I really do need to go into a deep dive into Ford's filmography, a director who is on my top 10 director's of all time list. I watched the Informer last year and loved it. Another Ford film I saw for the first time last too was The Fugitive and while the story dragged on a bit and narrative a bit uneven, it had some beautiful images and cinematography in it.
Tonight I watched a John Ford film, I've not seen or heard of before. The Last Hurrah (1958). It's a wonderful film, a political parable or satire about a shady and corrupt, but dutiful and obligated mayor running for reelection and the shenanigans and dirty pool that follow. This might be my favorite Spencer Tracy role. I've seen Adam's Rib, Fury, A Man Named Joe, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Bad Day at Black Rock, and a handful of others, but this might be my favorite performance of his, which is really saying a lot.
While Tracy has never been a huge draw for me, in that I feel a compulsion to be a completist and watch his entire filmography, there's no denying he is great on screen.
The writing is also absolutely top notch here by Frank Nugent who also wrote The Searchers and it's a film that's full of the John Ford stock of actors in some great bit roles and it's full of Ford's fit and Irish infused charm. The Last Hurrah is a film that like The Informer, Grapes of Wrath, and How Green Was My Valley showed that he was so much more than a "western director" and I do love it when he has films which are largely indoor affairs, such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which was a very different type of Ford western.
Grade: A
I'd have to really sit back and go stew a bit to rank all his films. The man was absolutely a work horse, no doubt about it and one thing I did read or heard on a podcast (can't remember which) was that he didn't shoot a lot of takes and didn't shoot a lot of coverage and his films usually came in under budget and ahead of schedule so studios liked him for that, but going back to what I read or heard, part of the reason for that wasn't to appease the studio, but to give his editors and post-production as little as possible to work with so they couldn't compromise his vision and also from habits he likely picked up in the early days of filmmaking low budget pictures where he grinded them out.
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