adictory that a man who achieves his effects by careful use of action and gesture would rely on scenarists. Baxter notes that Ford "learned much from them and developed an imagery almost totally literary in its basis" (p. 28). Baxter feels that the relationship Ford had with his writers gave him a focus for his non-verbal statements, offering the sounding board that was needed to center these statements. Baxter notes that Ford relied heavily upon his screenwriters. According to Baxter Ford personally selected and trained his own screenwriters. Frank Nugent and Dudley Nichols between them receive credits on twenty-four Ford features, while Nunnally Johnson, Frank Wead, James Kevin McGuinness, and Lamar Trotti have three or four films each with Ford: "These men, all of whom had an instinctive understanding of Ford's style, and particularly Nichols, who played an important part in forming it, provided Ford with a depth to his work that eluded him in the silent period, a heightened sense of drama that for the first time allowed him to give simple incidents the same emotional significance as character confrontations, and to capture in dialogue the vitality previously confined to scenes of action" (pp. 28-29).
Nichols began collaborating with Ford in the mid-1930s. He was an ex-newspaperman and playwright with no script writing experience, but Ford thought he was very good and found that the two men agreed on the idea that there should be a paucity of dialogue. Ford was indebted to Nichols for a number of details they had developed together, and Baxter notes how many of these details would reappear in later Ford films produced with different writers. He cites the scene in The Informer in which the police chief pushes the reward toward the informant with a pencil and the scene in the Frank Nugent script for Fort Apache where there is a similar gesture as a character picks up an Indian headdress with a pencil: "Despite different wri...