When directors get deep into their careers, they can begin to make a retrospective view of it part of their movies. That’s what John Ford did in “The Wings of Eagles,” a bluff yet dark-hued military and cinematic adventure film from 1957, which he made at the age of sixty-three, after forty years as a director. The movie is a bio-pic of a screenwriter, but one whose life was dramatic—even when he was behind a typewriter. John Wayne stars as the real-life Frank (Spig) Wead, a Navy aviation pioneer who, after his paralysis in a domestic accident, endured an agonizing rehabilitation and turned to writing to keep active even when his body was all but idled. Even as his screenwriting career thrived, he became a major military strategist during the Second World War, and also wrote the script for Ford’s war film “They Were Expendable.” Yet, in filming the story of Wead’s life, Ford also films the story of stories, of where stories come from. In Ford’s view, they arise from a full life, from a life that’s filled with pain and conflict—and much of Wead’s conflict involves not the military milieu but his love affairs. Ford’s depiction of Wead’s wife, Min, played by Maureen O’Hara, is sympathetic yet unstinting, and Wead’s relationship with her is impassioned and anguished. To borrow a title from Ingmar Bergman, these are Ford’s scenes from a marriage.
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