Punished Under a Foreign Code: A ‘lecture sociale’ on John Ford

Wystan Hugh Auden, in memory of Yeats, 1939:¹

The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

The words “he became his admirers” are ones that Joseph McBride borrows often — for example in his biography Searching for John Ford² — to describe Ford’s influence on the generations that followed. It is apt. Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, Satyajit Ray, Wim Wenders, Pedro Costa, Hayao Miyazaki, Hong Sang-soo, Ryusuke Hamaguchi — all have expressed their admiration publicly, and the list of New Hollywood ‘movie brats’ who claim the same debt is long enough to skip. The cultural, geographical and ideological diversity of these names says something in itself.

But there is more in this passage. It is a poem about the death of a poet — William Butler Yeats, probably the greatest figure in all of post-classical Anglophone poetry — written by another poet, also very much loved in that tradition. The pairing of two Irishmen is not accidental. Yeats, like Ford, carried his Irishness proudly in his art. Ford was born, raised and lived his entire life in America — but his films never once let you forget where they come from. He is, in this presenter’s view, the greatest poet of classical Hollywood cinema. Orson Welles put it plainly when asked about the two greatest American filmmakers: “Howard Hawks is great prose. Ford is poetry.”

What matters most, however, are these final lines: “And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. / The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.” The emphasis falls on “a foreign code of conscience.” What drove Auden — leftist, marxisant, openly homosexual — to write it was Yeats’s political turn toward the end of his life: his reactionary sympathies, his mystical nationalism. He saw in Yeats a great poet whose posterity would have to reckon with an uncomfortable inheritance. This is precisely the gesture of the present exposé with Ford. His work is often considered emblematic of classical Hollywood cinema, and any attempt to question, deconstruct or challenge it cannot avoid confronting his films. The question is how our contemporary “code of conscience” applies to them.

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Cesare Zavattini’s critique of classical cinema crystallizes in a famous contrast: Gilda on her poster, and the workers on the streets who paste it on the walls. Hollywood cinema is Gilda in her gown, Glen Ford in his tuxedo — characters who exist only inside the studio walls. With Ford — speaking here of roughly sixty of his films, barely half his filmography — this is almost never the case. Yet his characters are not les gens de la vraie vie either. They are historical figures, cowboys, soldiers, farmers, the marginalized — but always carrying a heroic dimension, a grace. Lincoln in Young Mr. Lincoln, released the same year Yeats died, is a good example.

The writer Peter Handke — one of Wim Wenders’s important collaborators, and someone particularly, almost obsessively fascinated by Ford’s cinema — notes in his Parisian journal The Weight of the World, almost certainly in reference to this film: “When I come out of the movies, the people in the street are all the wrong people.”³ And that is exactly it — these characters are not ones you will encounter on the streets.

Even notre théoricien fondateur du cinéma social, Eisenstein — writing around 1944–45, between the two parts of Ivan the Terrible and long after Potemkin and October — declared that if offered the chance to claim any American film as his own, he would name Young Mr. Lincoln.⁴ What is telling is that in this essay, his usual Marxist vocabulary is nowhere to be found — no dialectic, no class struggle. He speaks of harmony, of mystery, of Greek ideals. Bref, Eisenstein en mode fanboyisme total.

[A note before going further: the figure of John Wayne is being deliberately set aside here. Wayne is a figure Ford invented but who escaped him entirely in the American collective imagination. To focus on Wayne is to read Ford through a distorting lens, and to miss what is essential.]

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Also starring Henry Fonda is The Grapes of Wrath. Eisenstein, in the same essay, identifies this as the film social of Ford’s career — and he is right. It is the only film in his filmography that genuinely se donne comme social, or at least comes closest to doing so. It remains a Hollywood film, it does not answer every criterion the social cinema tradition demands — but it is the nearest Ford ever got.

Adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name, the film follows a family of farmers expelled from their land during the Great Depression, crossing the country toward California in a broken-down truck. Along the way they encounter hundreds of families in the same situation — dispossessed, exploited by landowners, harassed by the law. A vraie vie mutilée.⁵ The film ends with Tom Joad — having killed a guard at a clandestine strike meeting — saying goodbye to his mother in a monologue that reads almost as a workers’ manifesto, but is already mythology: “I’ll be everywhere. Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there.” Then Fonda walks away into an extreme wide shot, dissolving into the landscape at dawn — as Lincoln had walked toward the stormy horizon at the end of the previous film. The political programme becomes icon.

Two details worth noting. Ford made this film at Fox — not Warner, not a studio with any particular social sensibility. And the film’s reputation for communist sympathies was strong enough that it was briefly screened in the USSR, until censors reportedly withdrew it having noticed that even the poorest American family in the film owned a car.

