These were unique, complex, personal and professional relationships between master director John Ford and his two favorite actors, John Wayne and Ward Bond. The book provides a biography of each and a detailed exploration of Ford's work as it was intertwined with the lives and work of both Wayne and Bond (whose biography here is the first ever published). The book reveals fascinating accounts of ingenuity, creativity, toil, perseverance, bravery, debauchery, futility, abuse, masochism, mayhem, violence, warfare, open- and closed-mindedness, control and chaos, brilliance and stupidity, rationality and insanity, friendship and a testing of its limits, love and hate--all committed by a "half-genius, half-Irish" cinematic visionary and his two surrogate sons: Three Bad Men. "One of the most impressive elements of "Three Bad Men" is Nollen's familiarity with every film he discusses. For any title mentioned we get at least an honest critical evaluation and often a little opinion too, all expressed eloquently yet in language that any film fan can understand." -Cliff Aliperti, Immortal Ephemera "'Three Bad Men' is a must have book for any fan of Ford, Wayne or Bond; and it is essential reading for anyone who hopes to really understand these three men. Nollen not only talks about their lives apart from each other, but also about their lives together, something no biographer has ever really examined before. And without that type of biographical examination, one cannot hope to understand these three men as completely as Nollen obviously does." - The New Frontier "'Three Bad Men' is a literal who's who of Hollywood between the late 1920s and the early 1970s. It starts and ends with one of the greatest film directors to have ever graced a Hollywood set, John Ford. In between the covers of this great book you will run across every name you have ever heard of in motion pictures. . . and then some. The book interweaves this detailed Hollywood history with the complex and, dare I say, somewhat strange relationship between Ford, movie megastar John Wayne and everyman's favorite actor Ward Bond." -Carla Ives, Performing Arts Examiner "You've probably got shelves loaded with books on Ford and Wayne. Some are indispensable, some are good, some aren't so hot. I'd put 'Three Bad Men' in the indispensable stack. What Nollen does that sets 'Three Bad Men' apart is use Bond's biography as the backbone on which the rest of the book hangs. Nollen covers the films they made together, along with the pictures that came between them. Nollen strikes an almost perfect balance between the meticulously researched and the engagingly told. I found this a fun, fast, enlightening read -- up there with the Bogdanovich book." - Fifties Westerns "Scott [Nollen]...not only performed a service for history and the memory of Abraham Lincoln but [is now] writing about the Fords and their screen treatments of [Abraham] Lincoln. That is a good topic. I used it for my keynote address at one of the international John Ford conferences held in Dublin and linked it with Spielberg's treatment of the subject in LINCOLN. I enjoyed THREE BAD MEN and am glad to see that Ward Bond was prominently included, since not enough has been written about him." --Joseph McBride Historian  Scott Allen Nollen  was educated in film and history at the University of Iowa.  Since 1986, he has written and edited more than 40 books on the history of film, literature and music, including volumes on Boris Karloff (now finishing his third), Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Ford, John Wayne and Ward Bond, Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong, Paul Robeson, Frank Sinatra, Takashi Shimura and (with his wife, Yuyun Yuningsih Nollen) Chester Morris.  In 2014, Nollen was selected by the Library of Congress to write essays on John Ford's films, including  Stagecoach  (1939),  The Quiet Man  (1952) and The Searchers (1956), for the National Film Registry. Used Book in Good Condition