According to
Garry Wills' biography of
John Wayne, "John Wayne's America,"
John Ford kept Francis as part of his stock company partly so
he could humiliate him by giving him small, meaningless roles and
yelling at him on the set. The younger Ford could not handle feelings
of indebtedness, which was one of the reasons he only worked with
Harry Carey once in the quarter-century after Carey left
Universal. Carey was given the role of the prison warden and Francis
the role of a corporal of the guard in Ford's
The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936).
