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Henry Ford is the latest subject of “American Experience,” which will be broadcast on PBS stations on Tuesday from 9 to 11 p.m. Other subjects include Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Ford is the only one of the three who left a company with his name. Carnegie and Rockefeller are better known for philanthropic foundations, although Ford also created a foundation with his name on it.

If there’s a lesson from Ford for today’s entrepreneurs it is this: Don’t stay in charge of the company too long.

For all the good the Ford Foundation has done, the image of Ford’s name continues to be associated with anti-Semitism, antiunion sentiments and the paranoia of his old age.

The film was directed by Sarah Colt and is timed for the 150th anniversary of Ford’s birth. That year, 1863, was the year of the battle of Gettysburg and eons away from the world in which Ford died, in 1947. His tale should be familiar: born on a farm, he worked hard to escape it, falling in love with machinery. Once he had succeeded, he fought to return to the farm and to the past: he missed the world his invention had forever altered.

The PBS program has excellent film footage. Ford, who was a pioneer of using film as propaganda, distributed a lot of it, free to local theaters. This policy made him and his company well known on Main Street. Ford was the Steven P. Jobs of his day. As an inventor and entrepreneur, Ford defied convention to bring magic new technology to ordinary life and ordinary people.

This look at Ford lacks a sense of his place as cultural figure and folk legend, the prophet of “Fordism” invoked by Aldous Huxley in the novel “Brave New World.” The Model T and the assembly line represented a shift in the culture as well as the economy. The principle of the Model T was applied to many other items. Producing a single, basic product model radically lowered its price and made it accessible to many more people.

The thinking behind Ford’s success is summed up in “My Life and Work” and the entry Ford himself signed in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Many important features of Ford’s life don’t show up at all in this bio. There is nothing about the Selden patent, a tale in which Ford fought what today would be called patent trolls. There are no Model T jokes and nothing about the Ross Perot-style “Henry Ford for President” boomlet. I missed it if there was even the briefest mention of the Peace Ship, Ford’s idealistic but naïve effort to mediate among the great powers to try to end World War I.

But there are surprises, too. A disturbing and telling sequence about a ceremony from Ford’s infamous sociological department, charged with Americanizing his workers. Workers dressed in the garb of their native lands are seen plunging into a literal melting pot, like a carnival prop, emerging a few minutes later, identically dressed and waving American flags.

The story has been told in many books, including Douglas Brinkley’s centennial history of the Ford Motor Company, Allan Nevins’s multivolume academic-level study and more recently in “The People’s Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century” by Steven Watts, who appears on the show along with Mr. Brinkley.

The usual juxtaposition of talking heads includes articulate historians. But the most memorable parts of the show are snippets of film — the roiling hell of the assembly line at River Rouge comes alive in film, by contrast to heroic paintings or still photos — and facts delivered by the show’s narrator, the actor Oliver Platt.

But Ford may be best represented not by the Highland Park or River Rouge assembly lines but by the stables, shops and churches of Greenfield Village. There, the reconstruction of the past was so exact that Ford had “dresser drawers filled with shawls like those his mother had worn.”