From The Current Winter 2012 Issue

FORD. TOUGH.

From Gilda to Superman: The modest demeanor and big heat of actor GLENN FORD

By Wayne Klatt

Time Magazine once wrote that Glenn Ford always looked like a studio accountant who had blundered onto the movie set.

Cruel? Sure, although there were probably films in his career where the criticism was justified. However, when it comes to his three specialties — Westerns, crime dramas, and light comedy — it’s entirely possible that Glenn Ford is one of our most underrated film stars.

Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born on May 1, 1916, in Quebec Province. (He took his stage name from his father’s birthplace, Glenford, Canada.) His Welsh family owned a mill, his father was a Canadian railroad executive and the nephew of John MacDonald, the country’s first prime minister. When the boy was eight, the Ford family moved to Santa Monica, California.

Gwyllyn’s stern father insisted that he do manual labor as a character-builder. Even when the young man announced his desire to be an actor, his father suggested he “learn something else first...that way, you’ll always have something.”

The good-looking, introverted teenager enjoyed taking part in plays at Santa Monica High School. When he acted, his thin lips were always pressed together in the same way. When the ends lifted up, he was engaging. When they turned downward — watch out!

After graduation, Ford went from juvenile parts to playing leads for several theater companies on the West Coast. A 20th Century Fox talent scout arranged for a screen test in 1939, and he appeared opposite Jean Rogers (better known for playing Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon serials) in the pleasant romance Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence.

Luckily, Columbia Pictures saw something Fox had overlooked: Here was a man’s man, but one with a shy side that might appeal to women. Even so, Ford knew his limitations. “Acting is just being truthful,” he would say. “I have to play myself. I’m not an actor who can take on another character, like Laurence Olivier. The worst thing I could do would be to play Shakespeare.”

Ford signed a contract with Columbia, which turned out to be equal parts blessing and curse. At Columbia, the possibility of stardom beckoned, but it didn’t disguise the fact that the studio was still considered part of Hollywood’s Poverty Row, a minor league franchise compared to the major league studios like M-G-M. That sense of second-class citizenship affected both Ford’s life and his career.

One thing Columbia did fairly well was to turn out routine but believable Westerns. Ford’s screen personality began to emerge in 1941’s Texas, when he and William Holden played former friends on opposite sides of the law. In 1943’s The Desperadoes, Ford started a horse stampede to free Randolph Scott from jail.

A country boy at heart, Ford amused himself between takes by seeing how fast he could draw a gun. According to studio publicity, Ford eventually could draw in 0.04 seconds. In other words, had Ford engaged in an actual shootout with John Wayne, the odds are that the Duke would’ve bitten the dust.

By December of 1942, Ford had enlisted in the Marine reserves. In 1943, he married pretty tap dancer Eleanor Powell, a showstopper who had danced on screen with Fred Astaire and Buddy Ebsen. But the “inferiority complex” that Eleanor saw in Glenn troubled their marriage from the start. Ford was a screen nobody while she had recently made $125,000 per picture at M-G-M. Like Norman Maine in A Star Is Born, the acclaim she received in public made him feel a little like “Mr. Powell.” He enjoyed himself a little more as a Marine sergeant in the Navy’s Public Relations Office. (There were reports that Ford assisted in building “safe houses” in France, but subsequent reports have suggested that his wartime activity was limited to working in the U.S.)

When the war ended, Ford decided he didn’t want to be tied down to B-pictures. With his new contract, he agreed to do one movie a year for Columbia and be a free agent the rest of the time. Ford’s decision came as a number of stars were setting up their own corporations to avoid skyrocketing post-war taxes. One such star was Bette Davis, who needed a love interest for A Stolen Life, her company’s first film for Warner Bros. Davis recommended Ford (believing that he wouldn’t overwhelm her on the screen), but Warner Bros. didn’t want her to team up with a cowboy from Quebec.

According to scriptwriter Catherine Turney, a publicist “literally smuggled Glenn onto the Warners lot”; when studio boss Jack Warner found out, “all hell broke loose.” Ford appeared lost in the film, and he might have felt as though he were destined to appear in nothing but oaters.

Then, fate — in the form of Humphrey Bogart — intervened. The story goes that Columbia had sent Bogart the script for a romance-crime drama, Gilda. The male lead, Johnny Ferrill, is a petty gambler who quickly becomes the right-hand-man to the corrupt manager of a Argentine casino owned by ambitious post-war Nazis — a perfect role for the man who had owned Rick’s Cafe American in Casablanca.

Then Bogart learned that Rita Hayworth was going to play the title role, the villain’s “show wife” who torments the lead character until he begins to torment her. Bogart reportedly complained that with Hayworth on the screen, nobody would be looking at him. So Bogie gave up what became possibly Glenn Ford’s best movie ever.

Gilda gets its power from what is not shown. There are no Casablanca-like flashbacks to clarify the former relationship between Gilda and Johnny; the backstory is carried in Ford’s clipped delivery and Hayworth’s sassiness. Even the nature of the triangle isn’t made clear; some shots in Charles Vidor’s direction suggest that Gilda’s evil husband (played by George Macready), seems more interested in Johnny than in his own wife.

That wasn’t the case for filmgoers, who flocked to Gilda and made a hit out of “Put the Blame on Mame,” the song Hayworth lip-synched in the film. The movie turned her into an international star and showed that Glenn Ford could play more than a nice guy or a hero. In his second pairing with William Holden, 1948’s Man From Colorado, Ford plays a judge overwhelmed by his own sadistic instincts. No one seemed to notice that he made a disturbing villain.

