Work
Ford acted in over 400 films altogether, with many of his early credits poorly documented and likely lost.
Ambitious and prolific, in Ford's early work he cast himself as George Armstrong Custer, Sherlock Holmes (with his younger brother as Dr. Watson), and Abraham Lincoln, a role which he specialized in. By 1912 Ford was directing alongside Thomas Ince. It rapidly became clear that Ince was characteristically taking credit for Ford's work, so Ford moved to Universal in early 1913. His 1913 Lucille Love, Girl of Mystery was Universal's first serial, and the first of a string of very popular serials starring Ford's collaborator and lover Grace Cunard. The 1915 serial The Broken Coin was expanded from 15 to 22 episodes by popular demand, probably the height of Ford's career.
In 1917 Ford founded a short-lived independent company, Fordart Films, which released the 1918 Berlin via America with Phil Kelly, and briefly opened his own studio at Sunset Boulevard and Gower Street. At the same time Ford mentored his younger brother, collaborating frequently as writers, directors, and actors in each other's projects. But as early as 1917, it was clear that John's star was on the rise. Frank's directorial style remained suitable for serials, but failed to evolve. Ford's final known directoral credit is for the 1928 The Call of the Heart, a 50-minute vehicle for "Dynamite the Devil Dog".
The Ford brothers were, at the best of times, critical of each other, and sometimes sharply antagonistic. Ford wrote an unpublished memoir in 1934 called "Up and Down the Ladder" which is "filled with bitter and sometimes heartrending complaints about how old-timers who had helped create the industry had been shunted aside by younger men."
From the late 1920s, and for the next two decades, Ford sustained a career as a grizzled character actor and bit player. He is often uncredited, as in his appearance in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein. Among his most memorable roles was that of the demented old man in The Ox-Bow Incident (1943).
Read more about this topic: Francis Ford (actor)
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As I went about with my father when he collected taxes, I knew that when taxes were laid some one had to work to earn the money to pay them.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“The literary critic, or the critic of any other specific form of artistic expression, may detach himself from the world for as long as the work of art he is contemplating appears to do the same.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)