"Color film" redirects here. For the motion picture equivalent, see Color motion picture film.

A circa 1850 "Hillotype" photograph of a colored engraving. Long believed to be a complete fraud, recent testing found that Levi Hill's process did reproduce some color photographically, but also that many specimens had been "sweetened" by the addition of hand-applied colors.

The first color photograph made by the three-color method suggested by James Clerk Maxwell in 1855, taken in 1861 by Thomas Sutton. The subject is a colored ribbon, usually described as a tartan ribbon.

An 1877 color photographic print on paper by Louis Ducos du Hauron, the foremost early French pioneer of color photography. The overlapping yellow, cyan and red subtractive color elements are apparent.

The Emir of Bukhara in a 1911 color photograph by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. At right is the triple color-filtered black-and-white glass plate negative, shown here as a positive.

A 1912 color photograph of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, who documented the Russian Empire with a color camera from 1909 to 1915.

A 1914 color photograph of the Taj Mahal published in a 1921 issue of the National Geographic magazine

A 1917 Autochrome color photograph of a French Army lookout at his observation post during World War I.

Color photography is photography that uses media capable of representing colors, which are traditionally produced chemically during the photographic processing phase. By contrast, black-and-white (monochrome) photography records only a single channel of luminance (brightness) and uses media capable only of showing shades of gray.

In color photography, light-sensitive chemicals or electronic sensors record color information at the time of exposure. This is usually done by analyzing the spectrum of colors into three channels of information, one dominated by red, another by green and the third by blue, in imitation of the way the normal human eye senses color. The recorded information is then used to reproduce the original colors by mixing together various proportions of red, green and blue light (RGB color, used by video displays, digital projectors and some historical photographic processes), or by using dyes or pigments to remove various proportions of the red, green and blue which are present in white light (CMY color, used for prints on paper and transparencies on film).

Monochrome images which have been "colorized" by tinting selected areas by hand or mechanically or with the aid of a computer are "colored photographs," not "color photographs." Their colors are not dependent on the actual colors of the objects photographed and may be very inaccurate or completely imaginary.

History[link]

Early experiments[link]

Color photography was attempted beginning in the 1840s. Early experiments were directed at finding a "chameleon substance" which would assume the color of the light falling on it. Some encouraging early results, typically obtained by projecting a solar spectrum directly onto the sensitive surface, seemed to promise eventual success, but the comparatively dim image formed in a camera required exposures lasting for hours or even days. The quality and range of the color was sometimes severely limited, as in the chemically complicated "Hillotype" process invented by American Daguerreotypist Levi Hill around 1850. Other experimenters, such as Edmond Becquerel, achieved better results but could find no way to prevent the colors from quickly fading when the images were exposed to light for viewing. Over the following several decades, renewed experiments along these lines periodically raised hopes and then dashed them, yielding nothing of practical value.

Three-color processes[link]

The three-color method, which is the foundation of virtually all practical color processes whether chemical or electronic, was first suggested in an 1855 paper on color vision by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

It is based on the fact that the normal human eye sees color because its inner surface is covered with millions of intermingled cone cells of three types: one more sensitive than the others to the end of the spectrum we call "red", one more sensitive to the middle or "green" region, and one which is most strongly stimulated by "blue". The named colors have no objective existence in physical reality but simply describe the sensations experienced when these three types of cells are unequally stimulated by various wavelengths of light.

From his studies of color vision, Maxwell found that any hue could be made by mixing only three pure colors of light – red, green and blue – in proportions that would stimulate the three types of cells to the same degrees that the "real" colors did. To emphasize that each type of cell by itself did not actually see color but was simply more or less stimulated, he drew an analogy to black-and-white photography: if three colorless photographs of the same scene were taken through red, green and blue filters, and transparencies ("slides") made from them were projected through the same filters and superimposed on a screen, the result would be an image reproducing not only red, green and blue, but all of the colors in the original scene.^[1]

The first color photograph made according to Maxwell's prescription, a set of three monochrome "color separations", was taken by Thomas Sutton in 1861 for use in illustrating a lecture on color by Maxwell, where it was shown in color by the triple projection method. The test subject was a bow made of ribbon with stripes of various colors, apparently including red and green. During the lecture, which was about physics and physiology, not photography, Maxwell commented on the inadequacy of the results and the need for a photographic material more sensitive to red and green light. A century later, historians were mystified by the reproduction of any red at all, because the photographic process used by Sutton was for all practical purposes totally insensitive to red light and only marginally sensitive to green. In 1961, researchers found that many red dyes also reflect ultraviolet light, coincidentally transmitted by Sutton’s red filter, and surmised that the three images were probably due to ultra-violet, blue-green and blue wavelengths, rather than to red, green and blue.^[2]

Maxwell's 1855 suggestion and this seriously defective 1861 demonstration appear to have been quickly and completely forgotten until being brought to light again in the 1890s. In the intervening decades, the basic concept was independently re-invented by several people.

Additive color[link]

Creating colors by mixing together colored lights (usually red, green and blue) in various proportions is the additive method of color reproduction. LCD, LED, plasma and CRT (picture tube) color video displays all use this method. If one of these displays is examined with a sufficiently strong magnifier, it will be seen that each pixel is actually composed of red, green and blue sub-pixels which blend together at normal viewing distances, reproducing a wide range of colors as well as white and shades of gray. This is also known as the RGB color model.

Subtractive color[link]

The same three images taken through red, green and blue filters which are used for additive color synthesis may also be used to produce color prints and transparencies by the subtractive method, in which colors are subtracted from white light by dyes or pigments. In photography, the dye colors are normally cyan, a greenish-blue which absorbs red; magenta, a purplish-pink which absorbs green; and yellow, which absorbs blue. The red-filtered image is used to create a cyan dye image, the green-filtered image to create a magenta dye image, and the blue-filtered image to create a yellow dye image. When the three dye images are superimposed they form a complete color image.

This is also known as the CMYK color model. The "K" is a black component normally added in ink-jet and other mechanical printing processes to compensate for the imperfections of the colored inks used, which ideally should absorb or transmit various parts of the spectrum but not reflect any color, and to improve image definition.

At first it may seem that each image ought to be printed in the color of the filter used in making it, but by following any given color through the process the reason for printing in complimentary colors should become apparent. A red object, for example, will be very pale in the red-filtered image but very dark in the other two images, so the result will be an area with just a trace of cyan, absorbing just a bit of red light, but a large amount of magenta and yellow, which together absorb most of the green and blue light, leaving mainly red light to be reflected back from the white paper in the case of a print, or transmitted through a clear support in the case of a transparency.

Before the technical innovations of the years 1935 to 1942, the only way to create a subtractive full-color print or transparency was by means of one of several labor-intensive and time-consuming procedures. Most commonly, three pigment images were first created separately by the so-called carbon process and then carefully combined in register. Sometimes, related processes were used to make three gelatin matrices which were dyed and assembled or used to transfer the three dye images into a single layer of gelatin coated on a final support. Chemical toning could be used to convert three black-and-white silver images into cyan, magenta and yellow images which were then assembled. In a few processes, the three images were created one on top of another by repeated coating or re-sensitizing, negative registration, exposure and development operations. A number of variations were devised and marketed during the first half of the 20th century, some of them short-lived, others, such as the Trichrome Carbro process, enduring for several decades. Because some of these processes allow very stable and light-fast coloring matter to be used, yielding images which can remain virtually unchanged for centuries, they are still not quite completely extinct.

The production of photographic three-color prints on paper was pioneered by Louis Ducos du Hauron, whose comprehensive 1868 French patent also included the basic concepts of most of the color photographic processes which were subsequently developed. For making the three color-filtered negatives required, he was able to develop materials and methods which were not as completely blind to red and green light as those used by Thomas Sutton in 1861, but they were still very insensitive to those colors. Exposure times were impractically long, the red or orange-filtered negative requiring hours of exposure in the camera. His earliest surviving color prints are "sun prints" of pressed flowers and leaves, each of the three negatives having been made without a camera by exposing the light-sensitive surface to direct sunlight passing first through a color filter and then through the vegetation.

Color sensitization[link]

As long as photographic materials were usefully sensitive only to blue-green, blue, violet and ultraviolet, three-color photography could never be practical. In 1873 German chemist Hermann Wilhelm Vogel discovered that the addition of small amounts of certain aniline dyes to a photographic emulsion could add sensitivity to colors which the dyes absorbed. He identified dyes which variously sensitized for all the previously ineffective colors except true red, to which only a marginal trace of sensitivity could be added.^[3][4][5][6] In the following year, Edmond Becquerel discovered that chlorophyll was a good sensitizer for red.^[7] Although it would be many more years before these sensitizers (and better ones developed later) found much use beyond scientific applications such as spectrography, they were quickly and eagerly adopted by Louis Ducos du Hauron, Charles Cros and other color photography pioneers. Exposure times for the "problem" colors could now be reduced from hours to minutes. As ever-more-sensitive gelatin emulsions replaced the old wet and dry collodion processes, the minutes became seconds. New sensitizing dyes introduced early in the 20th century eventually made so-called "instantaneous" color exposures possible.

Color cameras[link]

Making color separations by reloading the camera and changing the filter between exposures was inconvenient, added delays to the already long exposure times and could result in the camera being accidentally shifted out of position. To improve the actual picture-taking, a number of experimenters designed one or more special cameras for color photography. They were usually of two main types.

The first type used a system of partially reflecting surfaces to divide the light coming through the lens into three parts, each part passing through a different color filter and forming a separate image, so that the three images could be photographed at the same time on three plates (flexible film had not yet replaced glass plates as the support for the emulsion) or different areas of one plate. Later known as "one-shot" cameras, refined versions continued to be used as late as the 1950s for special purposes such as commercial photography for publication, in which a set of color separations was ultimately required in order to prepare printing plates.

The second type, known variously as a multiple back, repeating back or drop back camera, still exposed the images one at a time but used a sliding holder for the filters and plates which allowed each filter and the corresponding unexposed area of emulsion to be quickly shifted into place. German photochemistry professor Adolf Miethe designed a high-quality camera of this type which was commercially introduced by Bermpohl in 1903. It was probably this Miethe-Bermpohl camera which was used by Miethe's pupil Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii to make his now-celebrated color photographic surveys of Russia before the 1917 revolution. One sophisticated variant, patented by Frederic Eugene Ives in 1897, was driven by clockwork and could be adjusted to automatically make each of the exposures for a different length of time according to the particular color sensitivities of the emulsion being used.^[8]

Otherwise simple cameras with multiple color-filtered lenses were sometimes tried, but unless everything in the scene was at a great distance, or all in a plane at the same distance, the difference in the viewpoints of the lenses (parallax) made it impossible to completely "register" all parts of the resulting images at the same time.

Color photography leaves the laboratory[link]

Prior to the late 1890s, color photography was strictly the domain of a very few intrepid experimenters willing to build their own equipment, do their own color-sensitizing of photographic emulsions, make and test their own color filters and otherwise devote a large amount of time and effort to their pursuits. There were many opportunities for something to go wrong during the series of operations required and problem-free results were rare. Most photographers still regarded the whole idea of color photography as a pipe dream, something only madmen and swindlers would claim to have accomplished.

In 1898, however, it was possible for anyone with the price in hand to buy the required equipment and supplies ready-made. Two adequately red-sensitive photographic plates^[9] were already on the market, and two very different systems of color photography with which to use them, tantalizingly described in photographic magazines for several years past, were finally available to the public.

The most extensive and expensive of the two was the "Kromskop" (pronounced "chrome-scope") system developed by Frederic Eugene Ives. This was a straightforward additive system and its essential elements had been described by James Clerk Maxwell, Louis Ducos du Hauron and Charles Cros much earlier, but Ives invested years of careful work and ingenuity in refining the methods and materials to optimize color quality, in overcoming problems inherent in the optical systems involved, and in simplifying the apparatus to bring down the cost of producing it commercially. The color images, dubbed "Kromograms," were in the form of sets of three black-and-white transparencies on glass, mounted onto special cloth-tape-hinged triple cardboard frames. To see a Kromogram in color it had to be inserted into a "Kromskop" (generic name "chromoscope" or "photochromoscope"), a viewing device which used an arrangement of colored glass filters to illuminate each slide with the correct color of light and transparent reflectors to visually combine them into a single full-color image. The most popular model was stereoscopic. By looking through its pair of lenses, an image in full natural color and 3-D was seen, a startling novelty in the late Victorian age.

The results won near-universal praise for excellence and realism. At demonstrations, Ives sometimes placed a viewer displaying a still-life subject next to the actual objects photographed, inviting direct comparison. A Kromskop triple "lantern" could be used to project the three images, mounted in a special metal or wooden frame for this purpose, through filters as Maxwell had done in 1861. Prepared Kromograms of still-life subjects, landscapes, famous buildings and works of art were sold and these were the Kromskop viewer's usual fodder, but a "multiple back" camera attachment and a set of three specially adjusted color filters could be bought by "Kromskopists" wishing to make their own Kromograms.

Kromskops and ready-made Kromograms were bought by educational institutions for their value in teaching about color and color vision, and by individuals who were in a position to pay a substantial sum for an intriguing optical toy. A few people did, indeed, make their own Kromograms. Unfortunately for Ives, this was not enough to sustain the businesses which had been set up to exploit the system and they soon failed, but the viewers, projectors, Kromograms and several varieties of Kromskop cameras and camera attachments continued to be available through the Scientific Shop in Chicago as late as 1907.

