"Frank Feeney, known in the moving picture world as Francis Ford, one of the country's leading emotional actors of the movies, a Portland boy, is home for his first vacation in many years, visiting his parents, Mr. And Mrs. John A. Feeney of Sheridan street."

Feeney's vacation was hardly restful. Well-established as a director and actor for the Universal Film Co., Feeney spent his break from Hollywood writing, casting and shooting two movies in Maine.

Though Chicken Hearted Jim is now a lost film, and The Yellow Streak was apparently never released, Feeney's productive homecoming resonates gently through the Northeast 83 years later. As the weeks of Maine location work for the Costner-Newman film Message in a Bottle have shown, it's still no trifle for Hollywood to visit New England. Although the contrast in working styles is noteworthy: Feeney shot the two-reeler Chicken Hearted Jim in three days.

More interesting, in view of a celebration taking place in Portland this summer [1988], are Feeney's personnel decisions. For Jim, in which he also starred, his cast was entirely local, including his parents, two sisters, two nieces, the local police chief, and a herd of Elks.

At the top were Feeney and his brother, 21-year-old Jack, then a year into a film career that would end with 136 films, six Oscars and an enduring reputation as one of the world's greatest directors.

Born in Cape Elizabeth, youngest of 13 children, John Martin Feeney grew up in Portland, earning the nickname "Bull" through his aggressiveness in high school sports. Adopting his brother's professional surname and occupation, John Ford went on to eclipse Francis, whose film career had dwindled to occasional character roles by the time he died, in 1953.

From July 6-12, [1998] Portland celebrates John Ford with a film retrospective and the dedication of a statue at Gorham's Corner, near where Feeney père opened a pub in 1897. (Like many other historic sites in Portland, the location at Center and Fore streets is now a parking lot.)

Linda Noe Laine, once a close friend of Mary Smith Ford, the director's wife, is primary donor for the statue. At a press conference in March [1998], celebration director Jack Dawson said that Laine offered her support after learning that Portland lacked a permanent Ford memorial-a discovery, Dawson said, that "appalled" her.

Which goes to show that underestimating the regional voice in film is a two-way street. Apart from a 1970 Ford film festival in Maine, Portland till now has had little to say about him-despite the fact that this son of a major seaport, a town 15 percent Irish in the year 1900, proclaimed his complex heritage in ways large and small.

The Irish aspect dominates, and it's true that Ford made many fewer Easterns than Westerns, but he did reveal other dimensions of his origins. He covered Longfellow for Fox with the 1922 interpretation of The Village Blacksmith. The 1924 feature Hearts of Oak (like most of Ford's silents, now lost) is a tale of New England seafarers. Ford was briefly one of those, playing hooky to work on a Portland tugboat for 10 days. Dr. Bull, a 1933 comedy-drama starring Will Rogers, paints an unflattering picture of New England village life.