Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalist legend, gets a moment in the spotlight

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Hersh’s record on uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take...
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‘It made him an A-lister’: John Ford’s breakthrough film The Iron Horse at 100

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Filmed in the freezing Nevada desert under studio pressure, Ford’s 1924 epic was a huge hit. It was the springboard for the director’s astounding career of westerns, idealism and high drama

Had the Oscars been around in 1924, when director John Ford’s epic western The Iron Horse was released, the critically lauded film would have swept up the lot. Though it might be largely forgotten now, this black and white silent movie, which turns 100 on 28 August, marked the point where Jack Ford – a former fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants props guy who also acted a bit, and was first hired as a director by virtue of being available – became master film-maker John Ford, the director many still herald as the greatest of all time. When The Iron Horse was inducted into the Library of Congress film archive in 2011, the official registry citation stated that it “established Ford’s reputation as one of Hollywood’s most accomplished directors”.

Ford remains the most Oscar-decorated director ever, notching up four awards for feature films – The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952) – and two for second world war documentaries The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943). None of which were westerns, a genre Ford adored, shaped, and left his mark all over. Incongruous perhaps, given his coastal Maine upbringing by Irish immigrant parents. As a teenager, Jack Feeney followed his elder brother – star actor and director Francis Ford – to Hollywood, taking his surname and learning on the trailblazer’s sets at Universal Pictures. Short on directors, Universal head Carl Laemmle hired him to direct cowboy star Harry Carey in Straight Shooting in 1917, simply because “Jack Ford yells good”.

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