After introductory comments by off-screen narrator Orson Welles, director Peter Bogdanovich asks actors James Stewart, John Wayne and Henry Fonda about the director's over 135 films and their work with him. Clips of many of Ford's most famous films are interspersed with clips and discussions of some of his lesser known works. Wayne recalls his first acting experience with Ford, for the 1928 silent film Mother Macree , when he knocked Ford down while displaying a football maneuver. Fonda recalls being verbally chastised by Ford for thinking that he was going to portray Abraham Lincoln as the "Great Emancipator" when, in fact the 1939 film Young Mr. Lincoln was intended to show Lincoln as "a young jack leg lawyer from Springfield." Stewart states that he wanted to please Ford and feels that others who worked with him felt the same way. He adds that Ford seemed to dare his actors "to do it right." In speaking of the filming of Ford's 1939 picture Stagecoach Wayne recounts an incident in which Ford called the entire company to attention to hear the then-young star be humiliated by the director. Wayne and Stewart describe Ford's habit of making someone in the company be at "the bottom of the list" each day. They also express the thought that Ford not only kept his cast and crew under control by such tactics, but often used verbal bruisings to make others feel sympathy for the person being humiliated. Welles's narration and Ford's own words describe how Ford, an Irish American who was born Sean Aloysius O'Faerna, came to Hollywood, where his older brother Francis was an established actor and director who had assumed the surname Ford. John Ford describes how he came to direct his first film, which came as a stroke of luck precipitated when a Universal executive asked Ford, who was then an assistant director, to "shoot something" for some visitors from the East. In 1917, Universal studio head Carl Laemmle assigned the then-twenty-two year old Ford to direct his first feature because, as Ford recounted, "That Jack Ford--he yells load. He'd make a good director." That film, which starred Ford's longtime friend and frequent star, Harry Carey, was the Western Straight Shooting . When asked about various aspects of his films, Ford gives terse, yes or no or evasive answers to many of Bogdanovich's questions, but at other times offers lengthy answers. Ford describes filmmaking as luck, sometimes good and sometimes bad, then offers the example of the thunder and lightning sequence in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon : Because the weather on the day for shooting the sequence had turned to rain, thunder and lightning, the picture's cinematographer shot it under protest. Ford contemptuously adds that the cinematographer won an Academy Award for it, "under protest." Fonda relates an incident on the set of My Darling Clementine in which, just prior to shooting a scene on a porch, Ford came to him and suggested movements for his feet which were "a little choreographed dance." The short scene, in which Fonda portrayed Wyatt Earp, became famous and represents the type of small touches that Ford would inject into his films, often as if completely spontaneous. Many clips are shown to illustrate Ford's visual style, which was reflective of his skill as an artist as well as a director. Clips from many of Ford's films illustrating American life are shown, appearing chronologically, beginning with the period films and ending with scenes from Ford's 1958 film The Last Hurrah , a film with a contemporary setting that starred Spencer Tracey as a long-time Boston mayor who is defeated in his last political campaign. Welles's narration then describes the quintessential Ford hero as a man alone, whether portrayed by Fonda, Carey, Tracey, Stewart or Wayne, someone who, victorious in defeat, was "silhouetted against the moving background of history."