Episode Details

John Ford won six Academy Awards and created the visual language of the American Western. He was also a bully who humiliated actors on set, an Irish-American who romanticized a frontier built on the displacement of Native Americans, and a man whose public persona as a rough outdoorsman concealed a deeply sentimental artist.

This episode traces Ford from his Maine childhood through his decades-long partnership with John Wayne, his World War II combat filmmaking, and the complicated legacy of films that are simultaneously great art and historical mythology.

• He won six Academy Awards, more than any other director in history
• He directed combat documentaries during World War II and was wounded at the Battle of Midway
• His partnership with John Wayne produced some of the most iconic Westerns ever filmed
• His late film The Searchers is regularly cited as one of the greatest American movies ever made