INTERVIEW: TCM host Ben Mankiewicz on the influence of John Ford
Photo: Ben Mankiewicz, TCM host, said he believes John Ford is the most influential American filmmaker of the 20th century. Photo courtesy of TCM / Provided with permission.
TCM’s engaging and entertaining podcast series The Plot Thickens has returned with a deep dive into the life and career of John Ford, the highly influential director whose westerns and portraits of American life defined cinema in the 20th century. The audio project, now in its fifth season, not only tracks the personal and professional sides of Ford, a man known for The Searchers, Stagecoach, The Quiet Man and The Grapes of Wrath, but the episodes also search for a supposed lost film that the director made about the D-Day invasion. In fact, this season of The Plot Thickens was meant to be solely about this lost film, but with a subject as interesting as Ford, the decision was made to expand the narrative.
For TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, who can be heard on the podcast, expanding to include more of Ford’s life and career was the right move.
“The story started out as something that changed course,” Mankiewicz said in a recent phone interview. “We initially partnered with Novel, a British company that makes some very good podcasts, and the focus was going to be the search for John Ford’s missing World War II D-Day documentary. And I traveled to London and Normandy. We went down to Cambridge to [Winston] Churchill’s archives. We went to search for where this movie might be. Did it exist? Was Ford telling the truth about it? Did it burn in a fire in 1958? Did it drop into the channel while being loaded from a landing craft onto a destroyer? It was incredibly choppy waters in the channel. All of these things seemed likely. Or, was Ford not so much deceiving but just mistaken that he shot some stuff, and it became a shorter film, but there wasn’t this hour-long color documentary that was censored by the War Department because it was too graphic?”
This lost film is known to cinephiles because Ford apparently talked about it in a magazine article on the 20th anniversary of D-Day, so based on that magazine reference, Mankiewicz and the team decided to go out on a treasure hunt. Spoiler alert: They didn’t find it.
“It may exist somewhere, but in the process we got access to all these interviews with Ford and with his wife, Mary Ford, and then with all these other actors,” he said. “We needed access to those for one of the episodes regarding the search, but in listening to it, Angela [Carone] thought we should just tell John Ford’s story because nobody’s heard these interviews. Maybe some scholars might have tracked it down as part of writing a book, but they had not been part of a documentary. They had not been exposed to the general public, the movie-loving general public, and Angela thought, what if we just made the search part of the story.”
Mankiewicz said that decision was the right one, so he supported Carone’s thinking behind this season of The Plot Thickens. Also, Mankiewicz did not shy away from using some hyperbole, a linguistic choice he often strays from when hosting on TV.
“You know, I try to avoid hyperbole on TCM,” he said with a laugh. “I really try not to say, ‘This is the best,’ but I think it’s really fair to say that John Ford is the most influential filmmaker, certainly the most influential American filmmaker of the 20th century. … I think with almost no hesitation you’d hear the same thing from the three directors who are helping TCM so much, from Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson. They would say, ‘It’s John Ford.’ You may not like his movies best, or he may not be your favorite director, but he’s had the most profound impact on the most highly regarded filmmakers working today and those who have already left us.”
Ford, of course, had some less-than-desirable character traits, and The Plot Thickens never shies away from delving into the negatives alongside the positives. Their portrait of this director is an honest one, and Ford had many flaws that needed to be examined.
“That’s what makes it such a compelling story,” Mankiewicz said. “John Ford was a bully. He also sought loyalty. He got it despite the shortcomings that you’re talking about, and his bullying nature … he thought it was the only way to get the performances. He didn’t, by the way, bully everybody.”
Mankiewicz added: “It’s weird. He’s a guy that deified authority. Nothing was a more … honorable career for a man than the military. As I said, he deified the military. His whole family did, but he hated authority, couldn’t stomach it. How would he have really managed in the military? It might have been a catastrophe, but he was enormously proud of the work he did for the military when he got his commission. … He loved talking about his service. He was just a man of all these staggering contradictions, which I suspect is true of many of us, but, as they do with many Hollywood figures, they seemed larger than life these contradictions inside the blood and the soul of John Ford.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on TCM’s podcast The Plot Thickens.
