Bogdanovich: Directed by John Ford
Ohhh, film history and personal history for me as for many others, I am sure. Let’s get the last matter settled first: When I was studying at the Library school in Copenhagen in the beginning of the 1970’es, my teacher Werner Pedersen showed us few students specialising in film and tv, ”Directed by John Ford”, made by Bogdanovich and later on my other mentor Niels Jensen, who has written the best Danish book about film history – with John Wayne on the front page – taught me why he, a true connaisseur of the director found him to be the important American film director.
And there they were in the film that Bogdanovich had revised in 2006: James Stewart, what a storyteller, giving us anecdote after anecdote from films that he had played in. John Wayne doing the same. And Harry Carey. And formidable Henry Fonda. In the new version including Spielberg, Scorcese, Eastwood and Walter Hill, all of them analysing films and scenes from works that had influenced their filmmaking.
Bogdanovich knows how to link the interviews with clips so you want to revisit films – right away after the experience and knowledge that this well made director-film has given you. Home again dvd’s of the films will be bought and enjoyed.
John Ford is in the film, of course, sitting in a chair with the landscape we know from several westerns in the background. Answering yes and no and maybe to Bogdanovich, playing with him, but sitting there with his enormous charisma and his cigars. Great Great stuff, I said to myself sitting outside the hotel room enjoying my cigar later in the evening. Thank you American Documentary Film Festival for showing this piece of wonderful film history!