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Around this time the United States entered the Second World War, and Ford enlisted in the Navy, shooting documentaries in the field — sometimes under fire. In this context he also made Sex Hygiene, a training film for soldiers on sexually transmitted diseases: a film d’hygiène sociale / Sozialhygienische Film in the tradition of Richard Oswald, even if the impulse here was institutional rather than voluntary. McBride warns that anyone who watches it today comes away with zero desire to have sexual intercourse. One imagines the effect on the soldiers.

In Ford’s postwar career, a social consciousness continues to evolve. Sergeant Rutledge is historically remarkable as the first film from a major Hollywood studio to place a Black actor in the leading role — a Black soldier accused before a white military court of a crime he did not commit. But it is also a film with its limits, those of Ford and those of its time: the racism yields less to the Black soldier’s own agency than to his mythologization, and to the goodwill of his white defenders.

The same film uses Native Americans as pure villains in service of Rutledge’s heroism — which raises the question of whether Ford, who more than anyone shaped the Western as we know it, was racist toward Native Americans. The short answer is yes, as a symptom of his era. But with nuance. His representation evolves — from fairly frontal racism in his early period to Cheyenne Autumn, his penultimate film, which represents a more complex reckoning with the crimes committed against Native Americans and which Ford’s apologists often cite as a counter-example to the charge of racism.

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7 Women (1966), Ford’s final film, places women — and only women — at the center. Set in a Christian mission in rural China in the 1930s, the mission is run entirely by women. The men who appear are either marginal or villains — there is a husband, but his role is reduced to a single biological function. A Fordian community — constituted entirely of women.

There is an anecdote of McBride’s worth quoting. In 1974, Joseph McBride moves into a building in Beverly Hills and recognizes his landlord — it is Jane Chang, who plays Miss Ling in the film. She told him she had quit acting because every director — except one — had refused to let her show her feelings, telling her that Asians don’t show feelings and she should remain blank-faced and “inscrutable.” Ford was the one exception. She said he not only treated her as a fellow human being but also gave her a big emotional scene in 7 Women, for which she was eternally grateful. She was also pleasantly astonished when Ford suddenly started ad-libbing dialogue for her in Mandarin Chinese.

It is fair to say that how Asians figured in Hollywood of that period remains an under-discussed subject. One of the first prominent voices to condemn it publicly was Marlon Brando — on The Dick Cavett Show, whose host interviewed many of the great names of cinema: Welles, Wilder, Bergman, Godard, Cassavetes, and even Kurosawa, who rarely gave interviews even in his own country. Brando spoke forcefully about the stereotyped representation of Asians, Latinos, and Native Americans in Hollywood. Though in retrospect, Brando himself exercised another rapport de domination, notably toward the actress Maria Schneider.

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How Green Was My Valley (1941) — the film at the center of this exposé — was made one year after The Grapes of Wrath, and unlike it, does not se donner comme social: it presents itself rather as a melodrama, a family saga. It was shot just before Ford left for Europe and the war, which perhaps explains its particular tone.

The film is today often remembered as the one that beat Citizen Kane at the Oscars. What is interesting is that its premiere took place the very day Welles began shooting his next film, The Magnificent Ambersons. Ford was already on the other side of the Atlantic. The two photogrammes below, placed side by side, say more than any commentary.

The film tells the story of a Welsh mining community in the age of emerging capitalism — owners bringing in workers from elsewhere willing to work for far less, local jobs destroyed, the community slowly coming apart. In theory, it is set in Wales. In practice Ford could not have cared less — everything is Irish, including certain rituals, which drove screenwriter Philip Dunne to distraction.

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The analysis turns on three sequences from the film (black and white, Academy ratio 1.37:1):

The first sequence shows the valley and its people in the memory of the narrator. What we see is what Robert Castel calls le sociétal⁶ — what existed before le social, before industrial and mercantile society. A community organized around belonging rather than contract, where work is still part of collective life rather than a constraint imposed from outside by the market. The Morgan household is at the center of it all: the father at the head, his authority unquestioned, the women assigned to le travail reproductif — the house, the bath for the men returning from the mine, the evening meal. The silent dinner scene could easily belong to the English Free Cinema — everyone eating without speaking, no dialogue. Except that Huw, the youngest son, provides a voiceover explaining that no one talks at the table because no conversation is better than good food. This narration does the ideological work in place of the image — and in an instant, we are back inside Hollywood convention.

