The Plot Thickens is to me the best podcast ever! Period. I'm french and lucky to understand english. I wish I could share this with french speaking people.
Oodles of thanks to all the good folk at TCM for what looks like is gonna be another wonderfully informative & entertaining season of "The Plot Thickens". I'm already learning stuff about John Ford that I never knew!
@ustuppy Thank you for your comment🙇🏻♀ I finally saw that evocative film recently. Upon reading your reaction, it certainly will be more than worthwhile to see it again. Best wishes, Andrea S.
The story telling and sound effects are great for a podcast but its hard to imagine a docuseries about film without a visual component. TCM has such excellent video editing staff and I'm surprised they haven't put any of that to use here.
I love the focus on John Ford's Irish heritage and immigrant mentality(even though he was American). It clearly influenced his work. Very interesting stories of his silent film era as well. Hope to hear more of that conversation with him and Katharine Hepburn. Great first episode, TCM! By the way, Straight Shooting (1917), The Iron Horse (1924), and 3 Bad Men (1926) are all master works of silent cinema that I highly recommend to those that haven't seen them. Hearing how these films were made behind-the-scenes makes them all the more fascinating. One could easily tell that even before sound films were a thing, Ford had a natural gift for making Westerns. Glad his first director-actor partnership with Harry Carey Sr. was mentioned. Carey Sr. would also become John Wayne's mentor as well, and Wayne would pay homage to him in the iconic ending of The Searchers. John Ford was a genius and a puzzle, this will be an intriguing Plot Thickens season.
No kidding-! Someone was asleep at the switch. (Or perhaps some 'dumb' AI was automatically replacing 'Fox' with '2oth Century-Fox' and it got past everyone - who should've known better...)
..Still trying to figure out if Jack Feeney a.k.a. John Ford and I could be related through a times passed but immediate family stand point, I'm about 99% sure.. Don't know much about my father's side but from what I do know, it's likely.
You guys have been putting these podcast episodes on youtube for years now and still haven't figured out how to have the episodes run in order in a playlist. It's really not that hard. Have an intern spend 10 minutes on it, please.
Very well made, even though they didn't get the part of how Marion Morrison aka John Wayne entered the epic John Ford story quite right - that didn't happen on the Annapolis thing. Wayne was working for Ford before that.
💔💋God, I miss you, Ben, and everyone at TCM! My fave TV channel 🤩😍I won't pay Hulu's ransom anymore. As much as I love you, Hulu stinks. I hope you make TCM more accessible to us people who refuse to be held hostage. I'm mad as hell... etc. 💪👊✊💘
John Ford's constant & often outrageous lies were a significant aspect of his humor. During one interview he did from bed with French journalists in the late 1960s, Ford's wife Mary shouted the correct answers from an adjacent room when Ford lied about his age and other subjects--she & Ford were like a double act. Ford's perversity was a rather terrible mix of deadpan humor, contrariness and opposition, subterfuge, an elaborate defense mechanism shielding his vulnerability and sensitivity, cruelty, sadism, and a pathological mean-spiritedness conflated with catastrophic alcoholic binge drinking (Ford often ended up blackout-drunk, naked and drooling in a sleeping bag, where he had defecated and urinated, & would then be hospitalized for weeks for alcohol poisoning and dehydration. His brothers Frank & Eddie were also catastrophic alcoholic drinkers. One Ford associate said of Eddie that the only way you could deal with him when he was drunk was to hit him over the head with a two-by-four!). Ford reveres the family in his films, but in reality his own family was quite troubled. His daughter Barbara was a catastrophic alcoholic, and at the end of his life Ford wrote his son Patrick out of his will. Ford's Hollywood career is fascinating. His early Harry Carey films are superb, followed by a lot of trial and error, hits and misses, thru the 1920s and '30s. The Ford we think of as the Classic Ford produced an almost back-to-back sequence of masterpieces from 1935 to 1956. His failed films are painful to sit thru (The Black Watch, Up The River, The Plow & The Stars, Men Without Women, Flesh, Mary Queen of Scotland, The Fugitive, What Price Glory, Two Rode Together, Cheyanne Autumn, Seven Women) but are well worth studying, because as much can be learned about Ford from his failures as from his masterpieces. Ford's biggest box office picture, Mogambo, starring Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, is unrecognizable as a Ford film, an odd example of The Ford "touch" not leaving any fingerprints. Ford was a great artist, and like many great artists he was inscrutable by nature--as Sigmund Freud said, the Irish are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis. Thank you Ben Mankiewizc for your superb work on John Ford, Peter Bogdanovitch, et al. CHEERS
Wonderful stuff and a great subject. Thank You. For future reference: Galway is pronounced like gaulway and poitin is pronounced like paw-cheen or po-cheen accent on first syllable. My mother was a native Irish speaker from Spiddal. Cheers!
