John Ford

On the inner sleeve of Nebraska, there is a picture of Bruce Springsteen in the hallway of a house as seen through a doorway. This is, at least in part, an homage to a film for which Springsteen professed profound admiration throughout his career, namely John Ford’s Western, The Searchers (1956). In the film, Ethan Edwards (played by John Wayne) is a constantly isolated character. Ford shows this pictorially by framing Ethan alone and outside in doorways with the empty plains behind him while the rest of the characters are inside the house. Dave Marsh calls John Ford, “the greatest poet of the American cinema” and in films such as The Searchers and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Ford defined what it meant to be an American. Marsh argues that both Ford and Springsteen were alike in the way they acted as a “representative and disseminator of a version of the American Dream”. (Marsh 368)
Ford won four awards for directing, but none for his Westerns. Still, when introducing himself or answering interviewers’ questions, he always claimed that he “made Westerns”. John Ford and John Wayne made many films together, including several classic Westerns. But The Searchers is widely considered the greatest Western of all time and also one of the greatest films in any genre. Marsh writes (referring to Born in the USA), “Bruce’s image of standing in a doorway, trying to decide whether to walk through, again threw him into the realm of John Ford’s The Searchers.”
“In that film, John Wayne spends five years tracking his young niece, who has been kidnapped by Indian raiders who massacred the rest of her family. Wayne doesn’t play an uncomplicated good guy; he is an unreconstructed Confederate soldier, he is a racist, and there are indications that he may be a highwayman. Although he initially intends to rescue his niece, he decides to kill her when he finds that she’s been taken as a wife by the Indian chief. But when he finally does catch up to her, after a long ride across the desert, he sweeps her up in his arms and brings her home.” (Marsh 414)
In the first scene of the film, Ethan Edwards (John Wayne’s character) arrives at the home of his brother and his brother’s wife after many years of wandering by himself in the wilderness of the desert. Ford shows us through the use of spare, stark images that Ethan and his sister-in-law are truly in love with each other. This process is similar to the way that Springsteen is able to tell stories and express the emotions and thoughts of his characters with only a few simple words. Just as Nebraska is thought of as Springsteen’s darkest album (up to that point), The Searchers could be considered the darkest film John Ford ever made, and it is certainly his darkest Western. It’s central figure, Ethan Edwards, is a complex man with many hidden and unconscious motives for his actions.
The character of Tom Joad from The Grapes of Wrath is less complicated but more heroic, at least in a traditional sense. Ford did win an Oscar for this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel, but this film is not nearly as complex or modern in its sensibility as The Searchers. It is not now considered one of his very best films, although it has several memorable scenes and powerful dialogue. Springsteen would later pay explicit homage to The Grapes of Wrath on the album, The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995). This film focuses on a large family’s journey from Oklahoma to California with the hopes of finding the means of earning a living during the Depression. But the Okies were unwelcome in California because they threatened the jobs of the locals. They were constantly harassed by the state and its police force, especially when they tried to form unions and ask for decent wages which would at least allow them to eat. The character of Tom Joad speaks and acts, not only in defense of his family, but for all the oppressed, as we see in his famous speech to his mother.
In the years before Nebraska, Jon Landau introduced Bruce to certain novels, films, and even “to the very idea of art”. He also showed him “what he was missing” with regard to The Grapes of Wrath when Bruce was at first resistant to the film on television. (Marsh 306) During the Nebraska period, Springsteen was feeling “his need to be alone was becoming something tougher, more pernicious: loneliness”. He would eventually compare this to a scene in the Ford film where “an Okie farmer tries to hold off eviction with a shotgun, only to be told that the men he wants to shoot are faceless, hidden away in boardrooms hundreds of miles away. I felt the same way [Tom Joad] did.” said Bruce, “Where do I point the gun?” (Marsh 338)