A destitute actor begs for $200 for his wife’s surgery; the director screams, knocks him down and throws him out, then secretly sends a $1,000 check, a chauffeur, a flown-in surgeon, a house and a lifetime pension. That contradiction defines John Ford. This episode traces John Martin Feeney from an Irish immigrant family in Maine, the Bull Feeney football nickname, following his brother Francis Ford to California in 1914, and yelling his way into a director’s chair at Universal in 1917.

We cover the 60-plus silent films he directed by 1928, shooting holes in William Fox’s telegrams on The Iron Horse, fighting for a year to make Stagecoach with John Wayne and Monument Valley in 1939, the run of Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, filming Midway and Omaha Beach for the OSS, the darker post-war westerns like The Searchers, and the on-set tyranny, the punch that hit Henry Fonda, the chewed handkerchiefs, and the editing-in-camera technique that kept studios from recutting his films.

• Why studios in the 1930s dismissed westerns as poverty row pulp
• How Ford taught the camera to look at John Wayne rather than teaching Wayne to act
• The record four Best Director Oscars, none of them for a western
• Praise from Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman and Orson Welles
• Whether Ford’s tyranny was a calculated tactic or a defense for an overly sensitive artist