I love cinema, I’ve studied cinema. But Ford is an oddity for me, one of the most famous, influential filmakers - but aside from Liberty Valance, never made anything beyond mediocre. It saddens me me hear how disinterested he seemed in this trade, yet he influenced so many truly passionate filmmakers
One of John's masterpieces and one of my favorite pictures is THE QUIET MAN
Yes great film
The Plot Thickens is to me the best podcast ever! Period. I'm french and lucky to understand english. I wish I could share this with french speaking people.
Oodles of thanks to all the good folk at TCM for what looks like is gonna be another wonderfully informative & entertaining season of "The Plot Thickens". I'm already learning stuff about John Ford that I never knew!
Great job, Ben. Love John Ford movies and spellbound by the detail in this podcast.
The Grapes of Wrath is always fresh every time I see it.
@ustuppy Thank you for your comment🙇🏻♀ I finally saw that evocative film recently. Upon reading your reaction, it certainly will be more than worthwhile to see it again. Best wishes, Andrea S.
Great episode. Excellent production. Thanks, Ben & TCM!
My sentiments exactly !
Ditto! 😍
TCM is the greatest
I certainly have a notion to second THAT emotion!
Moi aussi! 💘
Ooooooohhhhhh yeah. Pappy, the Old Man. John Ford. One of the greats of the history of Cinema.
James Stewart called Ford "Boss"
The story telling and sound effects are great for a podcast but its hard to imagine a docuseries about film without a visual component. TCM has such excellent video editing staff and I'm surprised they haven't put any of that to use here.
I love the focus on John Ford's Irish heritage and immigrant mentality(even though he was American). It clearly influenced his work. Very interesting stories of his silent film era as well. Hope to hear more of that conversation with him and Katharine Hepburn.
Great first episode, TCM!
By the way, Straight Shooting (1917), The Iron Horse (1924), and 3 Bad Men (1926) are all master works of silent cinema that I highly recommend to those that haven't seen them. Hearing how these films were made behind-the-scenes makes them all the more fascinating. One could easily tell that even before sound films were a thing, Ford had a natural gift for making Westerns. Glad his first director-actor partnership with Harry Carey Sr. was mentioned. Carey Sr. would also become John Wayne's mentor as well, and Wayne would pay homage to him in the iconic ending of The Searchers.
John Ford was a genius and a puzzle, this will be an intriguing Plot Thickens season.
Well said and well put. Thanks for sharing!
Katharine Hepburn: "You're very odd."
John Ford: "Very odd?"
Hepburn: "You're odd."
Ford: "O double D?
Hepburn: "O double D, odd."
Sergeant Rutledge. When you know, you know!❤
It would be wonderful if the PBS series "The American Experience" did a documentary on Ford!
For further reading I recommend Searching for John Ford by Joseph McBride.
Shocked when Ben said "twentieth century fox " in reference to " The Iron Horse " , there was no such animal , it was just FOX , William Fox .
No kidding-! Someone was asleep at the switch. (Or perhaps some 'dumb' AI was automatically replacing 'Fox' with '2oth Century-Fox' and it got past everyone - who should've known better...)
Why is there no video? This is a TCM doc after all....
It's a podcast, dummy. 😂
Um…because it’s a podcast, not a TV show. 🙄
Great end credits. Fantastic! Period.
Josh -this is wonderful- thanks!
This guy is nuts
..Still trying to figure out if Jack Feeney a.k.a. John Ford and I could be related through a times passed but immediate family stand point, I'm about 99% sure..
