Episode 3 – The Commander
Ford is finally in the military and his first assignment is… to make a sex ed film for soldiers! Soon he sees real combat and is injured while filming The Battle of Midway. He’s nursed back to health with the help of John Wayne, while his Midway movie wins an Oscar and becomes a favorite of President Roosevelt. Ford then recuts December 7th, a movie directed by his friend and colleague Gregg Toland, to make it less racist. It wins him yet another Oscar. The brass recruit Ford for the assignment of his career: to cover the largest invasion in history. Ford goes to Normandy Beach to film D-Day, but his film detailing the invasion goes missing.
00:00 – Military Aspirations
05:39 – Sex Hygiene
08:10 – Field Photo
16:33 – Pearl Harbor
20:57 – The Battle of Midway
26:42 – Recovering with John Wayne
29:38 – Editing in Secret
37:00 – Assignment: D-Day
He made John Wayne cry.
He placed a real baby in front of galloping horses.
He was a commander at D-Day, a union leader, and a tyrant.
Meet John Ford, the curmudgeon with an eye patch who just happened to be the greatest filmmaker of the 20th century. Ford was a bully and a drunk who ruled Hollywood for five decades, making dozens of seminal movies – though he was incredibly hard to pin down. His behavior swung wildly from loyalty to cruelty, without notice. He won more Oscars than any director in history, but never showed up to accept an award. And he rewrote American history, painting the country with images so beautiful that people wished they were real. John Ford defined the attitudes of his time, ideas about masculinity and heroism that we’re still grappling with today. This season on The Plot Thickens, TCM brings you Decoding John Ford, a seven-part podcast about cinema’s most mysterious auteur.
Part of that mystery is his classified – and missing – WWII film. In 1944, the U.S. military recruited Ford for the assignment of his career: to cover the largest invasion in history. He went to Normandy Beach to film D-Day and created an on-the-ground film detailing the invasion, but the film goes missing. Host Ben Mankiewicz travels to Europe to trace the mystery of whether the D-Day movie exists.
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