The Hurricane (1937)1

Chapter 4 The Hurricane (1937)1

In 1937, the filmmaker John Ford called himself “a definite socialistic democrat—always left.”2 And, indeed, between 1935 and 1941, John Ford directed a series of films that turned a critical eye toward capitalism, colonial- ism, and imperialism, sometimes with surprisingly radical results. Thus, in this chapter I will examine the collaboration between Ford and the Popular Front screenwriter Dudley Nichols on The Hurricane (1937). Drawing upon their common memory of Irish dispossession, Ford and Nichols produced one of the most startling critiques of western imperialism found in 1930s cinema.3 That critique of imperialism was based upon a paradoxically “progressive” oriental- ism that posited a wild lust for freedom among South Pacific Islanders; yet, in 1934’s Judge Priest, these same filmmakers represented African Americans as servile and dependent. This chapter argues that it was precisely the pro- jected independence of colonized peoples that allowed Ford and Nichols to normalize black oppression in the United States.

Popular Front and Labor Affiliations

Ford’s public sympathy for organized labor surfaced during the first New Deal. In 1933, when the wave of bank failures allowed Hollywood producers and executives to attempt to institute a series of wage and salary cutbacks (aimed

1 This chapter is an expanded and revised version of an article that originally appeared as “‘The Last of the World’s Afflicted Race of Humans Who Believe in Freedom’: Race, Colonial Whiteness and Imperialism in John Ford’s and Dudley Nichols’ The Hurricane (1937),” The Journal of American Studies, 44:1, 2010: 117–133. 2 It must be noted, however, that Ford expressed his “socialistic” leanings in a private letter to his nephew who was at the time fighting the Fascists in Spain (McBride 2001: 271). 3 The common arguments that Ford’s 1930s politics were somehow inauthentic because he viewed the dispossession of the Okies through the lens of the colonization of Ireland by the English, or that “his attraction to the Spanish Loyalists stemmed from his ability to generate an imaginative analogy that compared Franco’s forces to British troops in Ireland and the Spanish Loyalists to the Irish Republican Army” need to be re-contextualized (Maland 2003: 57). The fact that Ford’s identification with Irish dispossession by British imperialism allowed him to generate such imaginative analogies, thus re-casting both his own past and the political present, is precisely what needs to be emphasized (see also Eyman 1999: 186–188).

106 Chapter 4 more at lower level production staff than at directors), Ford made an impas- sioned plea for collective solidarity. Arguing to his fellow directors that “we’re not stupid enough to deny that the picture racket is controlled from Wall Street,” that the “banking industry is going on a sitdown strike” in order to push wages “back to where they were in 1910,” Ford rallied the others to “pitch in with our coworkers and try to find a way out of this mess.” “I grant you,” he said, “that the producers haven’t recognized us, but for Christ’s sake, and I say that with reverence, let’s not get into a position where the workers of the industry don’t recognize us” (quoted in McBride 2001: 193–194). At this point in his career, Ford was something more than a journeyman director; but it was not until the end of that decade that a combination of critical acclaim and popular success allowed him to accumulate significant symbolic capital and institu- tional power. The Screen Directors Guild (sdg) formed in 1936, though the impetus for the group grew out of a meeting in King Vidor’s living room in 1935 where Ford was present (Ross 1941: 208–209, McBride 2001: 191). At that time, Emanuel Eisenberg, in an article for New Theater, described Ford as one of the sdg’s “most embattled members” (Eisenberg 2001: 258). Ford told his interviewer, “Do you know anything about the way they’re trying to break directorial power now? To reduce the director to a man who just tells actors where to stand?” When Eisenberg asked if movies would now be made “like a Ford car,” the director responded, “Not if the Screen Directors Guild can help it, boy. Hang around and watch some fireworks” (Eisenberg 2001: 258). Clearly, Ford thought the Sdg and the various other Hollywood craft unions would help workers re-gain at least some control over the productive process. A decade later, Dudley Nichols expressed some of the frustration that he and Ford felt over the Taylorized methods of conventional film production:

For while it is neither a difficult nor a notable task to make a motion- picture by the customary assembly-line methods, it is another thing entirely to eschew these factory methods and attempt to make a film by individual effort…. The unthinking may believe that the assembly-line films of Hollywood…have a style, because they are so much alike in their photography and technical finish, as apart from content. Yet it is precisely because of this neat and sumptuous similarity that we can assert defi- nitely that they have no style. nichols 1947

In part, this frustration with Hollywood’s “assembly-line methods,” “controlled from Wall Street,” by absentee owners and “autocratic money interests,” drove