The Screen Plate era[link]

The simpler and somewhat more economical alternative was the Joly Screen process. This required no special camera or viewer, just a special color-compensating filter for the camera lens and a special holder for the photographic plates. The holder contained the heart of the system: a clear glass plate on which very fine lines of three colors had been ruled in a regular repeating pattern, completely covering its surface. The idea was that instead of taking three separate complete photographs through three colored filters, the filters could be in the form of a large number of very narrow strips (the colored lines) allowing the necessary color information to be recorded in a single compound image. After the negative was developed, a positive transparency was printed from it and a viewing screen with red, green and blue lines in the same pattern as the lines of the taking screen was applied and carefully aligned. The colors then appeared as if by magic. The transparency and screen were very like the layer of monochrome liquid crystal elements and overlay of hair-thin red, green and blue color filter stripes which create the color image in a typical LCD display. This was the invention of Irish scientist John Joly, although he, like so many other inventors, eventually discovered that his basic concept had been anticipated in Louis Ducos du Hauron's long-since-expired 1868 patent.^[10]

The Joly Screen process had some problems. First and foremost, although the colored lines were reasonably fine (about 75 sets of three colored lines to the inch) they were still disturbingly visible at normal viewing distances and nearly intolerable when enlarged by projection. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that each screen was individually ruled on a machine which used three pens to apply the transparent colored inks, resulting in irregularities, high reject rates and high cost. The glass used for photographic plates at the time was not perfectly flat, and lack of uniform good contact between the screen and the image gave rise to areas of degraded color. Poor contact also caused false colors to appear if the sandwich was viewed at an angle. Although much simpler than the Kromskop system, the Joly system was not inexpensive. The starter kit of plate holder, compensating filter, one taking screen and one viewing screen cost $30 (the equivalent of at least $750 in 2010 dollars) and additional viewing screens were $1 each (the equivalent of at least $25 in 2010 dollars). This system, too, soon died of neglect, although in fact it pointed the way to the future.

Surviving examples of the Joly process usually show extremely poor color now. The colors in the viewing screens have badly faded and shifted, making it impossible to judge their original appearance. In some specimens the viewing screen is also misaligned.

Lippmann photography is a way of making a color photograph that relies on Bragg reflection planes in the emulsion to make the colors. It is similar to using the colors of soap bubbles to make an image. Gabriel Jonas Lippmann won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1908 for the creation of the first color photographic process using a single emulsion. The color fidelity is extremely high but the images can not be reproduced and viewing requires very specific lighting conditions. The development of the Autochrome process quickly rendered the Lippman method redundant. The method is still utilized to make singular images that cannot be copied for security purposes

The first commercially successful color process, the Lumière Autochrome, invented by the French Lumière brothers, reached the market in 1907. It was based on an irregular screen plate filter made of dyed grains of potato starch which were too small to be individually visible. The light-sensitive emulsion was coated directly onto the screen, eliminating problems due to imperfect contact between the screen and image. Reversal processing was used to convert the negative image which was initially produced into a positive image, so no printing or screen registration was required. The shortcomings of the Autochrome process were the expense (one plate cost about as much as a dozen black-and-white plates of the same size), the relatively long exposure times which made hand-held "snapshots" and photographs of moving subjects impractical, and the density of the finished image due to the presence of the light-absorbing color screen.

Viewed under optimum conditions and by daylight as intended, a well-made and well-preserved Autochrome can look startlingly fresh and vivid. Unfortunately, modern film and digital copies are usually made with a highly diffused light source, which causes loss of color saturation and other ill effects due to light scatter within the structure of the screen and emulsion, and by fluorescent or other artificial light which alters the color balance. The capabilities of the process should not be judged by the dull, washed-out, odd-colored reproductions commonly seen.

Millions of Autochrome plates were manufactured and used during the quarter century before the plates were replaced by film-based versions in the 1930s. The very last film version, named Alticolor, brought the Autochrome process into the 1950s but was discontinued in 1955. Many additive color screen products were available between the 1890s and the 1950s, but none, with the possible exception of Dufaycolor, introduced as film for still photography in 1935, was as popular or successful as the Lumière Autochrome. The presumably final use of the additive screen process for non-digital photography was in Polachrome, an "instant" 35mm slide film introduced in 1983 and discontinued about twenty years later.

Tripacks[link]

Louis Ducos du Hauron had suggested using a sandwich of three differently color-recording emulsions on transparent supports which could be exposed together in an ordinary camera, then taken apart and used like any other set of three-color separations. The problem was that although two of the emulsions could be in contact face-to-face, the third would have to be separated by the thickness of one transparent support layer. Because all silver halide emulsions are inherently sensitive to blue, the blue-recording layer ought to be on top and have a blue-blocking yellow filter layer behind it. This blue-recording layer, used to make the yellow print which could most afford to be "soft," would end up producing the sharpest image. The two layers behind it, one sensitized to red but not green and the other to green but not red, would suffer from scattering of the light as it passed through the topmost emulsion, and one or both would further suffer by being spaced away from it.

Despite these limitations, some "tripacks" were commercially produced, such as the Hess-Ives "Hiblock" which sandwiched an emulsion on film between emulsions coated on glass plates. For a brief period in the early 1930s, the American Agfa-Ansco company produced Colorol, a roll-film tripack for snapshot cameras. The three emulsions were on unusually thin film bases. After exposure, the roll was sent to Agfa-Ansco for processing and the triple negatives were returned to the customer with a set of color prints. The images were not sharp and the color was not very good, but they were genuine "natural color" snapshots.

"Bipacks" using only two emulsions face-to-face were the subject of some development. Although the range of colors which could be reproduced by only two components was limited, skin tones and most hair and eye colors could be rendered with surprising fidelity, making bipack processes a viable option for color portraiture. In commercial practice, however, the use of bipacks was almost entirely confined to two-color motion picture systems.

If the three layers of emulsion in a tripack did not have to be taken apart in order to produce the cyan, magenta and yellow dye images from them, they could be coated directly on top of each other, eliminating the most serious problems. In fact, some chemical magic was under development which would make that possible.

"Modern" color film[link]

In 1935, American Kodak introduced the first modern "integral tripack" color film and called it Kodachrome, a name recycled from an earlier and completely different two-color process. Its development was led by the improbable team of Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky, Jr. (nicknamed "Man" and "God"), two highly regarded classical musicians who had started tinkering with color photographic processes and ended up working with the Kodak Research Laboratories. Kodachrome had three layers of emulsion coated on a single base, each layer recording one of the three additive primaries, red, green, and blue. In keeping with Kodak's old "you press the button, we do the rest" slogan, the film was simply loaded into the camera, exposed in the ordinary way, then mailed to Kodak for processing. The complicated part, if the complexities of manufacturing the film are ignored, was the processing, which involved the controlled penetration of chemicals into the three layers of emulsion. Only a simplified description of the process is appropriate in a short history: as each layer was developed into a black-and-white silver image, a "dye coupler" added during that stage of development caused a cyan, magenta or yellow dye image to be created along with it. The silver images were chemically removed, leaving only the three layers of dye images in the finished film.

Initially, Kodachrome was available only as 16mm film for home movies, but in 1936 it was also introduced as 8mm home movie film and short lengths of 35mm film for still photography. In 1938, sheet film in various sizes for professional photographers was introduced, some changes were made to cure early problems with unstable colors, and a somewhat simplified processing method was instituted.

In 1936, the German Agfa followed with their own integral tripack film, Agfacolor Neu, which was generally similar to Kodachrome but had one important advantage: Agfa had found a way to incorporate the dye couplers into the emulsion layers during manufacture, allowing all three layers to be developed at the same time and greatly simplifying the processing. Most modern color films, excepting the now-discontinued Kodachrome, use the incorporated dye coupler technique, but since the 1970s nearly all have used a modification developed by Kodak rather than the original Agfa version.

In 1941, Kodak made it possible to order prints from Kodachrome slides. The print "paper" was actually a white plastic coated with a multilayer emulsion similar to that on the film. These were the first commercially available color prints created by the chromogenic dye coupler method. In the following year, Kodacolor film was introduced. Unlike Kodachrome, it was designed to be processed into a negative image which showed not only light and dark reversed but also complementary colors. The use of such a negative for making prints on paper simplified the processing of the prints, reducing their cost.

The expense of color film as compared to black-and-white and the difficulty of using it with indoor lighting combined to delay its widespread adoption by amateurs. In 1950, black-and-white snapshots were still the norm. By 1960, color was much more common but still tended to be reserved for travel photos and special occasions. Color film and color prints still cost several times as much as black-and-white, and taking color snapshots in deep shade or indoors required the use of flash bulbs, an inconvenience and an additional expense. By 1970, prices were coming down, film sensitivity had been improved, electronic flash units were replacing flash bulbs, and in most families color had become the norm for snapshot-taking. Black-and-white film continued to be used by some photographers who preferred it for aesthetic reasons or who wanted to take pictures by existing light in low-light conditions, which was still difficult to do with color film. They usually did their own developing and printing. By 1980, black-and-white film in the formats used by typical snapshot cameras, as well as commercial developing and printing service for it, had nearly disappeared.

Instant color film was introduced by Polaroid in 1963. Like Polaroid's contemporary instant black-and-white film, their first color product was a negative-positive peel-apart process which produced a unique print on paper. The negative could not be re-used and was discarded. The blight created by carelessly discarded caustic-chemical-laden Polaroid negatives, which tended to accumulate most heavily at the prettiest, most snapshot-worthy locations, horrified Polaroid founder Edwin Land and prompted him to develop the later SX-70 system, which produced no separate negative to discard.

Artists’ perspectives[link]

Many photographers differed in opinion about color photography when it was first introduced. Some fully embraced it when it was introduced to the public in the late 1930s, while others remained skeptical of its relevance in the art of photography.

Fans of color[link]

Ferenc Berko, a classic photographer who lived during the rise of color film, was one of the few photographers who immediately recognized the potential of color film. He saw it as a new way to frame the world; a way to experiment with the subjects he photographed and how he conveyed emotion in the photograph.^[11]

John Hedgecoe, another photographer who lived during this time period, was another example of those who preferred color. He published a book entitled “The Art of Color Photography”, in which he explained the importance of understanging the “special and often subtle relationships between different colors”. He also described the psychological and emotional power that color can have on the viewer, since certain colors, he argues, can make people feel a certain way.^[12]

Skeptics[link]

Though color photography had its followers, black and white still remained the more popular and respected film when color first came out.

Harold Baquet, for instance—a relatively current photographer known best for documenting New Orleans civil rights—was not too keen on color. He preferred to take pictures mainly using black and white film. When asked about his reasoning for this preference during an interview, he replied “The less is more thing. Sometimes the color distracts from the essential subject. Sometimes, just light, line and form is enough, and it allows you to explore the sculptural qualities of that third dimension, that illusional dimension of depth. And it’s fun”.^[13] This aversion to color was due mainly to a fear of losing simplicity in his pictures. He worried that color gave the eye too much to take in.^[14]

This worry was not uncommon. Photographer Ansel Adams, known best for his dramatic black and white landscapes, also felt that color could be distracting, and could therefore divert the artist’s attention away from creating a photograph to his full potential, according to some experts. Adams actually claimed that he could get “a far greater sense of ‘color’ through a well-planned and executed black-and-white image than [he had] ever achieved with color photography”. ^[15] Another expert source mentioned that Adams was a “master of control”. He wrote books about technique, developed the “zoning system”—something which helped determine the optimal exposure and development time for a given photograph—and introduced the idea of “previsualization”, which involved the photographer imagining what he wanted his final print to look like before he even took the shot. These concepts and methods allowed for nearly total control of all the potential variables that factor into a final print. Because of this love for control, Adams disliked color because it lacked this element that he had mastered with black and white.

While Adams initially was far from thrilled with color, he did experiment with it, unknown to many. A few examples of his color work are available in the online archive of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. His subjects that he shot in color ranged from portraits to landscape to architecture ^[16] ; a similar scope to that of his black and white work. In fact, toward the end of his life, Adams admitted his regret of not being able to master the technique of color, according to an expert source.

Though a wide range of film preference still exists among photographers today, color has, with time, gained a much larger following as well as a higher level of respect in the field of photography as a whole.

Current use of color film[link]

Color film has now been relegated to a niche market by inexpensive multi-megapixel digital cameras. Film continues to be the preference of some photographers because of its high image quality (when used with a high-quality camera and lens) and its distinctive "look." In medium and large formats, its effective pixel count has not yet (as of 2010) been equaled by any commercially available and reasonably priced digital camera.

The changeover from chemical to electronic photography may prove to be comparable to the shift from black-and-white to color, in which black-and-white retained some distinctive merits and was never entirely replaced. As exampled by the discontinuation of Kodachrome, however, the variety of film types available is liable to become increasingly limited.

Some currently available color films are designed to produce positive transparencies for use in a slide projector or magnifying viewer, although paper prints can also be made from them. Transparencies are preferred by some professional photographers who use film because they can be judged without having to print them first. Transparencies are also capable of a wider dynamic range, and therefore of a greater degree of realism, than the more convenient medium of prints on paper. The early popularity of color "slides" among amateurs went into decline after the introduction of automated printing equipment started bringing print quality up and prices down.

