Well, I just spoke to my husband who teaches film at the New York Film Academy and he assures me that all the directors who worked on How The West Was Won were very fine directors - Ford, of course, was in a class by himself.
I never said True Grit was a classic - it’s not.
And Ken Darby did create the music for How the West Was Won as did Alfred Newman. Both were nominated for an Academy Award for their work. I always have the cd in my car for long travels. Beautiful.
“Very fine” is a relative term. Henry Hathaway did nothing unexpected with his many films and occasionally turned out a passable genre film like ‘Kiss of Death’. The other HTWWW director, George Marshall, was a cheerful vulgarian best remembered for the rowdy and unchallenging Jimmy Stewart-Marlene Dietrich vehicle ‘Destry Rides Again’ and the amusingly tasteless “Murder, He Says”. That’s about it.