This room is my castle of quiet: The collaborations of Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford

Although it is relatively common to examine the collaborations between various actors and directors working in the 1950s Western - John Wayne/John Ford, James Stewart/Anthony Mann, etc. - the series of three varied films made by Delmer Daves and Glenn Ford between 1956 and 1958 have seldom attracted attention. While at least one of these films, 3:10 to Yuma, has been championed in terms of Daves's spatially and tonally expressive direction, and Ford's morally ambiguous but effortlessly genial characterisation, this extraordinary trio of films have seldom been examined in relation to one another. This chapter reads the collaboration between Ford and Daves as symptomatic of the work of both actor and director, and their sympathetic, subtle, "benevolent" and relatively unadorned approach to various subjects and character types. In the process it pinpoints some of the key reasons why both of these important but workaday figures have remained relatively underestimated and why they need to be brought to the forefront of a more complex understanding of the variations possible in the "classical" Western.