Other currently available films are designed to produce color negatives for use in creating enlarged positive prints on color photographic paper. Color negatives may also be digitally scanned and then printed by non-photographic means or viewed as positives electronically. Unlike reversal-film transparency processes, negative-positive processes are, within limits, forgiving of incorrect exposure and poor color lighting, because a considerable degree of correction is possible at the time of printing. Negative film is therefore more suitable for casual use by amateurs. Virtually all single-use cameras employ negative film. Photographic transparencies can be made from negatives by printing them on special "positive film," but this has always been unusual outside of the motion picture industry and commercial service to do it for still images may no longer be available. Negative films and paper prints are by far the most common form of non-digital color photography today.

Preservation issues[link]

Experimentation with creating photographs that mirrored the colors of real life began in the 1840s. Each process may require different methods of preservation.

Color photographic materials are impermanent and are by nature unstable. Chromogenic color photographs, for example, are composed of yellow, magenta, and cyan organic dyes, which fade at different rates. Even when in dark storage and enclosed in the proper archival materials, deterioration is unavoidable. However, when given the proper preservation care, fading, color shifting, and discoloration can be delayed.

Factors[link]

Numerous factors can deteriorate and even destroy photographs. Some examples include:

• High temperature and high relative humidity (RH)
• Air pollution and dirt
• Light exposure
• Biological threats such as fungi and insects
• Residual processing chemicals
• Base and emulsion deterioration
• Handling and usage
• Improper storage and enclosures

Three signs of age that affect color photography are:

• Dark fading occurs regardless of the procedures taken to preserve a photograph and is unavoidable. It is instigated by temperature and RH. Cyan dyes will typically fade more quickly, which will make the image appear too red in color.

• Light fading occurs when materials are exposed to light, e.g. while on display. The intensity of the light source and ultraviolet (UV) rays will affect the rate of change and fade. Magenta dyes will typically fade the quickest.

• Highlight staining occurs with older color photographic papers, and is a yellowing of the border and highlight areas of a photograph.

Storage[link]

In general, the colder the storage, the longer the "life" of color photographs. Frost-free refrigeration, more commonly known as cold storage (below freezing) is one of the most effective ways to bring a halt to developing damage to color photographic materials. Selecting this type of storage environment is costly and requires special training to remove and return items. Therefore, cool storage (above freezing) is more common and less costly, which requires that the temperature is consistently between 10–15 °C (50–59 °F) with 30–40% relative humidity with special attention to dew point to eliminate concerns for condensation. General dark storage in light tight enclosures and storage boxes is always advised for individual items. When materials are exposed to light during handling, usage, or display, light sources should be UV-filtered and intensity kept at minimum. In storage areas, 200–400 lux is recommended.

Recommended storage[link]

The usage of enclosures is the easiest method of preserving photographic materials from being damaged through handling and light exposure. All protective materials should pass the Photographic Activity Test (PAT) as described both by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in standard IT9.2-1988, and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) in standard 18916:2007(E), Photography – Processed Photographic Materials – Photographic Activity Test for Enclosure Materials. The PAT is an archival science test that determines what kind of enclosures will preserve, prevent, and/or prolong from further deterioration while in storage.

The recommended use of archival enclosures includes each item having its own enclosure and that each enclosure is of the appropriate size. Archival enclosures may come in two different forms: paper or plastic. Choosing either option has its advantages and disadvantages.

• Paper enclosures should be non-acidic, lignin-free paper and may come in either buffered or non-buffered stock. An advantage of paper is that it is generally less costly than plastic enclosures. The opaque quality of paper protects photographs from light exposure, and the porous quality protects photographs from humidity and gaseous pollutants. However, for images to be viewed, they must be removed from the enclosure, putting the materials at risk for mishandling and/or vandalism.

• Archival quality plastic enclosures are made of uncoated polyester, polypropylene, or polyethylene. The transparent quality of plastic lends itself to easier access to the image because there is no extra step to remove the photograph. Plastic is also less resistant to tears in comparison to paper. Some disadvantages include being prone to static electricity and a risk of ferrotyping (the act of moisture becoming trapped between the enclosure and item, causing the materials to stick to one another).

After photographic materials are individually enclosed, housing or storage containers provide another protective barrier such as folders and boxes made from archival paperboard as addressed in ISO Standards 18916:2007 and 18902. Sometimes these containers have to be custom-made in order to properly store odd sizes. In general, flat storage of in boxes is recommended because it provides more stable support, particularly for materials that are in more fragile condition. Still, boxes and folders should never be over-filled with materials.

Patents[link]

This section requires expansion.

• U.S. Patent 2,059,884—Color photography

See also[link]

People[link]

• George Eastman
• William Eggleston
• Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky
• Gabriel Lippmann
• Luis Marden
• Otto Pfenninger
• Stephen Shore
• Jules Gervais-Courtellemont
• Léon Gimpel

Other topics[link]

• Hand-coloring (easily mistaken for early color photography)
• Color motion picture film
• Chromogenic
• Color printing
• Color television
• Film colorization
• Potassium ferricyanide
• Timeline of historic inventions
• Photochrome
• The Shackleton Expedition, on which Paget color photography was used, among other types

Notes[link]

References[link]

This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (May 2009)

• Coe, Brian, Colour Photography: the first hundred years 1840-1940, Ash & Grant, 1978.
• Coote, Jack, The Illustrated History of Colour Photography, Fountain Press Ltd., 1993, ISBN 0-86343-380-4
• Eastman Kodak Company. (1979). Preservation of photographs. Kodak publication, no. F-30. [Rochester, N.Y.]: Eastman Kodak Co.
• Great Britain, & Paine, C. (1996). Standards in the museum care of photographic collections 1996. London: Museums & Galleries Commission. ISBN 0-948630-42-6
• Keefe, L. E., & Inch, D. (1990). The life of a photograph: archival processing, matting, framing, storage. Boston: Focal Press. ISBN 0-240-80024-9, ISBN 978-0-240-80024-0
• Lavédrine, B., Gandolfo, J.-P., & Monod, S. (2003). A guide to the preventive conservation of photograph collections. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute. ISBN 0-89236-701-6, ISBN 978-0-89236-701-6
• Photograph preservation and the research library. (1991). Mountain View, Ca: The Research Libraries Group. ISBN 0-87985-212-7
• Reilly, J. M. (1998). Storage guide for color photographic materials. Albany, N.Y.: University of the State of New York ... [et al.].
• Ritzenthaler, M. L., Vogt-O'Connor, D., & Ritzenthaler, M. L. (2006). Photographs: archival care and management. Chicago: Society of American Archivists. ISBN 1-931666-17-2, ISBN 978-1-931666-17-6
• Sipley, Louis Walton, A Half Century of Color, Macmillan, 1951
• Time-Life Books. (1982). Caring for photographs: display, storage, restoration. Life library of photography. Alexandria, Va: Time-Life Books. ISBN 0-8094-4420-8
• Weinstein, R. A., & Booth, L. (1977). Collection, use, and care of historical photographs. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History. ISBN 0-910050-21-X
• Wilhelm, H. G., & Brower, C. (1993). The permanence and care of color photographs: traditional and digital color prints, color negatives, slides, and motion pictures. Grinnell, Iowa, U.S.A.: Preservation Pub. Co. ISBN 0-911515-00-3
• Wythe, D. (2004). Museum archives: an introduction. Chicago: Society of American Archivists. ISBN 1-931666-06-7, ISBN 978-1-931666-06-0

External links[link]

• Color Film Information and Comparisons Chart

General[link]

• Internet Resources compiled by the Northeast Document Conservation Center
• "Care and Handling and Storage of Photographs" by Mark Roosa (IFLA)
• Conservation Register
• Image Permanence Institute
• Library of Congress – Information Leaflet: Photographs
• National Archives and Records Administration – Cold Storage Handling Guidelines
• National Park Service. Conserve-O-Gram (select PDF versions on menu)
• Henry Wilhelm

Online collections[link]

• Library of Congress Prokudin-Gorskii collection
• 100 of Prokudin-Gorsky's photographs from 1909 to 1915 with captions in pdf format

Supplies[link]

• Library of Congress List of Photographic Preservation Supplies

Standards[link]

• American National Standards Institute^{[clarification needed]}

Edward Turner
Edward Turner's Blue Plaque unveiled in 2009 at his former residence, 8 Philip Walk, Peckham, London SE15
Personal details
Born	(1901-01-24)24 January 1901 Camberwell, United Kingdom
Died	15 August 1973(1973-08-15) Dorking, United Kingdom
Spouse(s)	Edith Webley (1929–1939) (her death) Shirley Watts (1952–1965?)(divorced)

Edward Turner (24 January 1901 – 15 August 1973) was a British motorcycle designer. He was born in Camberwell in the London Borough of Southwark, on the day King Edward VII was proclaimed King.^[1] In 1915, Turner had his first ride on a motorcycle, a Light Tourist New Imperial.

Turner Special[link]

On 16 April 1925 "The Motor Cycle" published drawings by Turner of an OHC single he had designed, using a series of vertically stacked gears to drive the overhead camshaft. A subsequent redesign used bevel gears to drive a vertical camshaft, operating the valves through rockers. The only shared aspects of the two designs were the bore and stroke, 74 × 81 mm (2.9 × 3.2 in), with the barrel being sunk into the crankcases. The head could be removed from either design complete with undisturbed valve gear.^[2]

Turner built his first bike in 1927, using his second design, a 350 cc OHC single. The Motor Cycle published a photograph of Turner's patented engine, mounted in his motorcycle called the Turner Special.^[3] The Special was registered for road use with the London County Council as YP 9286. It used Webb forks, and a three-speed Sturmey-Archer gearbox.^[2]

Ariel designer[link]

By now, living at various addresses in Peckham and East Dulwich, in the London Borough of Southwark and running Chepstow Motors, a Peckham Road motorcycle shop with a Velocette agency, Turner conceived the Square Four engine in 1928. At this time he was looking for work, showing drawings of his engine design to motorcycle manufacturers.^[4] The engine was essentially a pair of 'across frame' OHC parallel twins joined by their geared central flywheels, with a one-piece four-cylinder block (or Monobloc) and single head.^[5] The idea for the engine was rejected by BSA, but adopted by Ariel. Thus it became the Ariel Square Four, and not the BSA Square Four. Turner was then invited by Jack Sangster to join Ariel.

By 1929, at Ariel, Jack Sangster had Edward Turner and Bert Hopwood working under Val Page in design. Turner, now 28, married Edith Webley.^{[citation needed]}

Ariel Square Four[link]

Close-up of a 1932 Ariel Square Four 4F 600 cc engine

The first Ariel Square Four 4F^[6] was shown at the Olympia Motorcycle Show in 1930 in chain-driven overhead camshaft 500 cc form.

Ariel released the 600 cc Square Four in 1931.

The 40-year old Val Page, formerly a designer for JAP, and more lately Ariel (where he was Turner's boss), gave up on Ariel in 1932, and joined Triumph. (Ariel had closed in 1930 but was reconstituted in 1931–32).

In 1936 Triumph decided to create separate motorcycle and car companies, and sell the motorcycle company. Ariel owner Jack Sangster bought it and changed the name to Triumph Engineering Company. The Ariel Square Four changed from the 4F 600 cc OHC version to the 4G OHV 995 cc version that year.

Triumph general manager and chief designer[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Sangster made Turner, now 35, General Manager and Chief Designer. (In this new position Turner received a 5% commission on the company's net profits, and became a shareholder with 4.9% of the equity). The first thing he did was clear space on the production floor for an office and an adjoining drawing office. Val Page had left Triumph four months before and joined BSA. Bert Hopwood came to Triumph as Turner's Design Assistant. Ted Crabtree, who was also at Ariel before, became Chief Buyer, and Freddie Clarke was made Chief Development Engineer: both were motorcycle racers.

Turner examined the line of 250, 350 (3H) and 500 cc Mk 5 singles, and rationalised them into three sports roadsters: the Tigers 70, 80, and 90. He added single-tube frames, enclosed valve gear, upswept exhausts, polished cases, new paint designs, and chrome petrol tanks.

Triumph Speed Twin[link]

Close-up of a 1938 Triumph Speed Twin 500 cc engine

In July 1937, Turner introduced the 500 cc Speed Twin, selling at £75. It was smaller and weighed five pounds less than the £70 Tiger 90,^[7] and proved very successful. The 5T Speed Twin (some say based on the engine design of Turner's Riley Nine car) became the standard by which other twins were judged, and its descendants continued in production until the 1980s. The original 27 bhp parallel-twin was capable of exceeding 90 mph (145 km/h)^[7] and weighed 361 lb (166 kg).

Turner's wife Edith died in a car crash near Coventry on 8 July 1939; the same crash which killed Gillian Lynne's mother and two other friends.

Turner's "sprung hub" was supposed to go into production in 1941, adding 17 lb to the weight of a bike. But the war delayed its introduction until 1948.

In 1942, Turner designed a generator, using an all-alloy Triumph vertical twin engine, for the Air Ministry. After a heated disagreement with Jack Sangster, Turner quit his position at Triumph and promptly became chief designer at BSA, where he worked on a side-valve vertical twin for the War. Bert Hopwood was made Triumph's new designer and Sangster put him to work on a 500 cc side-valve twin competing for the same contract.

By 1943 Bert Hopwood completed the design, but it was never produced. Triumph's prototypes were released in February, before BSA's planned launch. The design later became the post-war TRW model. In late October, Turner went back to Triumph. Hopwood had been working on a design for a 700 cc inline four-cylinder engine that could produce 50 bhp, but Turner's return to Triumph put an end to that plan.

Turner was Managing Director once again by 1944.

