But The Battle of Midway was a film virtually lacking any formal precedent, one for which Ford had to invent something “new”. And it was for Ford an occasion when critical reaction mattered little, an occasion aimed at a broad audience, an occasion when the reaction of the masses to this deeply personal essay on “war, and peace, and all-of-us” mattered terribily. Rarely is an artist given so vast a subject to address, and rarely do his thoughts receive the interested attention of so vast an audience. To this aim The Battle of Midway is directly manipulative, it seeks a deeper level of consciousness through a fuller exploitation of multi-media art. To be sure, Ford did not abandon staginess altogether, but he would never stand so far back from his material after The Battle of Midway as he did before. This is the deepening of feeling, provoked by exposition to the War, which James Agee referred to. It is the difference, perhaps, between a man who films his ideas and one who films his experience.

Tad Gallagher, Film Comment, September-October 1975