One account of his output at the Times says that "He was known for his acerbic wit and poison-tipped pen, and even his news articles had verve and voice; his features were chatty, clever, and intimate, if occasionally smug.
Here, in a sentence, is a movie of the grand old school, a genuine rib-thumper and a beautiful sight to see.Of Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, released the following year, he wrote:[6] In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is one small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which by dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to be recalled not merely at the end of their particular year but whenever great motion pictures are mentioned.
To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century-Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.... Its greatness as a picture lies in many things, not all of them readily reducible to words.
Ford's cameras turn off a white-striped highway, follow Tom Joad scuffling through the dust to the empty farmhouse, see through Muley's eyes the pain of surrendering the land and the hopelessness of trying to resist the tractors.
He called Mannequin with Joan Crawford and Spencer Tracy a "glib, implausible and smart-gowned little drama, as typical Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as Leo himself".
[7] Of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), he wrote: "The film is almost unrelievedly brutal and without the saving grace of unreality which makes Frankenstein's horrors a little comic.
"[4] In assessing their work together, Glenn Frankel credits Nugent with providing Ford with more sophisticated male-female relationships than his other scripts and tempering the racism so endemic to the western genre's portrayal of Native Americans.
[4] Nugent's screenplay for Fort Apache, for example, altered his source material's "visceral loathing" for the Indigenous characters, transforming them into "victims of government-sanctioned criminal exploitation".
In the place of like-minded Native leaders, he introduced contrast between the young, hot-blooded warrior and the wiser veteran, which became a standard feature of the Hollywood western.
His screenplays in other genres include The Red Beret, North West Frontier, Trouble in the Glen, The Quiet Man, The Rising of the Moon and Donovan's Reef.
My knowledge of the Civil War extended only slightly beyond the fact that there was a North and a South, with West vulnerable and East dealing.
In view of all this, I can only surmise that Ford picked me for Fort Apache as a challenge.Nugent served as the President of the Writers Guild of America, West (WGAW) from 1957 to 1958 and as its representative on the Motion Picture Industry Council from 1954 to 1959.
[1] He also served a three-year stint (1956–59) as chairman of the building fund committee that oversaw the construction of its headquarters in Beverly Hills.