But God Made Him A Poet
By Scout Tafoya
Foreward by Adam Piron
Published by With an X, 2023
269 pages, paperback
John Ford's reputation today can be summed up perhaps best by a quote that adorned the poster of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. "Some called him a hero... others called him a heel." Welles himself said Ford was one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, while Quentin Tarantino called him a white supremacist. Ford and his leading man John Wayne have become synonymous with, for some modern audiences, America's legacy of colonialism and white washing, the worst crimes committed in the name of American exceptionalism. And yet in their movies is breathtaking poetry and emotional catharsis unlike any other in the American cinema. This director, the great poet of the cinema, also kept in his images the malicious violence of the American mission.
But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century is a reckoning with all the beauty and the white hot pain in the movies of Ford and his right wing stars. Ford the socialist, Ford the anti-communist, Ford the General, Ford the artist, they all lived in one body and this book is an attempt to track his art and politics, to make sense of the greatest contradiction of the American cinema, as well as show just how much his influence is still felt today.
Praise for But God Made Him a Poet
"A young cinephile meets and American legend and the effect is electrifying... Tafoya addresses performances, politics, and social context, but what grabs the reader is his own unique style--rambunctious, lyrical, conversational, but deeply knowledgeable. This is a wizardly book of first-class scholarship." -Molly Haskell, pioneering film critic and author of Steven Spielberg: A Life in Films
"Scout Tafoya revisits the movies of John Ford neither to praise nor bury him,but to show how alive his movies are 60 years after his death. To paraphrase Tafoya, reading about Ford's films in chronological order has rewards far beyond the poetry with which the filmmaker used his camera and with which Tafoya uses his words." -Carrie Rickey, award-winning feminist art critic for the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, The Boston Herald, and Artforum
"Required reading for any student of the great American story" -Joel Potrykus, director of Relaxer and The Alchemist Cookbook