The Speed Twin, Tiger 100 and 350 cc 3T models emerged in 1945. They now had telescopic forks, originally designed by Turner, but modified by Freddie Clarke after it was found that fork oil would spew out on bottoming.

Triumph T100 GP[link]

1947 500 cc Triumph T100 GP

Ernie Lyons won the first Manx Grand Prix on a Tiger 100 built by Freddie Clarke using an alloy wartime generator engine and the unreleased sprung hub in 1946. Turner, away in America, and anti-racing, was furious when he heard, but threw Lyons a victory dinner anyway, and a small batch of replica T100 were made for sale. Clarke resigned and joined AMC as Chief Development Engineer. Bert Hopwood had an argument with Turner over racing, left Triumph, and stayed away for 14 years.^[8]

The Mark I sprung rear hub was introduced in late 1947.^{[citation needed]}

In 1948, Turner was persuaded to allow the entry of three 500 cc twins in the Senior TT, but none of them finished, so the experience only added to Turner's opposition to factory racing.^{[citation needed]}

Triumph Thunderbird[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

One of the Montlhery 1949 model 6T Triumph Thunderbirds on display at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieu

The 6T 650 cc Thunderbird, as designed by Turner, and further developed by Jack Wickes, was launched on 20 September 1949, when three models covered 500 miles at 90 mph (800 km at 145 km/h) in a demonstration at Montlhery. Essentially an enlarged tourer version of the Speed Twin, the 6T was designed to satisfy the substantial American export market, and was advertised as capable of a genuine 100 mph (161 km/h). The Thunderbird became a favourite of police forces worldwide.

For 1950, Turner went for a "low-chrome" policy, and banned the use of chrome fuel tanks. A chrome tank did not reappear till the 1981 Bonneville T140LE Royal Wedding edition.

Once in production, the first performance improvements came mid-way through the first year when the carburettor size was increased. This was the year Turner expressed the belief that 650 cc was the practical limit for the traditional British 360° vertical twin. It was the last year for the T100 GP model, although the T100C carried on, and the Mark 2 sprung hub was released.

Turner became involved in the establishment of the US-based Triumph Corp. in Maryland, a distribution company created to serve East Coast US markets. After 1950, America became Triumph's biggest customer.

In 1951 Sangster sold Triumph to BSA for £2.5 million, having previously sold Ariel to BSA in 1939. As part of the sale agreement, he joined the BSA Group as a member of the board. Turner's holdings in Triumph gave him 10% of the sale.

A race kit for the Tiger 100 was introduced, bikes were restyled with new paint and the first dual seat appeared.

Triumph Terrier and Tiger Cub unit construction singles[link]

1955 Triumph T15 Terrier at the Coventry Transport Museum

The first lightweight for Triumph since 1933, a 150 cc OHV Terrier T15, four-speed unit construction single with a sloping engine, was introduced in 1953. As a result Triumph directors Turner, Bob Fearon and Alex Masters rode from Land's End to John O'Groat's for a 1,000-mile Terrier demonstration and publicity stunt – the "Gaffers' Gallop." ^[9].^{[citation needed]} .

By 1954 the sportier 200 cc version was available, and called the Tiger Cub.^[10]

The Tiger 100 race kit was dropped, and the T100C came with the kit already installed. The T100C had twin-carburettors for this year only.^{[citation needed]}

In 1952, Turner married Shirley Watts. They had two daughters and a son.

Triumph T110 Tiger[link]

1954 650 cc Triumph T110

The production 650 cc Thunderbird was a low-compression tourer, and the 500 cc Tiger 100 was the performance bike. That changed in 1954, along with the change to swing arm frames and the release of the alloy head 650 cc Tiger 110, eclipsing the 500 cc Tiger 100 as the performance model.

Chief Executive of BSA Group (BSA, Ariel, Triumph, Daimler, and Carbodies)[link]

In 1956, after a boardroom struggle over power and control, Jack Sangster became Chairman of BSA Group, succeeding Sir Bernard Docker. He appointed Turner Chief Executive of the Automotive Division (comprising BSA, Ariel, Triumph, Daimler and Carbodies – makers of London taxicabs).^{[citation needed]}

Triumph 3TA unit construction twin[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

1958 350 cc Triumph Twenty-One with higher USA market handlebars at the Barber Motorcycle Museum

The first unit construction twin-cylinder motorcycle made by Triumph, the 350 cc (21 ci) 'Twenty One' 3TA , designed by Turner and Wickes, was introduced for the 21st Anniversary of Triumph Engineering Co. Ltd in 1957. Unfortunately it also had the first "bathtub" rear enclosure, which proved to be a major styling mistake, with dealers reputedly having to remove enclosures to sell bikes. Turner's new unit Triumph Speed Twin, the 5TA, introduced in 1959 was a 500 cc version of this engine and was similarly styled. The 6T Thunderbird and T110 models also acquired the bathtub rear fairing. Although quickly mimicked by competitors, eventually Turner relented on this unpopular feature, the 'bathtub' becoming more and more abbreviated until disappearing altogether on the final 1966 versions. Sportier versions of both the 5TA (the Tiger 100) and 3TA (the Tiger 90)were produced from 1960-1974 and 1963-1969, respectively.

Triumph T120 Bonneville[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

The first Triumph T120 Bonnevilles from 1959 retained the nacelle and deeply valanced mudguards of the then-Thunderbird and T110 models. Both of these features were dropped on the T120 from 1960 onwards. Note also, background left, the 6T Thunderbird with Turner's unpopular rear 'bathtub' fairing. Photo taken at The Art Of The Motorcycle exhibition in Las Vegas

In 1958 a twin-carburettor version of the 650 engine emerged. Triumph test rider Percy Tait hit 128 mph on a prototype Triumph Bonneville T120 at the Motorcycle Industry Research Association (MIRA) test track. The "Bonnie" was a show stopper at the 1958 Earl's Court Motorcycle Show.

Turner, wary of racing and high-performance options, thought the Bonnie was a bad design and reputedly said to Frank Baker, Triumph's experimental department manager, "This, my boy, will lead us straight into Carey Street (where the bankruptcy courts were)."

Daimler V8 engines[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Daimler SP250 also known as the 'Dart'

For 1959 Turner designed the hemi-head Daimler 2.5 & 4.5 litre V8 engines used in the Daimler SP250 sports car and Daimler Majestic Major respectively. The valve gear was more similar to the Chrysler Hemi than the Triumph motorcycle, itself based on Riley.

In 1960 Turner went for a tour of the Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha plants in Japan and was shaken by the scale of production.

By 1961 Turner was under pressure to retire. Bert Hopwood resigned from AMC, and accepted Turner's offer to work for Triumph as Director and General Manager. It was at this time that Hopwood conceived the idea of a three-cylinder bike and engineer Doug Hele completed the drawings. Daimler was sold to Jaguar, and Edward Turner's V-8 was put into a Jaguar Mark 2 body with an upgraded interior and trademark Daimler grille, and called the Daimler 2½ litre V8.

In 1962, the last year of the "pre-unit" models, Triumph used a frame with twin front downtubes, but returned to a traditional Triumph single front downtube for the unit construction models that followed.

From 1963 all Triumph engines were of unit construction.

1964 Triumph TR6R Trophy with Turner's unit 650 cc engine

Triumph Scooters[link]

1965 Triumph Tina scooter (left) at Coventry Transport Museum

Two Turner-designed scooters were introduced, about 1958 the high-performance Triumph Tigress (also sold as the BSA Sunbeam) and in 1963 the Tina (later called the T10), a Turner-designed 100 cc automatic transmission scooter for shopping.^[11]

Retirement[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Turner retired as Chief Executive of the Automotive Division (which included motorcycles) in1963, but retained his BSA Directorship. He was apparently by this time unhappy about the direction the company was taking. Bert Hopwood had hopes of being appointed Turner's successor, but the job went to BSA's Harry Sturgeon.

BSA management now took over Triumph policy completely. Sturgeon decided to streamline motorcycle operations after McKinsey, an international business consultant, recommended treating the two companies as one.

1966 saw Turner working on a large-displacement, four-cylinder engine design which was not built.

In 1967, Turner, at 66, retired from the BSA Board and Harry Sturgeon took his place. Unlike Turner, Sturgeon was convinced Triumph had to be involved in racing, and John Hartle won the 1967 Isle of Man TT production event on a Bonneville, just before Harry Sturgeon suddenly died, and was replaced by Lionel Jofeh.

Triumph Bandit and BSA Fury[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2009)

In November 1970 the ailing company's last major press and trade launch was held. In the lineup was an ohc 350 cc twin with dual carburettors and five-speed transmission, designed by Turner (already retired) as his last project, and further refined by Bert Hopwood and Doug Hele. It was to be sold both as the Triumph Bandit and BSA Fury (each distinguished by minor cosmetic changes and paint schemes) with 34 bhp capable of 110 mph, and it was already included in that year's brochures, when financial problems forced the model to be cancelled before it could be produced. Several pre-production prototypes were made and still exist.^[12]

1971 Triumph Bandit production prototype. The concept was Turner's but the eventual production version was by Doug Hele and Bert Hopwood

The BSA Fury was an attempt by BSA to compete in the 350 c.c. Double Overhead Cam category. This displacement was, at the time, one of the largest selling in motorcycling. In an early 1970s issue of Cycle Buyers Guide (a yearly listing of all available Motorcycles) it was stated that in that year prior to that issue, Honda had sold more 350 c.c. Motorcycles than Yamaha had sold Motorcycles.

Both BSA and Triumph marketed two versions of exhaust system on the Bandit and Fury: a Street Scrambler 'SS' version had a high mounted system finished in matt black with both pipes to one side of the engine; the other version had a bright chromed exhaust system conventionally mounted low to either side of the chassis (see picture).

BSA-Triumph both made a major media push with multi page brochure inserts in all of the major US Cycle publications and the 350s were prominently displayed. This represented a determined response to the challenge put forward by the Japanese by designing a competitive and aesthetically current 350. The look was very well received and many enthusiasts were looking forward to their arrival in America.

Unfortunately, BSA-Triumph was in a deteriorating financial condition (labor disputes, engines with bad electrical systems and leaking oil gaskets and aging looks). Faced with limited resources, the Company made a decision to neither produce nor export either 350 and to instead concentrate on the "proven models". Whether this decision contributed to their eventual demise is a point of argument that will never really be resolved.

Commemoration[link]

When the Royal Mail issued six postage stamps on 19 July 2005 each featuring a classic British motorcycle, Turner was the only designer cited by name in the accompanying presentation packet notes. This was in relation to the 47 pence stamp featuring his 1938 Triumph Speed Twin.^[13]

Edward Turner's Blue Plaque unveiling by Edward Turner Jr at 8 Philip Walk, Peckham, London SE15 United Kingdom, October 2009

In 2008, an address where Turner lived and worked in Peckham, South-East London was awarded a Blue Plaque by Southwark London Borough Council following a popular public vote in 2007.^[14] The Blue Plaque at 8 Philip Walk, where he lived whilst working for his father's bottle-brush factory itself now at 6 Philip Walk, was unveiled by his son, Edward Turner Jr on Sunday 25 October 2009 in the presence of his siblings, Jane Meadows and Charmian Hawley ^{[15] [16] [17]}.

References[link]

John Ford
Ford in 1946
Born	John Martin Feeney (1894-02-01)February 1, 1894 Cape Elizabeth, Maine, U.S.
Died	August 31, 1973(1973-08-31) (aged 79)[1] Palm Desert, CA, U.S.
Occupation	Film director/producer
Years active	1917–66
Influenced by	D.W. Griffith, F. W. Murnau
Influenced	Orson Welles, Michael Cimino, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, David Lean
Military career
Allegiance	United States
Service/branch	U.S. Navy U.S. Naval Reserve
Years of service	1942–45 (active) 1946–62 (reserve)
Rank	Commander (active) Rear Admiral (reserve)
Battles/wars	World War II Battle of Midway Battle of Normandy

John Ford (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973)^[1] was an American film director. He was famous for both his Westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath. His four Academy Awards for Best Director (1935, 1940, 1941, 1952) is a record, and one of those films, How Green Was My Valley, also won Best Picture.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Ford directed more than 140 films (although nearly all of his silent films are now lost) and he is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation.^[2] Ford's films and personality were held in high regard by his colleagues, with Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles among those who have named him as one of the greatest directors of all time.

In particular, Ford was a pioneer of location shooting and the long shot which frames his characters against a vast, harsh and rugged natural terrain.

Early life[link]

Ford was born John Martin "Jack" Feeney (though he later often gave his given names as Sean Aloysius, sometimes with surname O'Feeny or O'Fearna; an Irish language equivalent of Feeney) in Cape Elizabeth, Maine to John Augustine Feeney and Barbara "Abbey" Curran, on February 1, 1894^[3] (though he occasionally said 1895 and that date is erroneously inscribed on his tombstone).^[1] His father, John Augustine, was born in Spiddal,^[4] County Galway, Ireland in 1854.^[1] Barbara Curran had been born in the Aran Islands, in the town of Kilronan on the island of Inishmore (Inis Mór).^[1] John A. Feeney's grandmother, Barbara Morris, was said to be a member of a local (impoverished) gentry family, the Morrises of Spiddal, headed at present by Lord Killanin.

