“Nine major essays by prominent scholars of Hollywood film cast new light on the sound-era Westerns of John Ford. They place the films within contemporary critical contexts and regard them from fresh perspectives. While giving attention to style and structure, the volume also treats the ways in which these much-loved films engage with notions of masculinity and gender roles, capitalism and community, as well as racial, sexual, and national identity. Frank Capra "John Ford was the Compleat Director, . . . undoubtedly the mightiest and most versatile in films. A megaphone was to John ford what the chisel was to Michelangelo: his life, his passion, his cross. "Ford cannot be pinned down and analyzed. He was pure Ford—-which means pure great. John was half-tyrant, half revolutionary; half-saint, half-satan; half-possible, half-impossible; half-genius, half-Irish—-but all director, and for all time." —Frank Capra Frederico Fellini "What I like most in John Ford is the artist in a state of purity, unaware and raw, deprived of sterile and farfetched cultural intermediations, immune from intellectualistic contaminations. I like his strength and his disarming simplicity. . . . a man who liked motion picture, who lived for the cinema, who has made out of motion picture a fairy tale to be told to everyone. . . "For all this I esteem him, I admire him and I love him." —Frederico Fellini Alfred Hitchcock "A John Ford picture was a visual gratification?—his method of shooting, eloquent in its clarity and apparent simplicity. . . .His scripts had a beginning, a middle and an end. They are understood all the world over and [stand] as a monument to part of the land he loved: Monument Valley." —Alfred Hitchcock Stanley Kramer "Before a film is screened at the Kremlin Palace in Moscow, the director is asked to comment about his film. Any comment is, of course, gratuitous. The film speaks for itself. "That's what we face in discussing John Ford. There is nothing to be said—-his films roar through our times."—Stanley Kramer”