FORD: AFTER 220 OF THEM, A FILM ROLE IS STILL JOB 1

In the days when the movies ruled undistracted over entertainment, their stars achieved the universal fame of greater and lesser gods. Their movements and miscues were reported to a waiting world with the stop-press urgency now reserved for epicene rock stars.

A few survivors of film’s glory time are still among us: Garbo, who will be 80 later this year, and Cary Grant, James Stewart, Irene Dunne, Loretta Young, Jean Arthur. Some, like Myrna Loy, James Cagney and Rita Hayworth, are in sadly fragile health. Most have packed away the greasepaint. But a few, like Stewart, Don Ameche, marvelous in the recent “Cocoon,” and Glenn Ford reject the idea of retirement and will work if asked and if the part is right.

Ford, like the others, has always fitted that useful description of the stars, “They carry their own light,” which is to say you can’t help noticing them in any circumstances, and are drawn to watch them even when they aren’t doing anything.

He is a fit 69 (a legendary celebrant, he no longer drinks) and lives as he has for years in a house on what once was the L. B. Mayer estate a few steps northwest of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

By his own reckoning he has done 220 films, more, he says, than any other actor except his pal Duke Wayne, who called him “Pilgrim.” (Encyclopedists Katz and Halliwell, neither always exhaustive, list 88 Ford titles.)

Ford was born in Quebec but was raised in Santa Monica from the age of 8, and says he remembers falling in love with the aromas of the sound stage when he was still a kid, sneaking at night onto the Thomas Ince studio lot in Culver City.

He began as a stage actor, making his way to New York and becoming Tallulah Bankhead’s stage manager. “She was always trying to shock me,” Ford says, “and she always succeeded.” She called him “Hatrack” because he then weighed a slim 130 pounds (he’s 6 foot 1).

He returned to Hollywood in 1939 to make his first film, “Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence,” directed by the actor Ricardo Cortez, at 20th Century-Fox. It was an unpleasant debut and Cortez, Ford reports, told him he would never make it as a movie actor. “I went back to New York and joined Tallulah in ‘The Little Foxes.’ ”

But he came West again the same year to be tested and signed by Columbia, starting a 14-year hitch. Harry Cohn, Ford remembers, tried to change his name from Gwyllyn Ford to John Gower, honoring the street (also called Gower Gulch and Poverty Row) on which Columbia was then located. Ford compromised on Glenn, his father having been born in a town called Glenford.

Like the young contract players of the time, Ford worked constantly; five films in 1940, including “Blondie Plays Cupid” and “Babies for Sale.” Wartime service in the Marines delayed his career, but he returned in 1946 to make one of his best-known films, “Gilda,” with Rita Hayworth. He also played Don Jose to Hayworth’s Carmen in “The Loves of Carmen.” “One of the greatest mistakes I ever made; embarrassing,” Ford says. “But it was worth it, just to work with her again.”

Columbia had signed William Holden and Ford at about the same time, and they became friendly rivals for leading-man parts--and lifelong friends. “We competed in strange ways,” Ford recollects, with a sigh for youthful folly. “I stuffed paper in my boots to be taller than he was. Then he stuffed paper in his boots, and I stuffed more in mine. Finally neither of us could walk, and we said the hell with it.”

Ford became one of Hollywood’s polo players and still plays occasionally, he says, with a mallet once owned by Will Rogers. Indeed, what Rogers actually said, Ford insists, was “I never met a man I didn’t like, who liked horses.” It does make more sense than the no-exclusions policy generally attributed to Rogers.

A few years later Ford had started shooting a forgotten epic called “The Green Glove” at the Victorine Studio in Nice. His co-star, the late Geraldine Brooks, had given him an epic cold shoulder and one evening, drowning his sorrows in strong drink and bouillabaisse, Ford, as he remembers it, loped off into the night with some supportive pals and enlisted in the French Foreign Legion, the pals bidding him a tearful adieu.

He was awakened in the still-dark pre-dawn by a one-eyed German noncom slapping his bare feet with a bayonet. The French, Ford says, did not regard enlistment in the Legion as a lark, even to induce remorse in a pretty lady. He was being fitted for a kepi (“I didn’t look too bad”) and ticketed to Sidi-bel-Abbes in Algeria while the company shot around him for five days and lawyers negotiated with the government. The argument that 125 Frenchmen would lose jobs if the film was abandoned eventually persuaded the Legion to tear up Ford’s enlistment.

Brooks was very touched, and they became good friends. But, says Ford, “I haven’t tasted bouillabaisse since.”

As another Ford, John, once remarked, “When in doubt, print the legend.”

The list of Glenn Ford films includes such remarkable roles as “The Blackboard Jungle” and “The Big Heat,” and a thundering herd of good Westerns, including “3:10 to Yuma” and, a favorite of mine, “The Rounders,” in which he co-starred with Henry Fonda as a contemporary tramp cowboy, from a novel by Max Evans.

Twenty years ago, when I last spoke with Ford about the Western, it seemed certain the genre would go on as long as there was open land to shoot on. In truth the Western was at the edge of a decline from which it only now may be recovering.

“It’s going to come back,” Ford says. “It’s too much a part of American history not to. And it’s so popular in Europe, in the Orient. You don’t have to speak English to understand what’s going on. But I’ve always said the talking pictures talk too much anyway. The Duke proved that: The less said the better.”