ABSTRACT
The cinema of John Ford is a cinema of dreams and memories. His films are luminous images, tinged with an elegiac melancholy for a vanished, irrecoverable innocence, the innocence of Man and Society, of his hopes and his visions, which the course of history and progress and politics has doomed to unfulfilment. The opening speech of Huw Morgan in How Green Was My Valley represents the key to the gates of Ford's world: Ford is the keeper of a folk memory compounded of the ideals of America's Founding Fathers, the legends of her past, the aspirations of her immigrant peoples. In The Iron Horse, Ford recounted the story of the expansion of the railroad, bringing civilization and progress to the West; just as in Stagecoach he celebrated the means of transport which linked the West before the railroad.
