On all levels of Ford's work, Catholic dogma, philosophy and imagery play an important role. At the most basic, religious morality affects his choice of plots; speaking of sexual subjects, he remarked "they would be against my nature, my religion and my natural inclinations." A powerful religious conscience is apparent in his selection of the moral lessons for which his films are always vehicles. All of these reflect Catholic thinking. He supports the concept of a "just war" in favour of the American liberal view best synopsised as "War is hell, but …," assigns to large social groups a collective piety, implies in all deaths the existence of an afterlife, accentuated by his habit of bringing back the dead, either in concluding flashbacks, or by implication in the form of portraits, themselves imitative of religious images; the quasi-devotional offering of flowers before portraits of women is common in his films, yet another aspect of his veneration of the Virgin Mary. (pp. 32-3)

As echoes of the Holy Family, the Trinity and the eternal Church enrich many of Ford's most moving films, so subsidiary Catholic themes like the parable of the Prodigal Son distinguish his more personal works, those films that, over the years, he has chosen as his favourites. Many share the theme of a man who breaks away from his community and beliefs, experiences a crisis of faith, returns to the fold and is welcomed back. That the community and beliefs are often spiritual, and the welcome death is immaterial, since it is made clear throughout Ford's films that a death for one's principles guarantees immortality…. This key theme, and the larger issue of martyrdom for a cause, is examined most ambitiously in two of Ford's least seen and discussed films, Mary of Scotland … and The Fugitive…. (p. 59)

Nevertheless, Ford's vision unites them, making each film a work of arresting if occasionally obscure quality, deserving closer attention. Only Ford, who likes both, seems to have any genuine appreciation of their merit. (p. 60)

[Both] films end with the same symbol of resurrection; as Mary mounts the scaffold, the camera tilts off her exalted face to the stormy sky and the thunder of her lover's pipers while, as the priest dies in front of a firing squad, his wooden cross in his hand as Mary's gold one gleams on her breast, the fact of his assumption into heaven is conveyed by the same shots of the sky and the action of his killer crossing himself in an image of absolution. Between these two moments, both have fought a losing battle with their destinies, resisting the pain and death they know has been prepared for them, but succumbing finally to the moral necessity of fate. In fighting to stay alive, they sacrifice their integrity…. (p. 60)

Deaths in both films are given a powerfully heightened significance. (p. 65)

Mary of Scotland, though superbly engineered by Ford and his collaborators, is essentially a studio production in which Ford's usual imagery has insufficient room to expand, but The Fugitive, by contrast, is one of his most personal and deeply significant works, its examination of religious conscience making it fit to be compared with the greatest European films on this theme. Far from being the "dishonest" work of Sequence's estimation, The Fugitive if often painfully frank and open in its dealing with a subject obviously close to Ford's emotions; its faults, and one does not deny their existence, stem from the director's characteristic inability to function as a detached stylist when his feelings are engaged. The use of Ford's language of religious symbolism is, one admits, often too obvious for true stylistic balance; contrasts between characters are drawn on many occasions with a lack of subtlety that reduces some scenes to a grotesque level of melodrama, and Fonda lacks the detail in his character that might have made him less a symbol and more a man. But if one balances against these the richness of the conception, the depth of feeling in almost every gesture and scene, the insight Ford so clearly conveys into the nature of belief and the higher motivations of spirituality, they seem minor, ruffles on the surface of an otherwise smooth and confident work. (p. 67)

Among his films on the destruction of communities, The Last Hurrah … represents Ford's furthest excursion into the modern world, whose homogenous and unstructured society he plainly despises. [It] is ostensibly the story of one man's fight to keep alive some of the civic virtues of an earlier age, a fight he is doomed to lose…. [It is long, episodic and like They Were Expendable,] more fabric than story…. The useful device of Skeffington calling in his newsman nephew Adam Caulfield … to observe the campaign, which he fears will be the last of its kind, allows Ford to interpolate long passages in which the mayor reexamines his background, the community that has sustained him through a long political career and the social values he now sees about to be crushed by the soulless automation of Twentieth century life. (pp. 154-55)

Ford shows the mayor drawn to a dead and forgotten past, and his contemplation of the dark and silent alleys of the tenement suggests a world from which its inhabitants have retreated, leaving only Skeffington as a last lonely watchman. (p. 158)

In Skeffington, Ford sees the essential emptiness of a life devoted to tradition, in which mere age is an assurance of value. The inflexibility of the Plymouth Club begins to find its reflection in the mayor's actions as the film progresses, implying that he is destroyed not, as in Edwin O'Conner's novel, by the combined power of technology and new techniques of persuasion, but by his own irrelevance to the society he leads. His lack of understanding, his manipulation of the community for what he conceives to be its own good is suggested in an early shot where the mayor, respecting a tradition he has established, receives suppliant voters in the luxurious foyer of the mayoral mansion, sun flooding in through the open door as he greets with heavy political hospitality his first client. The contrast between his poor background and this piece of stage management interrupts our admiration of Skeffington, Man of the People, and hints at a later rightful collapse.

Skeffington is not, like Lincoln or MacArthur, a charismatic figure embodying the virtues of his society, nor a hero who inspires the community in time of danger and goes to his death peaceful in the knowledge that it has been saved, but rather a last dinosaur left behind by history, a casualty of the dead areas between great movements in which Ford often chooses to place his stories of communities in decline. (pp. 160-61)

Donovan's Reef, Ford's last important film, eclipses the later Seven Women which, although both assured and provocative in its analysis of contrasts between professed religious and social feeling and the more real convictions sometimes held by apparent outsiders, relates essentially in theme to Ford's late Thirties and Forties period of soul-searching and realignment of religious convictions. So central are the issues of Donovan's Reef to Ford's dilemma as an artist that it is difficult not to see it as his final testament, and its analysis of morality as the most profound summation of a preoccupation that has dominated his films. Conventional categorisation is less and less appropriate to Ford as his career progresses in skill and authority, and his last films, in which he is most in command of his subjects and less concerned than ever with the superficialities of entertainment, transcend descriptions like "comedy" and "Western" to approach the heart of his essential interest, the relationship of men to each other, and to God. (pp. 172-73)