ABSTRACT
The flood of writing on John Ford began in the 1970s. 1971 saw Ford issues of Film Comment and Focus on Film, the first book on Ford in English and, in the first three extended accounts of The Searchers, the claim that the film was a masterpiece. The first considered accounts of Ford as a director of films on specifically American themes were developed by the journal Sequence after the Second World War. Sequence writers celebrated aspects of Ford's career, especially his genre movies which had received little critical attention. Anderson stressed the distinctiveness of Ford's direction in films like They Were Expendable, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Wagonmaster as the work of a poet of the American past. While only Anderson's sprang from a considered view of Ford's artistic identity, most reviewers attributed the film essentially to Ford and commented positively on his reputation as a director of Westerns.