The second sequence comes shortly after, following a few scenes that elaborate this Hegelian paradise. The shift in tone is immediate. Fissures begin to appear in the Sittlichkeit. Civil society enters the family space — a wage cut, the arrival of cheaper outside labor, a union dispute that erupts at the dinner table. The same table as before, but now the sons confront the father, firmly and respectfully. The father’s authority wavers, and with it the whole edifice. The editing is faster; the characters more isolated within the frame than in the first sequence, where they frequently formed an organic whole. The film comes very close to social cinema at this moment — and then Huw signals to his father that he is still there, and something tender absorbs the fracture. This is a pattern that runs through the entire film: each tragedy balanced by something gentle, like waves, until the final moments when nothing can hold.

The third sequence, very brief, comes at a point when the brothers have been dismissed from the mine and have scattered across the world to find work. The sister, Angharad, has been married off to the mine owner’s son. Huw traces lines on a map connecting all the places where they have gone. When our gentil professeur spoke of the Hegelian theory of society — how industrial and mercantile society frees labor from the tutelage of the state, how people are now at liberty to move wherever they choose, to work for whoever they wish — this is the image that came to mind. That freedom wears the face of dispersal. Huw tells his mother she is like a star shining across all the oceans and continents. His mother refuses the analogy. “They are in the house,” she says. The family — première forme de la Sittlichkeit, last refuge — remains the only place where a human being is entirely protected, body and soul.

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Something to note about Ford’s direction throughout these sequences, and across the film as a whole: the absence of close-ups at crucial moments. This is precisely what distinguishes the cinema of Griffith from that of Eisenstein. Griffith isolates the character through the close-up — wrenching them from their social context, internalizing the conflict. Eisenstein does the inverse, multiplying faces to give the collective a presence. Ford does neither. He keeps the community; he injects emotional notes that make the viewer nearly lose sight of the social dimension — but not entirely. His principal characters are never truly severed from their collective — physically sometimes, spiritually never.

Consider Huw — the film’s main perspective. He has no motive in the classical Hollywood sense, no objective to achieve. He loves, he observes. He is shown to be in love with his sister-in-law — a love that transcends desire or romanticism in any conventional sense, something more reverential. When his brother dies, it is Huw who comes to live with her and her child and care for them. In any other Hollywood film, this would be scandalous. In Ford’s, it passes almost unnoticed — because Huw is not there to satisfy anything. He is a witness, almost a camera, and the incarnation of the nostalgia Ford carries through all his films.

Since neither psychologisation nor socialisation quite applies to Ford — and in a spirit of play — a third term is proposed here: poéticisation. A formal operation by which social contradiction is suspended in elegy — what is lost is mourned and preserved rather than psychologized or socialized.

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This term, fanciful as it is, also says something about Ford himself: a Kantian man living in a Hegelian and post-Hegelian era. He has the sensibility to feel the weight of what is disappearing — with a precision that is itself a form of moral judgment. That is Kant. But he has no critical language for naming why it is disappearing. That is where Hegel would have taken over. La poéticisation is what fills that space.

What it produces is not political analysis. It is elegy. And what Ford preserves in that elegy is the image of what existed before — rendered with such love and precision that the destruction does not become acceptable. It becomes unforgivable.

Whether Ford’s poéticisation constitutes a legitimate form of social consciousness, or whether it is a beautiful ideological operation — one that keeps the image of a lost world so alive, so present, that it ends by soothing the wound it ought to keep open — that question remains open. And Auden, with whose poem we began, answers it in his own way:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives.⁷

St-Germain-des-Prés, 23.04.2026

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This text is derived from a script prepared in English for a talk delivered in French as part of the course Social et Cinéma (13.04.2026, 7C, HaF).

1. W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” in Another Time (Faber & Faber, 2007), p. 97. ↩︎
2. Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), p. 718. ↩︎
3. Peter Handke, The Weight of the World, trans. Ralph Manheim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), p. 210. ↩︎
4. Sergei Eisenstein, “Mr. Lincoln by Mr. Ford,” in Film Essays and a Lecture, Jay Leyda, ed., pp. 139–149 (Praeger Publishers, 1970). ↩︎
5. Vies mutilées — borrowed from the subtitle of Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia (Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, 1951) — a touchstone in this context for the social cinema tradition’s attention to damaged and diminished lives. ↩︎
6. Robert Castel, Les Métamorphoses de la question sociale (Fayard, 1995). Castel distinguishes le sociétal — the pre-industrial order of organic affiliations, guilds, and royal tutelage — from le social, which emerges with industrial and mercantile society and the free labor contract. ↩︎
7. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” p. 98. ↩︎