Abstract
Anderson always wrote very personally about John Ford, and I will in turn be personal about Anderson.
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Notes
- 1.
Lindsay Anderson (1981), About John Ford (London: Plexus). The 1999 edition, from which I am working, uses a different cover image but again one taken from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
- 2.
Currency websites indicate that £1.50 translates to £31.20 in terms of 2015 values, but one would now have to pay a lot more than that for a set of Sequence: single issues can be bought online (as of June 2015) for £15 each.
- 3.
Lindsay Anderson (1971), ‘John Ford’, Cinema, vol. 6 no. 3, April. Gavin Lambert, who as editor of Sight and Sound had commissioned the aborted booklet, supplied an introduction.
- 4.
The quick rethink on She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is mentioned in Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, p. 79, footnote.
- 5.
The writers are Nunnally Johnson, Dudley Nichols, and Frank Nugent; the actors are Harry Carey jr, Donal Donnelly, Henry Fonda, and Robert Montgomery. Anderson also reprints brief passages by actors Mary Astor, Andy Devine, and John Carradine, taken from existing publications, and some material from conversations, by himself and by Kevin Brownlow, with writer/producer Willis Goldbeck.
- 6.
Sight and Sound, new series, vol. 20, no. 6, June 2010. Several critics included Hitchcock’s Films among their choices; none included About John Ford.
- 7.
Undated letter, almost certainly 1968, held in the Killanin archive at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin. The bracketed ‘sic’ is Ford’s own, understandably distancing himself from the persona of a lecturer. Killanin had worked with him on the production of The Quiet Man (1952), The Rising of the Moon (1957), and Gideon’s Day (1958, in England), and they were founding directors of Four Provinces Films, the company devoted to the development of Irish film production.
- 8.
Another account of this UEA occasion is given, along with other examples of his ‘vitriolic side’, by Erik Hedling in the Preface to his book Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker (London: Cassell, 1998). Hedling wittily refers to his own relationship with Anderson as ‘a kind of friendship’.
- 9.
Paul Ryan (ed.) (2004), Never Apologise: The Collected Writings—Lindsay Anderson (London: Plexus). Paul Sutton (ed.) (2004), Lindsay Anderson: The Diaries (London: Methuen).
- 10.
Lindsay Anderson (1952), ‘The Quiet Man’, Sequence 14 (final issue), January: reprinted in About John Ford, pp. 19–25. In the book, the 1951 shooting of The Quiet Man, and the Dublin meeting, are wrongly dated 1950 (pp. 16 and 19).
- 11.
Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, p. 17.
- 12.
Richard Roud (ed.) (1980), Cinema: a Critical Dictionary (two volumes: London, Secker and Warburg). Review by Anderson, The Guardian, 2 March 1981, reprinted in Paul Ryan (ed.), Never Apologise, pp. 271–276.
- 13.
The Dictionary contains several other essays by Wood, all of them displaying the same lucid scholarly virtues, none of them mentioned in Anderson’s review.
- 14.
Gavin Millar (1963), ‘This Sporting Life’, Movie 7, February/March. Ian Cameron (1963), ‘Against This Sporting Life’, Movie 10, June.
- 15.
Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, p. 160.
- 16.
Eisenstein’s essay is part of the booklet accompanying Criterion’s two-disc DVD edition of Young Mr. Lincoln.
- 17.
Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, p. 98.
- 18.
For Anderson, the only books on Ford worth reading are biography, not criticism: by his grandson Dan, and by his one-time collaborator, later director, Robert Parrish. They have no pretensions; they don’t offer competition or challenge by trespassing on his own critical territory. Dan Ford (1979), Pappy: The Life of John Ford (New Jersey: Prentice Hall) and Robert Parrish (1976), Growing up in Hollywood (London: Bodley Head). Anderson also acknowledges the ‘very useful’ shorter interview book, John Ford, by Peter Bogdanovich (1967) (London: Studio Vista), though he refrains, for understandable reasons, from supplying its full credit as a ‘Movie Paperback’ edited by Ian Cameron: see note 14 above. From the Acknowledgments section at the start of Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, p. 6.
- 19.
In an earlier article Wood discussed Wollen at greater length and more critically. Robin Wood (1971), ‘Shall We Gather at the River? The Late Films of John Ford’, in Film Comment vol. 7, no. 3, October.
- 20.
Lindsay Anderson, About John Ford, p. 208. The lines, identified neither in the text nor in a note, are taken from Arnold’s ‘Memorial Verses April 1850’.
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Barr, C. (2016). A Kind of Friendship: Lindsay Anderson and John Ford. In: Hedling, E., Dupin, C. (eds) Lindsay Anderson Revisited. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53943-4_4
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