Feeney that his affection for the Southern Confederacy was part and parcel of his Irish regard for lost causes. Indeed the level of Irish nationalist sympathy for the Confederacy has been mostly obscured down through the years by the fame of Meagher's Irish Brigade. But only here do we see the Irish and Confederate themes mingle in Feeney's cinema. We see that the marriage between Colonel Kirby and Kathleen is broken up by Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign during the Civil War and that Kathleen herself is a Lost Cause archetype. She is an unreconstructed confederate. Sheridan is of course the famous Irish-American Union General. “What will history say about... Shenandoah?” he muses to Kirby, even as they plot the destruction of the Apache Indians on the Texas Frontier. But he is moved by an Irish Rebel Song which eulogises the Lost Cause of the Fenian uprising and at the end of the film he makes amends to Kathleen by having the army band play Dixie. For all its formal simplicity, the film mines many rich veins of American trauma and identity.
The Fugitive: Feeney's Catholic Art-Film
Feeney's most directly personal films were usually the ones he made with his own company Argosy Pictures which he ran with Merian C. Cooper. Cooper was a life-long adventurer and entrepreneur who had fought with an American volunteer squadron during the Polish-Soviet War and even managed to escape from a Soviet prison camp. It is amusing to consider that while Feeney's 1946 western My Darling Clementine was a personal favourite of Joseph Stalin, Cooper's 1933 classic King Kong was reputedly the favourite film of Adolf Hitler. In any case, there are few more exciting title cards in film history than “John Ford and Merian C. Cooper Present.”
One such Argosy picture is The Fugitive (1947). Shot on location in Mexico, it tells the story of a missionary priest struggling to avoid capture by an anti-clerical socialist regime. Ward Bond's opening voice-over tells us the story is “timely” and “timeless.”
Despite his self-styled persona as “an illiterate”, Feeney did on occasion make self-consciously avant-garde films. He understood in advance that The Fugitive was not “a sound commercial gamble” but said, “my heart and my faith compel me to do it.”
The source material was Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. Green by all accounts hated the film and blamed Feeney's “Irish type of Catholicism” for subverting his novel. This would chime with claims by novelist Anthony Burgess that Greene (a convert to Catholicism) harboured a snobbish resentment towards Irish Catholics.
If anything, Feeney's film is more interesting than Greene's novel. Under the peculiar constraints of Hollywood censorship the story becomes more oblique, more mystical and avant-garde than the source material. The standard tropes of the whiskey priest (which now seem clichés anyway) are replaced by something obscurer. Unable to depict the debauched priest of the novel, the film's conflict becomes more abstract and cerebral.
The story proceeds at a glacial pace, with each stark hypnotising image giving way in exhaustion to the next. The fugitive priest moves like a ghost among the isolated rural villages in the blazing Mexican sunlight. Feeney in depicting a downtrodden peasantry clinging defiantly to their faith, is clearly influenced by the Irish experience. He lingers on the rituals of the mass and the simple piety of the people. In critic Tag Gallagher's view he “celebrates openly cultural aspects that repel Anglo-Saxon sternness” accounting in part for the film's cold reception. And while the film's sparse dialogue struggles to express its themes, the visuals more than make up for it. Though everyday processions and rituals, we see the structure of religious belief give order to an otherwise chaotic universe. The story's police lieutenant antagonist (for all his socialist zealotry) can only try in vain to impose an equivalent secular order. He can only make martyrs.
A Tragic Flawed Vision of a Multicultural America
Joseph McBride, the Irish-American film critic and Feeney biographer, has said that Feeney's Americana is “multicultural” in contrast to the norm of his time which was assimilationist. Feeney always highlights the Irish in his films, going right back to the Silent Era. The intertitles of films like The Iron Horse (1924) feature Irish-American slang. Feeney's vision of the United States is always complicated by his Irish identity. He celebrates America and at the same time lingers on ethnic difference. He lingers on the very aspects that could, at the drop of a hat, tear the country apart. But in his films, that explosive contradiction is rarely if ever fully grappled with. His Americana is after all a kind of fairy tale, just like his version of Ireland in The Quiet Man is a kind of fairy tale. There never was an Antebellum South quite like the one in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) or Judge Priest (1934). There never was a Texas quite like the one which Feeney sets in Monument Valley, Arizona in The Searchers (1956). There never was a Welsh mining town quite like the one that young Roddy McDowell inhabits in How Green Was My Valley (1941). Cinema is a fantasy and Feeney is one of the great fantasists.
It was a man disillusioned with the modern world, and with the direction of post-war America, who fantasised The Quiet Man. Growing older he became in many ways a typical Cold War conservative. Cold War conservatives were never very good at making sense of the world. They were not very good at conserving things either. Feeney's later films would be filled with the trauma of loss and with good reason. Much had been lost. And more would be lost.
In 1952, John Huston (director of The Maltese Falcon) decamped to Craughwell in County Galway to avoid the anti-communist backlash in the United States. He set himself up in a Georgian manner and carried on like a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry. Feeney sent a message to his friend Killanin: “Your letter received with the discouraging news that the reds – one John Huston – are seeking refuge in our lovely Ireland. This ain't good. He is not of the right wing.” He later described Huston as a “phoney” perhaps because his acquired connection to Ireland grated with Feeney's realer connection.
The post-war United States empire was not of course a conservative project but a revolutionary and expansionist one. And that is why Cold War conservatism was often self-defeating. It is one reason why Joseph McCarthy failed and there are no statues of him in Tipperary or even Wisconsin and the great name of McCarthy lives on as a pejorative in the United States. Feeney negotiated the post-war years, playing different sides and showing different faces to different people. Opposing anti-communist blacklists with one hand, supporting them with the other. He was surrounded by ultra-right Cold War conservatives like John Wayne and Ward Bond but he was not necessarily a doctrinaire believer. He remained an ambivalent figure. His vision of America became more ambivalent.
At its maximal extent, Feeney's Americana has a place for everybody, whether that be American Indians in Wagon Master (1950), African Americans in Sergeant Routledge (1960), or post-Antebellum Southern Confederate war veterans in Judge Priest (1934). These contradictions cannot be reconciled in real life, only in the fantasy of cinema. Feeney's films exalt in themes of tradition, family and community as no other American filmmaker ever has. His evocation of social cohesion in the transience of social ritual is often sublime. But is it a facade? Is he simply celebrating community at the moment of its dissolution. Is he celebrating it or is he grieving it?