John Augustine and Barbara Curran arrived in Boston and Portland respectively within a few days of each other in May and June 1872. They were married in 1875, and became American citizens five years later on September 11, 1880.^[1] They had eleven children: Mamie (Mary Agnes), born 1876; Delia (Edith), 1878–1881; Patrick; Francis Ford, 1881–1953; Bridget, 1883–1884; Barbara, born and died 1888; Edward, born 1889; Josephine, born 1891; Hannah (Joanna), born and died 1892; John Martin, 1894–1973; and Daniel, born and died 1896 (or 1898).^[1] John Augustine lived in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood of Portland, Maine with his family, and would try farming, fishing, working for the gas company, running a saloon, and being an alderman.^[1]

Feeney attended Portland High School, Portland, Maine. He moved to California and began acting and working in film production for his older brother Francis in 1914, taking "Jack Ford" as a stage name. In addition to credited roles, he appeared uncredited as a Klansman in D.W. Griffith's 1915 classic, The Birth of a Nation, as the man who lifts up one side of his hood so he can see clearly. He married Mary McBryde Smith, on July 3, 1920, and they had two children. His daughter Barbara was married to singer and actor Ken Curtis from 1952 to 1964. The Ford marriage lasted until his death, although he had many extramarital relationships.^[5]

Directing career[link]

John Ford began his career in film after moving to California in July 1914. He followed in the footsteps of his multi-talented older brother Francis Ford, twelve years his senior, who had left home years earlier and had worked in vaudeville before becoming a movie actor. Francis played in hundreds of silent pictures for Thomas Edison, Georges Méliès and Thomas Ince, eventually progressing to become a prominent Hollywood actor-writer-director with his own production company (101 Bison) at Universal.^[6]

Jack Ford started out in his brother's films as an assistant, handyman, stuntman and occasional actor, frequently doubling for his brother, whom he closely resembled.^[7] Francis gave his younger brother his first acting role in The Mysterious Rose (November 1914).^[8] Despite an often combative relationship, within three years Jack had progressed to become Francis' chief assistant and often worked as his cameraman.^[9] By the time Jack Ford was given his first break as a director, Francis' profile was declining and he ceased working as a director soon afterward.

One notable feature of John Ford's films is that he used a 'stock company' of actors, far more so than many directors. Many famous stars appeared in at least two or more Ford films, including Harry Carey, Sr., (the star of 25 Ford silents), Will Rogers, John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Maureen O'Hara, James Stewart, Woody Strode, Richard Widmark, Victor McLaglen, Vera Miles and Jeffrey Hunter. Many of his supporting actors appeared in multiple Ford films, often over a period of several decades, including Ben Johnson, Chill Wills, Andy Devine, Ward Bond, Grant Withers, Mae Marsh, Anna Lee, Harry Carey, Jr., Ken Curtis, Frank Baker, Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, Hank Worden, John Qualen, Barry Fitzgerald, Arthur Shields, John Carradine, O.Z. Whitehead and Carleton Young. Core members of this extended 'troupe', including Ward Bond, John Carradine, Harry Carey, Jr., Mae Marsh, Frank Baker and Ben Johnson, were informally known as the John Ford Stock Company.

Likewise, Ford enjoyed extended working relationships with his production team, and many of his crew worked with him for decades. He made numerous films with the same major collaborators, including producer and business partner Merian C. Cooper, scriptwriters Nunnally Johnson, Dudley Nichols and Frank S. Nugent, and cinematographers Ben F. Reynolds, John W. Brown and George Schneiderman (who between them shot most of Ford's silent films), Joseph H. August, Gregg Toland, Winton Hoch, Charles Lawton Jr., Bert Glennon, Archie Stout and William H. Clothier.

Silent era[link]

During his first decade as a director Ford honed his craft on dozens of features (including many westerns) but fewer than a dozen of the more than sixty silent films he made between 1917 and 1928 still exist in any form^[10] and only ten have survived in their entirety. However prints of several Ford 'silents' previously thought lost have been rediscovered in foreign film archives over recent years—in 2009 a trove of 75 Hollywood silent films was rediscovered in the New Zealand Film Archive, among which was the only surviving print of Ford's 1927 silent comedy Upstream.^[11] The print was restored in New Zealand by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences before being returned to America, where it was given a "repremiere" at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on August 31, 2010, featuring a newly-commissioned score by Michael Mortilla.^[12]

Throughout his career Ford was one of the busiest directors in Hollywood, but he was extraordinarily productive in his first few years as a director—he made ten films in 1917, eight in 1918 and fifteen in 1919—and he directed a total of 62 shorts and features between 1917 and 1928, although he was not given a screen credit on most of his earliest films.

There is some uncertainty about the identity of Ford's first film as director—film writer Ephraim Katz notes that Ford might have directed the four-part film Lucille the Waitress as early as 1914^[13]—but most sources cite his directorial debut as the silent two-reeler The Tornado, released in March 1917. According to Ford's own story, he was given the job by Universal boss Carl Laemmle who supposedly said, "Give Jack Ford the job—he yells good". The Tornado was quickly followed by a string of two-reeler and three-reeler "quickies"—The Trail of Hate, The Scrapper, The Soul Herder and Cheyenne's Pal; these were made over the space of a few months and each typically shot in just two or three days; all are now presumed lost. The Soul Herder is also notable as the beginning of Ford's four-year, 25-film association with veteran writer-actor Harry Carey,^[14] who (with Ford's brother Francis) was a strong early influence on the young director, as well as being one of the major influences on the screen persona of Ford's protege John Wayne. Carey's son Harry "Dobe" Carey Jr, who also became an actor, was one of Ford's closest friends in later years and featured in many of his most celebrated westerns.

Ford's first feature-length production was Straight Shooting (August 1917), which is also his earliest complete surviving film as director, and one of only two survivors from his twenty-five film collaboration with Harry Carey. In making the film Ford and Carey ignored studio orders and turned in five reels instead of two, and it was only through the intervention of Carl Laemmle that the film escaped being cut for its first release, although it was subsequently edited down to two reels for re-release in the late 1920s.^[15] Ford's last film of 1917, Bucking Broadway, was long thought to have been lost, but in 2002 the only known surviving print was discovered in the archives of the French National Center for Cinematography^[16] and it has since been restored and digitized.

Ford directed around thirty-six films over three years for Universal before moving to the William Fox studio in 1920; his first film for them was Just Pals (1920). His 1923 feature Cameo Kirby, starring screen idol John Gilbert—another of the few surviving Ford silents—marked his first directing credit under the name "John Ford", rather than "Jack Ford", as he had previously been credited.

Ford's first major success as a director was the historical drama The Iron Horse (1924), an epic account of the building of the First Transcontinental Railroad. It was a large, long and difficult production, filmed on location in the Sierra Nevada. The logistics were enormous—two entire towns were constructed, there were 5000 extras, 100 cooks, 2000 rail layers, a cavalry regiment, 800 Indians, 1300 buffalo, 2000 horses, 10,000 cattle and 50,000 properties, including the original stagecoach used by Horace Greeley, Wild Bill Hickok's derringer pistol and replicas of the "Jupiter" and "119" locomotives that met at Promontory Point when the two ends of the line were joined on 10 May 1869.^[17]

Ford's brother Eddie was a crew member and they fought constantly; on one occasion Eddie reportedly "went after the old man with a pick handle". There was only a short synopsis written when filming began and Ford wrote and shot the film day by day. Production fell behind schedule, delayed by constant bad weather and the intense cold, and Fox executives repeatedly demanded results, but Ford would either tear up the telegrams or hold them up and have stunt gunman Edward "Pardner" Jones shoot holes through the sender's name.^[18] Despite the pressure to halt the production, studio boss William Fox finally backed Ford and allowed him to finish the picture and his gamble paid off handsomely—The Iron Horse became one of the top-grossing films of the decade, taking over US$2 million worldwide, against a budget of $280,000.^[17]

Ford made a wide range of films in this period, and he became well known for his Western and 'frontier' pictures, but the genre rapidly lost its appeal for major studios in the late 1920s. Ford's last silent Western was 3 Bad Men (1926), set during the Dakota land rush and filmed at Jackson Hole, Wyoming and in the Mojave Desert. It would be thirteen years before he made his next Western, Stagecoach, in 1939.

During the 1920s, Ford also served as president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a forerunner to today's Directors Guild of America.

Talkies: 1928–1939[link]

Ford was one of the pioneer directors of sound films; he shot Fox's first song sung on screen, for his film Mother Machree (1928) of which only three of the original seven reels survive; this film is also notable as the first Ford film to feature the young John Wayne (as an uncredited extra) and he appeared in Ford's next two movies. Ford also directed Fox's first all-talking dramatic feature Napoleon's Barber (1928), a 3-reeler which is also now lost.

Just before the studio converted to talkies, Fox gave a contract to the German director F. W. Murnau, and his film Sunrise (1927), still highly regarded by critics, had a powerful effect on Ford.^[19] Murnau's influence can be seen in many of Ford's films of the late 1920s and early 1930s—his penultimate silent feature Four Sons (1928), starring Victor McLaglen, was filmed on some of the lavish sets left over from Murnau's production. Ford's last silent feature Hangman's House (1928) is notable as one of the first credited screen appearances by John Wayne.

Napoleon's Barber was followed by Riley the Cop (1928) and Strong Boy (1929), starring Victor McLaglen; the latter is now lost (although Tag Gallagher's book records that the only surviving copy of Strong Boy, a 35 mm nitrate print, was rumored to be held in a private collection in Australia^[20]). The Black Watch (1929), a colonial army adventure set in the Khyber Pass starring Victor McLaglen and Myrna Loy is Ford's first complete surviving talking picture; it was remade in 1954 by Henry King as King of the Khyber Rifles.

Ford's output was fairly constant from 1928 to the start of World War II; he made five features in 1928 and then made either two or three films every year from 1929–1942 inclusive. Three films were released in 1929—Strong Boy, The Black Watch and Salute. His three films of 1930 were Men Without Women, Born Reckless and Up the River, which is notable as the debut film for both Spencer Tracy and Humphrey Bogart, who were both signed to Fox on Ford's recommendation (but subsequently dropped). Ford's films in 1931 were Seas Beneath, The Brat and Arrowsmith; the last-named, adapted from the Sinclair Lewis novel and starring Ronald Colman and Helen Hayes, marked Ford's first Academy Awards recognition, with five nominations including Best Picture.

Ford's legendary efficiency and his ability to craft films combining artfulness with strong commercial appeal won him increasing renown and by 1940 he was acknowledged as one of the world's foremost movie directors.^{[citation needed]} His growing prestige was reflected in his remuneration—in 1920, when he moved to Fox, he was being paid $300–600 per week, but as his career took off in the mid-Twenties his annual income significantly increased. He earned nearly $134,000 in 1929, and he made over $100,000 per annum every year from 1934 to 1941, earning a staggering $220,068 in 1938^[21]—more than double the salary of the U.S. President at that time (although this was still less than half the income of Carole Lombard, Hollywood's highest-paid star of the 1930s, who was earning around $500,000 per year at the time).

With film production affected by the Depression, Ford made two films each in 1932 and 1933—Airmail (made for Universal) with a young Ralph Bellamy and Flesh (for MGM) with Wallace Beery. In 1933, he returned to Fox for Pilgrimage and Doctor Bull, the first of his three films with Will Rogers.

The World War I desert drama The Lost Patrol (1934), based on the book Patrol by Philip MacDonald, was a superior remake of the 1929 silent film Lost Patrol. It starred Victor McLaglen as The Sergeant—the role played by his brother Cyril McLaglen in the earlier version—with Boris Karloff, Wallace Ford, Alan Hale and Reginald Denny (who went on to found a company that made radio-controlled target aircraft during World War II). It was one of Ford's first big hits of the sound era—it was rated by both the National Board of Review and The New York Times as one of the Top 10 films of that year and won an Oscar nomination for its stirring Max Steiner score.^[22] It was followed later that year by The World Moves On with Madeleine Carroll and Franchot Tone, and the highly successful Judge Priest, his second film with Will Rogers, which became one of the top-grossing movies of the year.

Ford's first film of 1935 (made for Columbia) was the mistaken-identity comedy The Whole Town's Talking with Edward G. Robinson and Jean Arthur, released in the UK as Passport to Fame, and it drew critical praise. Steamboat Round The Bend was his third and final film with Will Rogers; it is probable they would have continued working together, but their collaboration was cut short by Rogers' untimely death in a plane crash in May 1935, which devastated Ford.

Ford confirmed his position in the top rank of American directors with the Murnau-influenced Irish Republican Army drama The Informer (1935), starring Victor McLaglen. It earned great critical praise, was nominated for Best Picture, won Ford his first Academy Award for Best Director, and was hailed at the time as one of the best films ever made, although its reputation has diminished considerably compared to other contenders like Citizen Kane,^[23] or Ford's own later The Searchers (1956).

The politically charged The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)—which marked the debut with Ford of long-serving "Stock Company" player John Carradine—explored the little-known story of Samuel Mudd, a physician who was caught up in the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspiracy and consigned to an offshore prison for treating the injured John Wilkes Booth. Other films of this period include the South Seas melodrama The Hurricane (1937) and the lighthearted Shirley Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie (1937), each of which had a first-year US gross of more than $1 million. The longer revised version of Directed by John Ford shown on Turner Classic Movies in November, 2006 features directors Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, and Martin Scorsese, who suggest that the string of classic films Ford directed during 1936 to 1941 was due in part to an intense six-month extra-marital affair with Katharine Hepburn, the star of Mary of Scotland (1936), an Elizabethan costume drama.

