Ford has always found his true image of reality in this world, not in the deliberately fashioned symbolism of a literary invention; his symbols arise naturally out of the ordinary, the everyday; it is by familiar places, traditions and themes that his imagination is most happily stimulated. There is a sort of strain, apt to evidence itself in pretentiousness of style, about his attempts with material outside his personal experience or sympathy. (p. 9)

[Ford's most successful films] manage with remarkable success to revive the manners and appearances of past times. Designed with obvious care, they show a keen pleasure in their period appurtenances, in dresses and uniforms, furniture and decoration. Delighting in dances and communal celebrations of a long-forgotten style, there is a sense about them of regret for ways of living at once simpler and more colorful than those of today.

This implied lack of concern with contemporary issues is evident also in Ford's present-day films. They Were Expendable is hardly, in the modern sense, a film about war, but rather a film about a species now almost extinct—the professional, dedicated warrior….

The films all start with the advantage of a good story. Further, they are the work of expert writers …—experienced story-tellers with no pretentious ambitions to transcend the natural bounds of their subjects. As a result their scripts leave Ford free to tell the stories at his leisure, to enrich and enliven them through his own humane inspiration. (p. 10)

[It] is evident in the whole approach, in the texture of the films: in odd, unscripted actions and gestures; in the robust humor which runs through them all, simple and genial, of character rather than incident; in the consistent dignity (rising at times to grandeur) with which the human figure is presented. (pp. 10-11)

Where … integrity is not preserved, where Ford's true sympathy is not with his material, or the material itself is counterfeit,… visual opulence can become overblown. This objection may be made to The Informer—a brilliant but sometimes showy exercise in the sort of expressionism one has come to associate rather with the German cinema, with its use of heavy-contrast lighting, studied grouping, and deliberate non-realism. Equally it is possible to criticize the last section of The Long Voyage Home, where the visual pretentiousness stems directly from the script; portions of Tobacco Road, in which Ford's tendency to idealize is not really in tune with the writing; or all The Fugitive, where Figueroa has been given unfortunate license to reinforce Nichols' vulgarity with his own. But when the material is genuine, and Ford's response to it a spontaneous one, his technique is characterized by its extreme simplicity. Seldom indulging in the sophistications of camera movement, his films proceed in a series of visual statements—they are as sparing in their use of natural sound as of dialogue. Rich in phrasing, simple in structure, it is a style which expresses a sure, affirmative response to life—the equivalent to that Biblical prose which, today, it takes greatness of spirit to sustain. (p. 14)

With the collapse of its popular traditions, Western art has become increasingly sophisticated and eclectic; the popular themes are in general left to be exploited, and degraded, by the opportunists. Ford's films, in this context, seem hardly to belong to our time at all. His art is not intellectual; his impulse is intuitive, not analytical. Unsophisticated and direct, his work can be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of cultural level, who has retained his sensitivity and subscribes to values primarily humane. He applies himself to traditional themes, and is happiest when his story is set in the settled society of another era—typically, Ford's is a man's world, one in which woman's function is largely domestic, to build the home and bear children, to sympathize and support. Relationships in these films are never complex (which does not mean that they are not subtle). Ford's heroes do not analyze themselves into negation; uncomplicated and instinctive, they realize themselves in action; and they win. Even the defeated heroes of They Were Expendable are indomitable in disaster, and Ford ends his film with a positive symbol, a presage of the ultimate victory. (pp. 14-15)

Ford's art is inspired by an optimistic faith in man's nature, a reverence for the human creature which is evident always in choice of subject and manner of treatment; but this is combined with a firm emphasis on discipline, an implicit stress on moral and social duties which may properly be described as classical, and which are matched by the sympathetic decorum of style. The poetry which, at their most intense, the films attain, approximates more closely to the Johnsonian "grandeur of generality" than to the romantic's glorification of the particular. (pp. 15-16)