Ford & Kipling
July 2008
Rudyard Kipling was a ‘divided writer’, a description taken from Jan Montefiore’s book on Kipling published last year. Reading it, I was brought forcibly to think of John Ford, who could be similarly well described as a ‘divided film-maker’.
Consider some intriguing echoes between the two: Kipling’s division was in his reactionary views about race combined with sympathy for the underdog, Ford’s in his paternalism combined with democratic sympathies for all his characters especially outsiders. Kipling was an imperialist who was strongly aware of the cruelties that imperial power can create; Ford was patriotic and militaristic, yet very conscious of America’s bloody history in populating and settling itself. Kipling would surely have responded to Ford’s conclusion that there was a long distance between what happened in the Wild West and how history recounts it as legend.
And here are some other connections: in her book Jan refers to Kipling’s approval of the moral aspect of labouring, which means that a job at any level has to be done well. This is an excellent description of the people doing a job in Ford’s Westerns, not just the cavalrymen, but the ordinary pioneers going west, or settling there, especially the females. (It also applies to his verdict on his films as a ‘job of work’, a job in which he took pride in performing professionally.) Both men were masters of storytelling and both were traditionalist in their styles – compare Kipling’s mastery of the techniques of poetry such as rhyme and metre, and Ford’s mastery of the formal elements of film-making such as composition within the frame, and of the rhythm made by a sequence of shots. That professionalism came in both cases from five decades practising their craft: Kipling made a life’s career out of writing stretching from his early days as a journalist and the publication of his short stories in 1888 up to his posthumous memoir, ‘Something of Myself ‘(1937); Ford made a career out of directing from his first films in the silent era (1917) up to Seven Women in 1966.
The Victorian era is an important background for both, and for Ford Victorian piety as it manifested itself in the films of the silent era in Hollywood is a strong ingredient in his early period. But it also is a marker of the difference between the two. Kipling’s divisions as a writer can be traced through his whole career, whereas Ford’s divisions as a film-maker derive more from the way his views evolve from early feelings about family and the community, about great men in history, about tough women and the rough but good men that made America, to the problematic subjects of his last working decade beginning with The Searchers, stories that question almost everything: the cruelty of community, of religion, of patriarchy, of military power. Ford’s divisions can be found within his films but even more in the way the second half of his work contrasts with the first.
Reading
Jan Montefiore Rudyard Kipling (North Tavistock, Devon: Northcote House 2007)
(c) Tim Cawkwell 2008