1939–1941[link]

Stagecoach (1939) was Ford's first western since 3 Bad Men in 1926, and it was his first with sound. Reputedly Orson Welles watched Stagecoach forty times in preparation for making Citizen Kane. It remains one of the most admired and imitated of all Hollywood movies, not least for its climactic stagecoach chase and the hair-raising horse-jumping scene, performed by the stuntman Yakima Canutt.

The Dudley Nichols–Ben Hecht screenplay was based on an Ernest Haycox story that Ford had spotted in Collier's magazine and he purchased the screen rights for just $2500. Production chief Walter Wanger urged Ford to hire Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich for the lead roles, but eventually accepted Ford's decision to cast Claire Trevor as Dallas and a virtual unknown, his friend John Wayne, as Ringo; Wanger reportedly had little further influence over the production.^[24]

In making Stagecoach, Ford faced entrenched industry prejudice about the now-hackneyed genre which, ironically, he had helped to make so popular. Although low-budget western features and serials were still being churned out in large numbers by 'Poverty Row' studios, the genre had fallen out of favor with the big studios during the 1930s and they were regarded as B-grade 'pulp' movies at best. As a result, Ford shopped the project around Hollywood for almost a year, offering it unsuccessfully to both Joseph Kennedy and David O. Selznick before finally linking with Walter Wanger, an independent producer working through United Artists.

Stagecoach is significant for several reasons—it exploded industry prejudices by becoming both a critical and commercial hit, grossing over US$1 million in its first year (against a budget of just under $400,000), and its success singlehandedly revitalized the moribund genre, showing that Westerns could be "intelligent, artful, great entertainment—and profitable".^[25] It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two Oscars, for Best Supporting Actor (Thomas Mitchell) and Best Score. Stagecoach became the first in the series of seven classic Ford Westerns filmed on location in Monument Valley.^[26]

John Wayne had good reason to be grateful for Ford's support, Stagecoach provided the actor with the career breakthrough that elevated him to international stardom. Over 35 years Wayne appeared in twenty-four of Ford's films (and three TV episodes). Ford is credited with playing a major role in shaping Wayne's screen image.

Stagecoach marked the beginning of the most consistently successful phase of Ford's career—in just two years between 1939 and 1941 he created a string of classics films that won numerous Academy Awards. Ford's next film, the biopic Young Mr Lincoln (1939) starring Henry Fonda, was less successful than Stagecoach, attracting little critical attention and winning no awards. It was not a major box-office hit although it had a respectable domestic first year gross of $750,000, but Ford scholar Tag Gallagher describes it as "a deeper, more multi-leveled work than Stagecoach .... (which) seems in retrospect one of the finest prewar pictures".^[27]

Drums Along the Mohawk (1939) was a lavish frontier drama co-starring Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert; it was also Ford's first movie in color and included uncredited script contributions by William Faulkner. It was a big box-office success, grossing $1.25 million in its first year in the US and earning Edna May Oliver a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for her performance.

Despite its uncompromising humanist and political stance, Ford's screen adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (scripted by Nunnally Johnson and photographed by Gregg Toland) was both a big box office hit and a major critical success, and it is still widely regarded as one of the best Hollywood films of the era. Noted critic Andrew Sarris described it as the movie that transformed Ford from "a storyteller of the screen into America's cinematic poet laureate".^[28] Ford's third movie in a year and his third consecutive film with Fonda, it grossed $1.1 million in the USA in its first year^[29] and won two Academy Awards—Ford's second 'Best Director' Oscar, and 'Best Supporting Actress' for Jane Darwell's tour-de-force portrayal of Ma Joad.

The Grapes of Wrath was followed by two less successful and lesser known films. The Long Voyage Home (1940) was, like Stagecoach, made with Walter Wanger through United Artists. Adapted from four plays by Eugene O'Neill, it was scripted by Dudley Nichols and Ford, in consultation with O'Neill himself. Although not a significant box-office success (it grossed only $600,000 in its first year) it was critically praised and was nominated for seven Academy Awards—Best Picture, Best Screenplay, (Nichols), Best Music (Best Photography (Gregg Toland), Best Editing (Sherman Todd), Best Effects (Ray Binger & R.T. Layton), and Best Sound (Robert Parrish). It was one of Ford's personal favorites; stills from it decorated his home and O'Neill also reportedly loved the film and screened it periodically.^[30]

Tobacco Road (1941) was a rural comedy scripted by Nunnally Johnson, adapted from the long-running Jack Kirkland stage version of the novel by Erskine Caldwell. It starred veteran actor Charley Grapewin and the supporting cast included Ford regulars Ward Bond and Mae Marsh, with Francis Ford in an uncredited bit part; it is also notable for early screen appearances by future stars Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews. Although not highly regarded by some critics—Tag Gallagher devotes only one short paragraph to it in his book on Ford^[31]—it was fairly successful at the box office, grossing $900,000 in its first year. According to IMDb, the film was banned in Australia for unspecified reasons.^[32]

Ford's last feature before America entered World War II was his screen adaptation of How Green Was My Valley (1941), starring Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara and Roddy McDowell in his career-making role as Huw. The script was written by Philip Dunne from the best-selling novel by Robert Llewellyn. It was originally planned as a four-hour epic to rival Gone with the Wind—the screen rights alone cost Fox $300,000—and was to have been filmed on location in Wales, but this was abandoned due to the heavy German bombing of Britain, so it was shot at Fox's San Fernando Valley ranch instead; another reported factor was the nervousness of Fox executives about the pro-union tone of the story.^[33] William Wyler was originally engaged to direct, but he left the project when Fox decided to film it in California; Ford was hired in his place and production was postponed for several months until he became available. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck had a strong influence over the movie and made several key decisions, including the idea of having the character of Huw narrate the film in voice-over (then a novel concept), and the decision that Huw's character should not age (Tyrone Power was originally slated to play the adult Huw).^[34]

How Green Was My Valley became one of the biggest films of 1940. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards including Best Supporting Actress (Sara Allgood), Best Editing, Best Script, Best Music and Best Sound and it won five Oscars—Best Director, Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Donald Crisp), Best B&W Cinematography (Arthur C. Miller) and Best Art Direction/Interior Decoration. It was a huge hit with audiences, coming in behind Sergeant York as the second-highest grossing film of the year in the USA and taking almost $3 million against its sizable budget of $1,250,000.^[35] Ford was also named Best Director by the New York Film Critics, and this was one of the few awards of his career that he collected in person (he generally shunned the Oscar ceremony).^[36]

War years[link]

During World War II, Commander John Ford, USNR, served in the United States Navy and as head of the photographic unit for the Office of Strategic Services, made documentaries for the Navy Department. He won two more Academy Awards during this time, one for the semi-documentary The Battle of Midway (1942), and a second for the propaganda film December 7th (1943). Commander Ford was a veteran of the Battle of Midway, where he was wounded in the arm by shrapnel while filming the Japanese attack from the power plant of Sand Island on Midway.^[37][38][39]

Ford was also present on Omaha Beach on D-Day. He crossed the English Channel on the USS Plunkett (DD-431), anchored off Omaha Beach at 0600 where he observed the first wave land on the beach from the ship, landing on the beach himself later with a team of US Coast Guard cameramen who filmed the battle from behind the beach obstacles, with Ford directing operations. The film was edited in London, but very little was released to the public. Ford explained in a 1964 interview that the US Government was "afraid to show so many American casualties on the screen", adding that all of the D-Day film "still exists in color in storage in Anacostia near Washington, D.C."^[40] Thirty years later, historian Stephen E. Ambrose reported that the Eisenhower Center had been unable to find the film.^[41] Ford eventually rose to become a top adviser to OSS head William Joseph Donovan. According to records released in 2008, Ford was cited by his superiors for bravery, taking a position to film one mission that was "an obvious and clear target". He survived "continuous attack and was wounded" while he continued filming, one commendation in his file states.^[42]

His last wartime film was They Were Expendable (MGM, 1945), an account of America's disastrous defeat in The Philippines, told from the viewpoint of a PT boat squadron and its commander. Ford repeatedly declared that he disliked the film and had never watched it, complaining that he had been forced to make it,^[43] although it was strongly championed by filmmaker Lindsay Anderson.^[44] Released several months after the end of the war, it was among the year's top 20 box-office draws, although Tag Gallagher notes that many critics have incorrectly claimed that it lost money.^[45]

Post-war career[link]

After the war, Ford became a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy Reserve. Ford directed sixteen features and several documentaries in the decade between 1946 and 1956. As with his prewar career, his films alternated between (relative) box office flops and major successes, but most of his later films made a solid profit, and Fort Apache, The Quiet Man, Mogambo and The Searchers all ranked in the Top 20 box-office hits of their respective years.^[46]

Ford's first postwar movie My Darling Clementine (Fox, 1946) was a romanticized retelling of the primal Western legend of Wyatt Earp and the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, with exterior sequences filmed on location in the visually spectacular (but geographically inappropriate) Monument Valley. It reunited Ford with Henry Fonda (as Earp) and co-starred Victor Mature in one of his best roles^[47] as the consumptive, Shakespeare-loving Doc Holliday, with Ward Bond and Tim Holt as the Earp brothers, Linda Darnell as sultry saloon girl Chihuahua, a strong performance by Walter Brennan (in a rare villainous role) as the venomous Old Man Clanton, with Jane Darwell and an early screen appearance by John Ireland as Billy Clanton. In contrast to the string of successes in 1939–41, it won no major American awards, although it was awarded a silver ribbon for Best Foreign Film in 1948 by the Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists,^[48] and it was a solid financial success, grossing $2.75 million in the USA and $1.75 million internationally in its first year of release.^[35]

The Argosy years[link]

Refusing a lucrative contract offered by Zanuck at 20th Century Fox that would have guaranteed him $600,000 per year,^[49] Ford launched himself as an independent director-producer and made many of his films in this period with Argosy Productions, a partnership between Ford and his old friend and colleague Merian C. Cooper, originally founded after the success of Stagecoach.^[50] The Fugitive (1946), again starring Fonda, was the first project of the Argosy Productions enterprise. It was a loose adaptation of Grahame Greene's The Power and the Glory, which Ford had originally intended to make at Fox before the war, with Thomas Mitchell as the priest. Filmed on location in Mexico, it was photographed by distinguished Mexican cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (who later worked with Luis Buñuel). The supporting cast included Dolores Del Rio, J. Carroll Naish, Ward Bond, Leo Carillo and Mel Ferrer (making his screen debut) and a cast of mainly Mexican extras. Ford reportedly considered this his best film^[51] but it fared relatively poorly compared to its predecessor, grossing only $750,000 in its first year. It also caused a rift between Ford and scriptwriter Dudley Nichols that brought about the end of their highly successful collaboration. Greene himself had a particular dislike of this adaptation of his work^{[citation needed]}.

Fort Apache (Argosy/RKO, 1948) was the first part of Ford's so-called 'Cavalry Trilogy', all of which were based on stories by James Warner Bellah. It featured many of his 'Stock Company' of actors, including John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen, Mae Marsh, Francis Ford (as a bartender), Frank Baker, Ben Johnson and also featured Shirley Temple, in her final appearance for Ford and one of her last film appearances. It also marked the start of the long association between Ford and scriptwriter Frank S. Nugent, a former New York Times film critic who (like Dudley Nichols) had not written a movie script until hired by Ford.^[52] It was a big commercial success, grossing nearly $5 million worldwide in its first year and ranking in the Top 20 box office hits of 1948.^[35]

During the year Ford also assisted his friend and colleague Howard Hawks, who was having problems with his current film Red River (which starred John Wayne) and Ford reportedly made numerous editing suggestions, including the use of a narrator.^[53] Fort Apache was followed by another Western, 3 Godfathers, a remake of a 1916 silent film starring Harry Carey (to whom Ford's version was dedicated), which Ford had himself already remade in 1919 as Marked Men, also with Carey and thought lost. It starred John Wayne, Pedro Armendáriz and Harry "Dobe" Carey Jr (in one of his first major roles) as three outlaws who rescue a baby after his mother (Mildred Natwick) dies giving birth, with Ward Bond as the sheriff pursuing them.

In 1949 Ford briefly returned to Fox to direct Pinky. He prepared the project but worked only one day before being taken ill, supposedly with shingles, and Elia Kazan replaced him (although Tag Gallagher suggests that Ford's illness was a pretext for leaving the film, which Ford disliked^[54]).

His only completed film of that year was the second installment of his Cavalry Trilogy, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (Argosy/RKO, 1949), starring John Wayne and Joanne Dru, with Victor McLaglen, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Mildred Natwick and Harry Carey Jr. Again filmed on location in Monument Valley, it was widely acclaimed for its stunning Technicolor cinematography (including the famous cavalry scene filmed in front of an oncoming storm); it won Winton Hoch the 1950 Academy Award for Best Color Cinematography and it did big business on its first release, grossing more than $5m worldwide. John Wayne, then 41, also received wide praise for his role as the 60-year-old Capt. Nathan Brittles.

1950s[link]

Ford's first film of 1950 was the offbeat military comedy When Willie Comes Marching Home, starring Dan Dailey and Corinne Calvet, with William Demarest, from Preston Sturges 'stock company', and early (uncredited) screen appearances by Alan Hale Jr and Vera Miles. It was followed by Wagon Master, starring Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr, which is particularly noteworthy as the only Ford film since 1930 that he scripted himself. It was subsequently adapted into the long-running TV series Wagon Train (with Ward Bond reprising the title role until his sudden death in 1960). Although it did far smaller business than most of his other films in this period, Ford cited Wagon Master his personal favorite of all his films, telling Peter Bogdanovich that it "came closest to what I had hoped to achieve".

