Glenn Ford, popular star of the 40s and 50s, bids us so long
The Greats - the Stewarts, the Fondas, the Crawfords and the Pecks - are long gone. The current stage in the erosion of Old Hollywood involves the loss of those who flew just below the radar, personalities sufficiently popular in their day but not necessarily the material of The Ages.
Glenn Ford, who passed away this week at the age of 90, fits this category about as perfectly as a weathered ten-gallon hat fit his head. He didn't announce himself with a bang - that style of debut would have clashed with his low-key personality anyway - and didn't go out in a blaze of glory. But for a long middle period, Ford enjoyed a steady stronghold on celebrity.
It took place right after the war, when he appeared with Rita Hayworth in Gilda. After a period as a kind of savvy sap, he settled very comfortably into a succession of cops and cowboys.
Ford's onscreen characters were at once wise, confident, introspective and gentlemanly - a collection of qualities constantly being put to the test, by the fickleness of Woman in Gilda, by the wily ways of a breathy serial killer in Experiment in Terror, and, most famously, by a gang of jive-talkin' juvies in The Blackboard Jungle.
As for the Westerns, Ford, in the great cattle call of filmdom's cowpokes, was a more than capable wrangler, even if he didn't quite have the tools to head up the drive. He rode ahead of the Rory Calhouns and the Randolph Scotts, but behind the Henry Fondas, the John Waynes and the Jimmy Stewarts; he was too good to be in B Westerns, but not quite the stuff of the better A's. If one Western stereotype, the school marm, was in charge of judging another, the white-hatted hero, Ford would be awarded a B plus.
This is not to imply that Ford was not the material of true screen greatness. The man had it in him, as he proved the odd time he was cast against type, as in the underrated 3:10 To Yuma.
He seemed happy, however, with the middle-level of celebrity he achieved, happy to satisfy the small but loyal sector of fans, mostly men, who attended his films because they knew exactly what they were going to get. And satiate them he did, amassing an extraordinary long list of films.
Glenn Ford was no Trojan horse. He was, like the animals he spent half a career atop, a workhorse.
