“At eventide we buried our heroic dead, the last salute from their comrades and their officers.” That’s the narration which accompanies the poignant funeral scene in John Ford’s The Battle of Midway. The man who conceived that film — and its brother-in-arms, They Were Expendable — is dead, destined never to return to this world. The men who wrote the words are also dead, as are the men who spoke them. The young soldiers saluting rows of flag-draped bodies, the priests praying over them, the audiences weeping in their seats at the theater — all dead. Time passes, and the next generation remembers a little bit less about their forefathers. The generation after, less still. Before long, all that’s left to remind us of our debt to the past are yellowed documents, faded photographs, and weathered headstones.

And, of course, old movies.

By 1944 John Ford already sensed the onset of these creeping forces of forgetfulness, and so when the time came to make Expendable, he hatched a strange plan. First, he confronted Louis B. Mayer, the head of M-G-M, and demanded that he be paid $300,000 for helming the picture, more than any director had ever made for a single film. Appealing to Mayer’s patriotism, he said he wasn’t going to keep a single cent of it — it would be used in toto to establish a special place of military honor and memory, a shrine “for Pennick and the boys.” Mayer agreed, and after Expendable was finished Ford used the money to buy eight acres of land in the foothills north of Los Angeles, and to build upon it what became known as The Field Photo Farm.

By the time Ford’s funds were exhausted, the property sported stables with horses, a tennis court, a swimming pool, a baseball diamond, and a large parade ground — all of it reserved for the veterans of his OSS Field Photographic unit. A big clubhouse contained glass cases filled with the war medals of Field Photo’s heroic dead. A beautiful chapel was constructed on-site, with the names of the men lost under Ford’s command engraved therein. The list included Jack MacKenzie Jr., the young assistant who had narrowly avoided death alongside Ford at Midway and who had survived the rest of the war, only to be tragically killed in an August 1945 Jeep accident in Los Angeles. In 1947, They Were Expendable’s brilliant cinematographer Joe August collapsed on the set of his 277th picture, dead of a heart attack. Ford dutifully had his name added to the chapel’s grim roster. (more…)

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“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.” (more…)