Rio Grande (Republic, 1950), the third part of the 'Cavalry Trilogy', co-starred John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, with Wayne's son Patrick Wayne making his screen debut (he appeared in several subsequent Ford pictures including The Searchers). It was made at the insistence of Republic Pictures who demanded a profitable Western as the condition of backing Ford's next project, The Quiet Man. A testament to Ford's legendary efficiency, Rio Grande was shot in just 32 days, with only 352 takes from 335 camera setups, and it was a solid success, grossing $2.25m in its first year.

Republic's anxiety was erased by the resounding success of The Quiet Man (Republic, 1952), a pet project which Ford had wanted to make since the 1930s (and almost did so in 1937 with an independent cooperative called Renowned Artists Company). It became his biggest grossing picture to date, taking nearly $4 million in the USA alone in its first year and ranking in the top 10 box office films of its year. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won Ford his fourth Oscar for Best Director, as well a second Best Cinematography Oscar for Winton Hoch. It was followed by What Price Glory? (1952), a World War I drama, the first of two films Ford made with James Cagney (Mister Roberts was the other) which also did good business at the box office ($2m).

The Sun Shines Bright (1953), Ford's first entry in the Cannes Film Festival, was a western comedy-drama with Charles Winninger reviving the Judge Priest role made famous by Will Rogers in the 1930s. Ford later referred to it as one of his favorites, but it was poorly received, and was drastically cut (from 90 mins to 65 mins) by Republic soon after its release, with some excised scenes now presumed lost. It fared poorly at the box office and its failure contributed to the subsequent collapse of Argosy Pictures.

Ford's next film was the romance-adventure Mogambo (MGM, 1953), a loose remake of the celebrated 1932 film Red Dust. Filmed on location in Africa, it was photographed by British cinematographer Freddie Young and starred Ford's old friend Clark Gable, with Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly (who replaced an ailing Gene Tierney) and Donald Sinden. Although the production was difficult (exacerbated by the irritating presence of Gardner's then husband Frank Sinatra), Mogamabo became one of the biggest commercial hits of Ford's career, with the highest domestic first-year gross of any of his films ($5.2m); it also revitalized Gable's waning career and earned Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations for Gardner and Kelly (who was rumored to have had a brief affair with Gable during the making of the film).

In 1955, Ford made the lesser-known West Point drama The Long Gray Line for Columbia Pictures, the first of two Ford films to feature Tyrone Power, who had originally been slated to star as the adult Huw in How Green Was My Valley back in 1941. Later in 1955 Ford was hired by Warner Bros to direct the Naval comedy Mister Roberts, starring Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, William Powell, and James Cagney, but there was conflict between Ford and Fonda, who had been playing the lead role on Broadway for the past seven years and had misgivings about Ford's direction. During a three-way meeting with producer Leland Hayward to try and iron out the problems, Ford became enraged and punched Fonda on the jaw, knocking him across the room, an action that created a lasting rift between them. After the incident Ford became increasingly morose, drinking heavily and eventually retreating to the Araner and refusing to eat or see anyone. Production was shut down for five days and Ford sobered up, but soon after he suffered a ruptured gallbladder, necessitating emergency surgery, and he was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy.

Ford also made his first forays into television in 1955, directing two half-hour dramas for network TV. In the summer of 1955 he made Rookie of the Year (Hal Roach Studios) for the TV series Studio Directors Playhouse; scripted by Frank S. Nugent, it featured Ford regulars John and Pat Wayne, Vera Miles and Ward Bond, with Ford himself appearing in the introduction. In November he made The Bamboo Cross (Lewman Ltd-Revue, 1955) for the Fireside Theatre series; it starred Jane Wyman with an Asian-American cast and Stock Company veterans Frank Baker and Pat O'Malley in minor roles.

The Searchers (1956)

Ford returned to the big screen with The Searchers (Warner Bros, 1956), the only Western he made between 1950 and 1959, which is now widely regarded as not only one of his best films, but also regarded by many as the greatest western ever made, and one of the best performances of John Wayne's career. Shot on location in Monument Valley, it tells of the embittered Civil War veteran Ethan Edwards who spends years tracking down his niece, kidnapped by Comanches as a young girl. The supporting cast included Jeffrey Hunter, Ward Bond, Vera Miles and rising star Natalie Wood (Hunter's first film for Ford). It was very successful upon its first release and became one of the top 20 films of the year, grossing $4.45m, although it received no Academy Award nominations. However its reputation has grown greatly over the intervening years—it was named the Greatest Western of all time by the American Film Institute in 2008 and also placed 12th on the Institute's 2007 list of the Top 100 greatest movies of all time.^[55] The Searchers has exerted a wide influence on film and popular culture—it has inspired (and been directly quoted by) many filmmakers including David Lean and George Lucas, Wayne's character's catchphrase "That'll be the day" inspired Buddy Holly to pen his famous hit song of the same name, and the British pop group The Searchers also took their name from the film.

The Searchers was accompanied by one of the first "making of" documentaries, a four-part promotional program created for the "Behind the Camera" segment of the weekly Warner Brothers Presents TV show, (the studio's first foray into TV) which aired on the ABC network in 1955-56. Presented by Gig Young, the four segments included interviews with Jeffrey Hunter and Natalie Wood and behind-the-scenes footage shot during the making of the film.

The Wings of Eagles (MGM, 1957) was a fictionalized biography of Ford's old friend, aviator-turned-scriptwriter Frank "Spig" Wead, who had scripted several of Ford's early sound films. It starred John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, with Ward Bond as John Dodge (a character based on Ford himself). It was followed by one of Ford's least known films, The Growler Story, a 29-minute dramatized documentary about the USS Growler. Made for the US Navy and filmed by the Pacific Fleet Command Combat Camera Group, it featured Ward Bond and Ken Curtis alongside real Navy personnel and their families.

Ford's next two films stand somewhat apart from the rest of his films in terms of production, and he notably took no salary for either job. The Rising of the Moon (Warner Bros, 1957) was a three-part 'omnibus' movie shot on location in Ireland and based on Irish short stories. It was made by Four Province Productions, a company established by British tycoon Lord Killanin, who had recently become Chair of the International Olympic Committee, and to whom Ford was distantly related. Killanin was also the actual (but uncredited) producer of The Quiet Man. The film failed to recoup its costs, earning less than half ($100k) its negative cost of just over $256,000 and it stirred up some controversy in Ireland.

Both of Ford's 1958 films were made for Columbia Pictures and both were significant departures from Ford's norm. Gideon's Day (titled Gideon of Scotland Yard in the USA) was adapted from the novel by British writer John Creasey. It is Ford's only police genre film, and one of the few Ford films set in the present day of the 1950s. It was shot in England with a British cast headed by Jack Hawkins, whom Ford (unusually) lauded as "the finest dramatic actor with whom I have worked".^[56] It was poorly promoted by Columbia, who only distributed it in B&W, although it was shot in color,^[56] and it too failed to make a profit in its first year, earning only $400,000 against its budget of $453,000.

The Last Hurrah, (Columbia, 1958), again set in present day of the '50s, starred Spencer Tracy, who had made his first film appearance in Ford's Up The River in 1930. Tracy plays an aging politician fighting his last campaign, with Jeffrey Hunter as his nephew. Katharine Hepburn reportedly facilitated a rapprochement between the two men, ending a long-running feud, and she convinced Tracy to take the lead role, which had originally been offered to Orson Welles (but was turned down by Welles' agent without his knowledge, much to his chagrin). It did considerably better business than either of Ford's two preceding films, grossing $950,000 in its first year^[57] although cast member Anna Lee stated that Ford was "disappointed with the picture" and that Columbia had not permitted him to supervise the editing.

Korea: Battleground for Liberty (1959), Ford's second documentary on the Korean War, was made for the U.S. Department of Defense as an orientation film for US soldiers stationed there. It was followed by his next feature, The Horse Soldiers (Mirisch Company-United Artists, 1959), a Civil War story starring John Wayne and William Holden. Although Ford professed unhappiness with the project, it was a commercial success, ranking in the year's Top 20 box-office hits, grossing $3.6m in its first year, and earning Ford his highest-ever fee—$375,000, plus 10% of the gross.^[57]

Last years, 1960–1973[link]

Ford in 1973

In his last years Ford was dogged by declining health, largely the result of decades of heavy drinking and smoking, and exacerbated by the wounds he suffered during the Battle of Midway. His vision in particular began to deteriorate rapidly and at one point he briefly lost his sight entirely; his prodigious memory also began to falter, making it necessary to rely more and more on assistants. His work was also restricted by the new regime in Hollywood, and he found it hard to get many projects made—by the 1960s he had been pigeonholed as a Western director and complained that he now found it almost impossible to get backing for projects in other genres.

Sergeant Rutledge (Ford Productions-Warner Bros, 1960) was Ford's last cavalry film. Set in the 1880s, it tells the story of an African-American cavalryman (played by Woody Strode) who is wrongfully accused of raping and murdering a white girl. It was erroneously marketed as a suspense film by Warners and was not a commercial success. During 1960, Ford made his third TV production, The Colter Craven Story, a one-hour episode of the network TV show Wagon Train, which included footage from Ford's Wagon Master (on which the series was based). He also visited the set of The Alamo, produced, directed by, and starring John Wayne, where his interference caused Wayne to send him out to film second-unit scenes which were never used (nor intended to be used) in the film.^[58]

Two Rode Together (Ford Productions-Columbia, 1961) co-starred James Stewart and Richard Widmark, with Shirley Jones and Stock Company regulars Andy Devine, Henry Brandon, Harry Carey Jr, Anna Lee, Woody Strode, Mae Marsh and Frank Baker, with an early screen appearance by Linda Cristal, who went on to star in the Western TV series The High Chaparral. It was a fair commercial success, grossing $1.6m in its first year.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Ford Productions-Paramount, 1962) is frequently cited as the last great film of Ford's career. It co-starred John Wayne and James Stewart, with Vera Miles, Edmund O'Brien, Andy Devine (as the inept marshal, Denver Pyle), John Carradine, and Lee Marvin in one of his first major roles as the brutal Valance, with Lee Van Cleef and Strother Martin as his henchmen. It is also notable as the film in which Wayne first used his trademark phrase "Pilgrim" (his nickname for James Stewart's character). It was very successful, grossing over $3m in its first year, although the lead casting stretched credibility — the characters played by Stewart (then 53) and Wayne (then 54) were meant to be in their early 20s, and Ford reportedly considered casting a younger actor in Stewart's role but feared it would highlight Wayne's age. Though it is often claimed that budget constraints necessitated shooting most of the film on soundstages on the Paramount lot, studio accounting records show that this was part of the film's original artistic concept, according to Ford biographer Joseph McBride. According to Lee Marvin in a filmed interview, Ford had fought hard to shoot the film in black and white to accentuate his use of shadows. Still, it was one of Ford's most expensive films at US$3.2 million.

After completing Liberty Valance, Ford was hired to direct the Civil War section of MGM's epic How The West Was Won, the first non-documentary film to use the Cinerama wide-screen process. Ford's segment featured George Peppard, with Andy Devine, Russ Tamblyn, Harry Morgan as Ulysses S. Grant, and John Wayne as William Tecumseh Sherman. Also in 1962, Ford directed his fourth and last TV production, Flashing Spikes, a baseball story made for the Alcoa Premiere series and starring James Stewart, Jack Warden, Patrick Wayne and Tige Andrews, with Harry Carey, Jr. and a lengthy surprise appearance by John Wayne, billed in the credits as "Michael Morris."

Donovan's Reef (Paramount, 1963) was Ford's last film with John Wayne. Filmed on location on the Hawaiian island of Kauai (doubling for a fictional island in French Polynesia), it was a morality play disguised as an action-comedy, which subtly but sharply engaged with issues of racial bigotry, corporate connivance, greed and American beliefs of societal superiority. The supporting cast included Lee Marvin, Elizabeth Allen, Jack Warden, Dorothy Lamour, and Cesar Romero. It was also Ford's last commercial success, grossing $3.3m against a budget of $2.6m.

Cheyenne Autumn (Warner Bros, 1964) was Ford's epic farewell to the West, which he publicly declared to be an elegy to the Native American. It was his last Western, his longest film and the most expensive movie of his career ($4.2m), but it failed to recoup its costs at the box office and lost about $1m on its first release. The all-star cast was headed by Richard Widmark, with Carroll Baker, Karl Malden, Dolores del Río, Ricardo Montalbán, Gilbert Roland, Sal Mineo, James Stewart as Wyatt Earp, Arthur Kennedy as Doc Holliday, Edward G. Robinson, Patrick Wayne, Elizabeth Allen, Mike Mazurki and many of Ford's faithful Stock Company, including John Carradine, Ken Curtis, Willis Bouchey, James Flavin, Danny Borzage, Harry Carey Jr, Chuck Hayward, Ben Johnson, Mae Marsh and Denver Pyle. William Clothier was nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar and Gilbert Roland was nominated for a Golden Globe award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Cheyenne elder Dull Knife.

In 1965 Ford began work on Young Cassidy (MGM), a biographical drama based upon the life of Irish playwright Sean O'Casey, but he fell ill early in the production and was replaced by Jack Cardiff.

