Quick: who holds the record for the most Oscar wins for Best Director? It isn’t Frank Capra or William Wyler, who each capped off with three victories. Nor is it David Lean, Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, or any of the other filmmakers who managed to snag two. The answer, as any Oscars fanatic well knows, is John Ford, who won four out of his five nominations in the category. Ford, whose career encompassed more than 100 feature films, was best known for his Westerns, especially the ones that starred John Wayne. Yet surprisingly enough, none of his four Academy Award victories came from titles in that genre, revealing a bias against popular entertainment that persists to this day.
John Ford Was an Oscar Darling Throughout His Career
Ford, whose career began in the Silent Era and ended at the dawn of the New Hollywood, won his first Oscar for directing 1935’s The Informer. Set in Dublin during the Irish War of Independence, it’s a moody drama about a man named Gypo (Victor McLaglen) who turns on a friend wanted by the police in order to collect a bounty. Employing expressionistic, atmospheric cinematography, it also took home prizes for McLaughlin for Best Actor, Best Screenplay, and Best Score, losing Best Picture to Mutiny on the Bounty. Four years later, Ford was back in the awards race for 1939’s Stagecoach, a Western that took the genre to new artistic heights. The adventure yarn about a stagecoach traveling through dangerous Apache territory made Wayne a star and won trophies for Thomas Mitchell as Best Supporting Actor and for Best Score. Ford lost his bid to Victor Fleming, director of that year’s Best Picture bohemith, Gone with the Wind.
The next year, Ford snagged his second Best Director Oscar for the 1940 drama The Grapes of Wrath, adapted from John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Ford took an almost documentary approach to telling Steinbeck’s story of an Oklahoma family making the trek to California during the Dust Bowl, with cinematographer Gregg Toland (of Citizen Kane fame) cloaking the images in dark shadows. The film lost Best Picture to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca, although Jane Darwell did win the prize as Best Supporting Actress. The following year, Ford won Best Director for How Green Was My Valley, which famously beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture. The sentimental drama about an Irish mining family took home five prizes in total, including wins for cinematography, art direction, and Donald Crisp as Best Supporting Actor.
Ford’s final trip to the Oscars was for one of his few collaborations with Wayne that wasn’t a Western or a war movie. Set in Ireland in the1920s, The Quiet Man stars Wayne as a retired boxer who falls in love when he returns to his hometown. The 1952 release won Ford his fourth and final Oscar, and took home an additional prize for its lush Technicolor cinematography. It lost Best Picture to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, long considered one of the worst Oscar winners in history (although not by Steven Spielberg).
John Ford’s Westerns Were Just as Worthy of Oscar Consideration
Missing from the list of films Ford received Oscar nominations for are The Searchers (perhaps the most influential Western ever made), My Darling Clementine, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon… the list is so long as to almost be embarrassing. Although Ford’s Westerns — which he began directing in the Silent Era with titles like The Iron Horse and 3 Bad Men — were populist hits, they were likely considered too commercial to warrant Oscar consideration. These are “genre entertainments,” after all, not serious artistic statements, and that Academy bias towards genre movies — be it against Westerns, horror, sci-fi, or fantasy — exists to this day.
Yet for all of their populist appeal, Ford’s Westerns were just as worthy of artistic consideration as any of the films that brought him Academy Awards. Just look at The Searchers, which inspired Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader’s Taxi Driver and has ranked high in the annual Sight and Sound Poll and the AFI’s Top 100. Oscar voters might not have understood its greatness at the time — nor the greatness of any Ford Western save for Stagecoach — but time has been the ultimate judge.