I miss westerns. They just don't make enough good ones anymore.

John Ford was the ultimate director!We need directors like him once again, though I am sorry to say we will never have a director like him. Ford saw that the rawness was the best.His movies are classics and should never be remade or even thought about being remade.Thank you John for the many years of great enjoyment from seeing your visions come to light.

The Great American West of John Ford is a nostalgic look back at the career of six-time Academy Award© winning director John Ford (1894–1973) as told by John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda both as onscreen narrators and in conversations with the famed director. Filmed in the classic Ford film settings of Monument Valley and the location of the former back lot of Twentieth Century Fox, as well as in the den and trophy room of Ford himself, the story goes back to Ford's start in the silent era up through the early 1960's.It is interspersed with memorable clips from such classics as Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, as well as footage from Ford's wartime career, which includes performances from such stalwarts as Ward Bond, Andy Devine (who also cameos during a conversation between Ford and Wayne), Maureen O'Hara, Thomas MItchell, Natalie Wood, Walter Brennan, Ken Curtis, and John Carradine.The presentation is filled with fascinating anecdotes, including practical jokes, and most notably, Ford's reminiscence of a long conversation that he once had with Wyatt Earp, who described the shootout at the OK Corral in such detail that he even drew a map of the site.The film quality is quite poor and does not compare well with the original that had been aired on television back in the 1990's, but the grainy visuals (apparently captured with a video camera from projected film) are soon forgotten as the story unfolds. To modern audiences, it may seem a bit hokey, but it is a wonderful reflection of the cinematic reality of the world of John Wayne and "Pappy" John Ford in which the focus is not on history as is was but how it should have been.