Ford's last completed feature film was 7 Women (MGM, 1966), a drama about missionary women in China ca. 1935 trying to protect themselves from the advances of a barbaric Mongolian warlord. Anne Bancroft took over the lead role from Patricia Neal, who suffered a near-fatal stroke two days into shooting. The supporting cast included Margaret Leighton, Flora Robson, Sue Lyon, Mildred Dunnock, Anna Lee, Eddie Albert, Mike Mazurki and Woody Strode, with music by Elmer Bernstein. Unfortunately it was a commercial flop, grossing only about half of its $2.3m budget. Unusually for Ford, it was shot in continuity for the sake of the performances and he therefore exposed about four times as much film as he usually shot. Anna Lee recalled that Ford was "absolutely charming" to everyone and that the only major blow-up came when Flora Robson complained that the sign on her dressing room door did not include her title ("Dame") and as a result Robson was "absolutely shredded" by Ford in front of the cast and crew.

Ford's next project, The Miracle of Merriford, was scrapped by MGM less than a week before shooting was to have begun. His last completed work was Chesty: A Tribute to a Legend, a documentary on the most decorated U.S. Marine, General Lewis B. Puller, with narration by John Wayne, which was made in 1970 but not released until 1976, three years after Ford's death.

Ford's health deteriorated rapidly in the early 1970s; he suffered a broken hip in 1970 which put him in a wheelchair. He had to move from his Bel Air home to a single-level house in Palm Desert, near Eisenhower Medical Center, where he was being treated for cancer. In October 1972, the Screen Directors Guild staged a tribute to Ford and in March 1973 the American Film Institute honored him with its first Lifetime Achievement Award at a ceremony which was telecast nationwide, with President Richard Nixon promoting Ford to full Admiral and presenting him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ford died on 31 August 1973 at Palm Desert, California, and his funeral was held on 5 September at Hollywood's Church of the Blessed Sacrament. He was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Personality and directing style[link]

This unreferenced section requires citations to ensure verifiability.

Personality[link]

Ford was renowned for his intense personality and his many idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. From the early Thirties onwards, he always wore dark glasses and a patch over his left eye, which was only partly to protect his poor eyesight. He was an inveterate pipe-smoker and while he was shooting he would chew on a linen handkerchief—each morning his wife would give him a dozen fresh handkerchiefs, but by the end of a day's filming the corners of all of them would be chewed to shreds. He always had music played on the set and would routinely break for tea (Earl Grey) at mid-afternoon every day during filming. He discouraged chatter and disliked bad language on set; its use—especially in front of a woman—would typically result in the offender being thrown off the production. He rarely drank during the making of a film, but when a production wrapped he would often lock himself in his study, wrapped only in a sheet, and go on a solitary drinking binge for several days, followed by routine contrition and a vow never to drink again. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and was always particularly angered by any comparison between his work and that of his older brother Francis. He almost never attended premieres or award ceremonies, although his Oscars and other awards were proudly displayed on the mantle in his home.

He was famously untidy, and his study was always littered with books, papers and clothes. He bought a brand new Rolls Royce in the 1930s, but never rode in it because his wife Mary would not let him smoke in it. His own car, a battered Ford roadster, was so dilapidated and messy that he was once late for a studio meeting because the guard at the studio gate did not believe that he was John Ford the famous director, and refused to let him in. He was also notorious for his antipathy towards studio executives—on one early film for Fox he is said to have ordered a guard to keep studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck off the set, and on another occasion he brought an executive in front of the crew, stood him in profile and announced, "This is an associate producer—take a good look because you won't be seeing him on this picture again".

His pride and joy was his yacht, Araner, which he bought in 1934 and on which he lavished hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs and improvements over the years; it became his chief retreat between films and a meeting place for his circle of close friends, including John Wayne and Ward Bond.

Ford was highly intelligent, erudite, sensitive and sentimental, but to protect himself in the cutthroat atmosphere of Hollywood he cultivated the image of a "tough, two-fisted, hard-drinking Irish sonofabitch" (Harry "Dobe" Carey Jr).^[59] One famous event, witnessed by Ford's friend actor Frank Baker, strikingly illustrates the tension between the public persona and the private man. During the Depression, Ford—by then a very wealthy man—was accosted outside his office by a former Universal actor who was destitute and needed $200 for an operation for his wife. As the man related his misfortunes, Ford appeared to become enraged and then, to the horror of onlookers, he launched himself at the man, knocked him to the floor and shouted "How dare you come here like this? Who do think you are to talk to me this way?" before storming out of the room. However, as the shaken old man left the building, Frank Baker saw Ford's business manager Fred Totman meet him at the door, where he handed the man a cheque for $1,000 and instructed Ford's chauffeur to drive him home. There, an ambulance was waiting to take the man's wife to the hospital where a specialist, flown in from San Francisco at Ford's expense, performed the operation. Some time later, Ford purchased a house for the couple and pensioned them for life. When Baker related the story to Francis Ford, he declared it the key to his brother's personality:

Any moment, if that old actor had kept talking, people would have realized what a softy Jack is. He couldn't have stood through that sad story without breaking down. He's built this whole legend of toughness around himself to protect his softness.^[60]

Although Ford had many affairs with women, there were occasional rumors about his sexual preferences,^[59] and in her 2004 autobiography 'Tis Herself, Maureen O'Hara recalled seeing Ford kissing a famous male actor (whom she did not name) in his office at Columbia Studios.

General style[link]

Ford had many distinctive stylistic 'trademarks' and a suite of thematic preoccupations and visual and aural motifs recurs throughout his work as a director. Film journalist Ephraim Katz summarised some of the keynote features of Ford's work in his Collins Film Encyclopedia entry:

Of all American directors, Ford probably had the clearest personal vision and the most consistent visual style. His ideas and his characters are, like many things branded "American", deceptively simple. His heroes .... may appear simply to be loners, outsiders to established society, who generally speak through action rather than words. But their conflict with society embodies larger themes in the American experience.

Ford's films, particularly the Westerns, express a deep aesthetic sensibility for the American past and the spirit of the frontier ... his compositions have a classic strength in which masses of people and their natural surroundings are beautifully juxtaposed, often in breathtaking long shots. The movement of men and horses in his Westerns has rarely been surpassed for regal serenity and evocative power. The musical score, often variations on folk themes, plays a more important part than dialogue in many Ford films.

Ford also championed the value and force of the group, as evidenced in his many military dramas ... (he) expressed a similar sentiment for camaraderie through his repeated use of certain actors in the lead and supporting roles ... he also felt an allegiance to places ...^[61]

In contrast to his contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, Ford never used storyboards, composing his pictures entirely in his head, without any written or graphic outline of the shots he would use.^[62] Script development could be intense but, once approved, his screenplays were rarely rewritten; he was also one of the first filmmakers to encourage his writers and actors to prepare a full back story for their characters. He hated long expository scenes and was famous for tearing pages out of a script to cut dialogue. During the making of one film, when challenged by a studio executive about falling behind schedule, Ford responded by tearing an entire scene out of the script and declaring "There, now we're all caught up!", and indeed he never filmed the scene. While making Drums Along the Mohawk, Ford neatly sidestepped the challenge of shooting a large and expensive battle scene—he had Henry Fonda improvise a monologue while firing questions from behind the camera about the course of the battle (a subject on which Fonda was well-versed) and then simply editing out the questions.

He was relatively sparing in his use of camera movements and close-ups, preferring static medium or long shots, with his players framed against dramatic vistas or interiors lit in an Expressionistic style, although he often used panning shots and sometimes used a dramatic zoom-in (e.g. John Wayne's first appearance in Stagecoach). Ford is justly famous for his exciting tracking shots, such as the chase sequence in Stagecoach or the attack on the Comanche camp in The Searchers.

Recurring visual motifs include trains and wagons—many Ford films begin and end with a linking vehicle such as a train or wagon arriving and leaving—doorways, roads, flowers, rivers, gatherings (parades, dances, meetings, bar scenes, etc.); he also employed gestural motifs in many films, notably the throwing of objects and the lighting of lamps, matches or cigarettes.^[63] If a doomed character was shown playing poker (such as Liberty Valance or gunman Tom Tyler in Stagecoach), the last hand he plays is the "death hand"—two eights and two aces, one of them the ace of spades—so-called because Wild Bill Hickok is said to have held this hand when he was murdered. Many of his sound films include renditions or quotations of his favorite hymn, "Shall We Gather at the River?", such as its parodic use to underscore the opening scenes of Stagecoach, when the prostitute Dallas is being run out of town by local matrons. Character names also recur in many Ford films — the name Quincannon, for example, is used in several films including The Lost Patrol, Rio Grande, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache.

Ford was legendary for his discipline and efficiency on-set^[64] and was notorious for being extremely tough on his actors, frequently mocking, yelling and bullying them; he was also infamous for his sometimes sadistic practical jokes. Any actor foolish enough to demand star treatment would receive the full force of his relentless scorn and sarcasm. He once referred to John Wayne as a "big idiot" and even punched Henry Fonda. Henry Brandon (who played Chief Scar from The Searchers) once referred to Ford as: "The only man who could make John Wayne cry."^{[citation needed]}. He likewise belittled Victor McLaglen, on one occasion reportedly bellowing through the megaphone: "D'ya known, McLaglen, that Fox are paying you $1200 a week to do things that I could get any child off the street to do better?".^[65] Stock Company veteran Ward Bond was reportedly one of the few actors who were impervious to Ford's taunting and sarcasms.

Ford usually gave his actors little explicit direction, although on occasion he would casually walk through a scene himself, and actors were expected to note every subtle action or mannerism; if they did not, Ford would make them repeat the scene until they got it right, and he would often berate and belittle those who failed to achieve his desired performance. On The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford ran through a scene with Edmund O'Brien and ended by drooping his hand over a railing. O'Brien noticed this but deliberately ignored it, placing his hand on the railing instead; Ford would not explicitly correct him and he reportedly made O'Brien play the scene forty-two times before the actor relented and did it Ford's way.

Despite his often difficult and demanding personality, many actors who worked with Ford acknowledged that he brought out the best in them. John Wayne remarked that "Nobody could handle actors and crew like Jack."^[66] and Dobe Carey stated that "He had a quality that made everyone almost kill themselves to please him. Upon arriving on the set, you would feel right away that something special was going to happen. You would feel spiritually awakened all of a sudden."^[67] Carey credits Ford with the inspiration of Carey's final film, Comanche Stallion (2005).

Ford's favorite location for his Western films was southern Utah's Monument Valley. Although not generally appropriate geographically as a setting for his plots, the expressive visual impact of the area enabled Ford to define images of the American West with some of the most beautiful and powerful cinematography ever shot, in such films as Stagecoach, The Searchers, Fort Apache. A notable example is the famous scene in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in which the cavalry troop is photographed against an oncoming storm. The influence on the films of classic Western artists such as Frederic Remington and others has been examined.^[68] Ford's evocative use of the territory for his Westerns has defined the images of the American West so powerfully that Orson Welles once said that other film-makers refused to shoot in the region out of fears of plagiarism.^[69]

Ford typically shot only the footage he needed and often filmed in sequence, minimizing the job of his film editors.^[70] In the opinion of Joseph McBride,^[71] Ford's technique of cutting in the camera enabled him to retain creative control in a period where directors often had little say on the final editing of their films. Ford noted:

I don’t give ‘em a lot of film to play with. In fact, Eastman used to complain that I exposed so little film. I do cut in the camera. Otherwise, if you give them a lot of film ‘the committee’ takes over. They start juggling scenes around and taking out this and putting in that. They can’t do it with my pictures. I cut in the camera and that's it. There's not a lot of film left on the floor when I’m finished.^[72]

Awards and honors[link]

Ford won a total of six Academy Awards. Four of these were for Best Director for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952) - none of them Westerns (also starring in the last two was Maureen O'Hara, "his favorite actress"). He was also nominated as Best Director for Stagecoach (1939). He won two Oscars for Best Documentary for The Battle of Midway and December 7th. To this day Ford holds the record for winning the most Best Director Oscars, having won the award on four occasions. William Wyler and Frank Capra come in second having won the award three times. Ford was the first director to win consecutive Best Director awards, in 1940 and 1941. This feat was later matched by Joseph L. Mankiewicz exactly ten years later, when he won consecutive awards for Best Director in 1950 and 1951. As a producer he received nominations for Best Picture for The Quiet Man and The Long Voyage Home. In 1955 and 1957, Ford was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film. He was the first recipient of the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1973. Also in that year, Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon.

Ford directed 10 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Victor McLaglen, Thomas Mitchell, Edna May Oliver, Jane Darwell, Henry Fonda, Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly and Jack Lemmon. McLaglen, Mitchell, Darwell, Crisp and Lemmon won Oscar for one of their roles in one of Fords movies.

A television special featuring Ford, John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda was broadcast over the CBS network on December 5, 1971 called The American West of John Ford, featuring clips from Ford's career interspersed with interviews conducted by Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda, who also took turns narrating the hourlong documentary.

In 2007, Twentieth Century Fox released "Ford at Fox", a DVD boxed set of 24 of Ford's films. Time magazine's Richard Corliss named it one of the "Top 10 DVDs of 2007", ranking it at #1.^[73]

A statue of Ford in Portland, Maine depicts him sitting in a director's chair. The statue made by New York sculptor George M. Kelly and commissioned by Louisiana philanthropst Linda Noe Laine was unveiled on 12 July 1998 at Gorham's Corner in Portland, Maine, United State, as part of a celebration of Ford that was later to include renaming the auditorium of Portland High School the John Ford Auditorium.^[74]

Academy Awards[link]