In Ford’s best films, he usually played an intelligent man of peace who gets pushed too far and strives — almost obsessively — to turn the tables. Like a character in an Elmore Leonard novel, there is a moment in almost every good Glenn Ford movie where his character reaches the breaking point. Sometimes the snap gets a close-up — for instance, when he nearly strangles the amoral gypsy girl (Hayworth again) in 1948’s The Loves of Carmen. Other times, you cannot see the exact moment, but you know it’s there. It’s as though a switch is thrown and his character turns cold as if dead inside. It’s evident in the steely way he guns down Brian Keith in 1955’s The Violent Men.

“Sometimes he could be a monotonous presence on screen,” said Hollywood biographer Patrick McGilligan, “but he also was capable of performing with surprising subtlety and distinction.” The challenge was matching him with the right story.

Ford hit a low period in 1949 and his insecurities were starting to show. During this fallow time, he played the title character in NBC radio’s Adventures of Christopher London in 1950, but don’t feel bad if you missed it. Most people did.

Ford’s fortunes changed in 1953 when he starred in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat. Ford was perfect as Det. Sgt. Dave Bannion, whose pursuit of a crime syndicate leads to the murder of his wife and sends him on a twisted path of retribution. The famed German director didn’t expect much from his B-movie star but found that Ford was fiercely independent and resented being told how to act. With Lang balancing the personalities of Ford, Gloria Grahame (as a sympathetic moll), and newcomer Lee Marvin, the picture had scenes that crackled with intensity. Even today, some of the off-screen violence is harrowing.

With The Big Heat, Ford finally made the jump to A-films. In the 1955 hit Blackboard Jungle, he is a teacher who must consider how best to communicate with unruly and violent students, played by the likes of Sidney Poitier, Vic Morrow, and Jamie Farr. (The film got an extra boost by including Bill Haley and the Comets’ then-new record, “Rock Around The Clock.”) In Trial, Ford is a law professor who must defend a Puerto Rican teenager accused of murder, while dealing with both the Ku Klux Klan and the cruelty of strictly applied law. In 1956’s Ransom (later remade by Mel Gibson), he’s a businessman who proposes using ransom money as a bounty to hunt down the kidnappers of his young son.

For all of Ford’s skill at portraying troubled souls, no one had yet realized his talent for humor until 1956’s Teahouse of the August Moon. This gentle comedy set in post-war Okinawa needed a tightly moral central character, and Ford fit the bill. In one particularly memorable scene, Ford is speaking on the phone to his commanding officer, as a lovely geisha he has mistaken for a prostitute is trying to remove his pants. Audiences howled at his embarrassed confusion.

M-G-M was smart enough to realize that no one was better than Ford at comic uptightness, as evidenced by his performance as a television writer turned hapless killer in The Gazebo. In 1958, he was the Number One box office star, appearing in three comedies (Don’t Go Near the Water, Sheepman, and Imitation General) in addition to Torpedo Run and the excellent Cowboy.

He was now at the height of his career, yet something compelled him to join the naval reserves as a lieutenant commander and public affairs officer. (Possibly he was trying to postpone the demise of his marriage to Eleanor Powell; after several unhappy years together, the couple finally divorced in 1959.)

Still, he wasn’t ready to leave Hollywood entirely, and if Frank Capra’s 1961 comedy Pocketful of Miracles comes off flat, blame it partly on behind-the-scenes hostility between Ford, star Bette Davis, and ambitious co-star Hope Lange. After that, Ford let his softer side show in the romance Dear Heart and the mild comedy Courtship of Eddie’s Father. Sometimes he was all right in his later films, and he merely walked through others. He appeared to be tired of acting and more interested in returning to the military.

Ford made annual tours of duty, promoting the Navy in documentary films and on radio and television broadcasts. By the time he left the Navy in the 1970s, he had risen to the rank of captain and considered himself more of a naval officer than an actor. Some critics did, too.

He served two tours of duty during the Vietnam war, and was awarded the Navy Commendation Medal (by the U.S.) and the Republic of Vietnam Legion of Merit, First Class (courtesy of the South Vietnamese). By then his dark hair had started graying at the temple and he had nearly a dozen medals on his chest.

Still, if old soldiers never die, they sometimes move to television. Ford tried his hand as a modern sheriff in Cade’s County, and later as a Depression-era Southern minister in Family Holvak.

One of Ford’s later screen appearances was in 1978’s Superman. As Pa Kent, Ford played the quintessential decent man facing unforeseen challenges — in this case, raising and instilling his own values into his adopted alien son Clark, the sole survivor of the planet Krypton.

Ford had retired for the most part by the 1980s, partly because of poor health and partly because audiences wanted rebels and oversized characters. No more Mr. Nice Guys. That gave him time for his hobbies of hunting, horseback riding, and engaging in organic gardening at his Beverly Hills home.

In all, he made 106 films and documentaries. But it isn’t fair to judge Glenn Ford by his later work. He never did well in Technicolor dramas, especially on a wide screen, where that sense of a man tightly coiled and suddenly letting go became lost. In those cases, he really did seem like an accountant who had blundered upon a movie set.

Ford suffered a series of strokes in the 1990s and had to send a videotaped message to a Hollywood tribute on his 90th birthday in 2006, three months before his death. On the tape he told the audience, “I have so much to be thankful for.” It fell to actress Shirley Jones (who co-starred with Ford in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father) to explain Ford’s six-decade career. “He had those magical qualities that are intangible but are quite impactful on the screen.

“He was a movie star.”

Tune in to Those Were the Days on January 21 and to Radio's Golden Age on February 19 to hear Glenn Ford on radio.

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