Noshing With Joseph McBride – December 21, 2023

Ira's Everything Bagel

Author (along with Michael Wilmington), John Ford

This week, Ira spoke with Joseph McBride, author (along with Michael Wilmington) of John Ford, the revised and expanded edition, published by University Press of Kentucky. In this cinematic episode of “Ira’s Everything Bagel,” Joseph talks about why he thinks John Ford is the closest thing we have to a national poet; how Ford developed his craft beginning with theater as a kid and then directing silent films; why Ford knew “what the earth is made of”; his talent for framing; why he rarely moved the camera, but had the action take place within the “proscenium arch”; the one-hour meeting that he (Joseph) had with Ford that was on the same day the director announced his retirement; and why his films matter, both in subject matter and in visual importance.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and a professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He has published twenty-four books, most recently a revised and expanded edition of the critical study John Ford (with the late Michael Wilmington, University Press of Kentucky, 2023); The Whole Durn Human Comedy: Life According to the Coen Brothers (Anthem Press, 2022); an updated edition of What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career (University Press of Kentucky, 2022); Political Truth: The Media and the Assassination of President Kennedy (Hightower Press, 2021); and Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge (Columbia University Press, 2021).

Joseph’s other books include acclaimed biographies of Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, and John Ford and the critical study How Did Lubitsch Do It?. McBride plays a film critic and historian in Welles’s film The Other Side of the Wind (2018), and he co-wrote the cult classic movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School (1979). He received Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards nominations for co-writing the AFI’s Life Achievement Award tributes to Fred Astaire and Lillian Gish and won the WGA award for co-writing the AFI’s Life Achievement Award tribute to John Huston.

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