Don't know much about my father's side but from what I do know, it's likely.
Pappy, a bio by Ford's grandson is excellent
And The Duke, John Wayne was a great Actor. One of the best in the business. They were like father and son both Johns.
You guys have been putting these podcast episodes on youtube for years now and still haven't figured out how to have the episodes run in order in a playlist. It's really not that hard. Have an intern spend 10 minutes on it, please.
Very well made, even though they didn't get the part of how Marion Morrison aka John Wayne entered the epic John Ford story quite right - that didn't happen on the Annapolis thing. Wayne was working for Ford before that.
💔💋God, I miss you, Ben, and everyone at TCM! My fave TV channel 🤩😍I won't pay Hulu's ransom anymore. As much as I love you, Hulu stinks.
I hope you make TCM more accessible to us people who refuse to be held hostage.
I'm mad as hell... etc. 💪👊✊💘
Drop Hulu and get either UA-cam TV or DiirectTV Streaming. Both have TCM.
John Ford was a scary ass dude.
John Ford's constant & often outrageous lies were a significant aspect of his humor. During one interview he did from bed with French journalists in the late 1960s, Ford's wife Mary shouted the correct answers from an adjacent room when Ford lied about his age and other subjects--she & Ford were like a double act. Ford's perversity was a rather terrible mix of deadpan humor, contrariness and opposition, subterfuge, an elaborate defense mechanism shielding his vulnerability and sensitivity, cruelty, sadism, and a pathological mean-spiritedness conflated with catastrophic alcoholic binge drinking (Ford often ended up blackout-drunk, naked and drooling in a sleeping bag, where he had defecated and urinated, & would then be hospitalized for weeks for alcohol poisoning and dehydration. His brothers Frank & Eddie were also catastrophic alcoholic drinkers. One Ford associate said of Eddie that the only way you could deal with him when he was drunk was to hit him over the head with a two-by-four!). Ford reveres the family in his films, but in reality his own family was quite troubled. His daughter Barbara was a catastrophic alcoholic, and at the end of his life Ford wrote his son Patrick out of his will. Ford's Hollywood career is fascinating. His early Harry Carey films are superb, followed by a lot of trial and error, hits and misses, thru the 1920s and '30s. The Ford we think of as the Classic Ford produced an almost back-to-back sequence of masterpieces from 1935 to 1956. His failed films are painful to sit thru (The Black Watch, Up The River, The Plow & The Stars, Men Without Women, Flesh, Mary Queen of Scotland, The Fugitive, What Price Glory, Two Rode Together, Cheyanne Autumn, Seven Women) but are well worth studying, because as much can be learned about Ford from his failures as from his masterpieces. Ford's biggest box office picture, Mogambo, starring Clark Gable and Ava Gardner, is unrecognizable as a Ford film, an odd example of The Ford "touch" not leaving any fingerprints. Ford was a great artist, and like many great artists he was inscrutable by nature--as Sigmund Freud said, the Irish are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis. Thank you Ben Mankiewizc for your superb work on John Ford, Peter Bogdanovitch, et al. CHEERS
Wonderful stuff and a great subject. Thank You. For future reference: Galway is pronounced like gaulway and poitin is pronounced like paw-cheen or po-cheen accent on first syllable. My mother was a native Irish speaker from Spiddal. Cheers!
Is there somewhere to see the clip with the baby?
I believe it's in Peter Bogdanovich's documentary about John Ford called "Directed by John Ford"
Good
❤😊
And the Oscars went bad in 1974
I love cinema, I’ve studied cinema. But Ford is an oddity for me, one of the most famous, influential filmakers - but aside from Liberty Valance, never made anything beyond mediocre. It saddens me me hear how disinterested he seemed in this trade, yet he influenced so many truly passionate filmmakers
Huh?
You claim to love and study cinema and yet you fail to see the brilliance of 'The Searchers' and 'The Quiet Man'?
#MasterofCinema
Brilliant filmmaker or not, for me one episode was more than enough of this deeply unpleasant-sounding compulsive liar.
Yep.
John Wayne =🥱. Nathan Lane had his number. 😁
Cowboy movies in general,
= 🥱