The auteur theory developed by French film critics beginning in the 1950s is partly a convenient way of categorizing and analyzing films, collecting titles as the body of work of the director. More than this, though, the theory holds that it is the director more than anyone else who is responsible for the completed film, since he or she is the one who determines visual style and other matters in the course of production. The theory finds that the director expresses meaning through visual style and that analyzing the visual style of a given director reveals consistent thematic concerns, similarities in character development, and other repeated and recognizable signs of a single intelligence at work. At the same time, though, film remains a collaborative medium, and it would seem that directors would be influenced by their collaborators so that there should be some distinctions that can be made between different works according to other members of the production team.
John Ford is noted for a large body of work extending from early silents to massive widescreen color epics into the 1960s. A number of his films have been Westerns and gave a distinct view of the West and of the Western hero. Dudley Nichols wrote Ford's most famous Western--Stagecoach--after a period of collaboration in the 1930s on a number of non-Western pictures. Nunnally Johnson wrote The Prisoner of Shark Island, The Grapes of Wrath, and Tobacco Road, and though none were strictly speaking Westerns, they had similar themes and attitudes to some of Ford's Westerns. The collaborator who worked on the most Ford Westerns, either as writer or co-writer, was Frank Nugent. His scripts have distinct themes which echo some of Ford's other work but gives Ford's work a distinctive flavor showing Nugent's own contribution.
John Baxter (1971) discusses the issue of John Ford and his relationship with writers and finds that while the observer might find it contr...