Old men stopping wars: “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949)

Chief Pony-That-Walks: Too late, Nathan. Young men do not listen to me. They listen to Big Medicine. Yellow Hair Custer dead. Buffalo come back. Red sun. Too late, Nathan! You will come with me. Hunt buffalo together. Smoke many pipes. We are too old for war.

Captain Nathan Brittles: Yes, we are too old for war. But old men should stop wars.

By Scott Ross

The second entry in John Ford’s post-war “Cavalry Trilogy” is in many ways the best, marred only by his baffling penchant for depicting the “humor” of drunken Irishmen, here in the person of Victor McLaglen as John Wayne’s obnoxious stage-Irish factotum. Fortunately McLaglen is on the periphery of the action, which involves the last day in the Cavalry of Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne), a threatened Indian uprising following the news of Little Big Horn, and Brittles’ attempts to head it off while escorting two women to their train. Aside from McLaglen’s bibacious shenanigans, which reach their nadir in the phony “comic” saloon brawl near the picture’s climax, one of the few badly-staged sequences in Ford’s work, the movie is remarkable for Brittles’ pacifism, for Wayne’s full-bodied portrayal of him, and for the extraordinary Technicolor photography by Winton C. Hoch. Although I maintain that most movies don’t need color, and while Ford’s strongest and most poetic images of Monument Valley are in black-and-white, what he and Hoch achieved in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was exquisite, arguably the finest live-action Technicolor job since Gone with the Wind ten years earlier.

_{The eternal triangle: Harry Carey Jr, Joanne Dru and John Agar}

Technicolor, for years the only full-spectrum color process, was problematic because the company insisted on Natalie Kamus, its developer’s wife, supervising any movie production employing it, and as a picture’s “color consultant” Kalmus objected to anything she felt put Technicolor in a bad light… which of course meant anything daring or artistic or out of the norm. Great (or even just very good) directors and lighting cameramen challenged her repeatedly, and their results were nearly always better than what they would have had to settle for if they hadn’t. In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon the Technicolor, which could be garish, is glorious. Hoch used the work of Frederick Remington as a template, getting richer color and imagery than almost anyone else working in Technicolor at the time. More, he and Ford took advantage of what nature gave them; to Natalie Kalmus’ chagrin they kept filming during a display of prairie lightning, and it’s one of the most celebrated color sequences in American movies. They captured life as it happens, in almost a documentary fashion; grafted to the fiction, it becomes something unique in moviemaking of the period, and anticipates more studied things like Days of Heaven 30 years later.

_{John Wayne and Ben Johnson. I wonder if Johnson ever realized just how good he was?}

One reason the picture feels so rich is that is that it’s lived-in; Ford and his scenarists (Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings, adapting two Saturday Evening Post stories by James Warner Bellah*) catch the characters and the action, essentially, in medias res. As always, Ford concerns himself with community, and we get a sense of life at the Cavalry outpost that is fuller, more detailed, than is the case in anyone else’s Westerns. There’s the Easterner (Joanne Dru) creating, and feeding, a rivalry between two eager young Lieutenants (John Agar and Harry Carey Jr.); the wife of the commandant (Mildred Natwick) assisting the camp’s doctor (Arthur Shields) in a delicate operation, and in a moving Conestoga, no less; and a sutler (Harry Woods) selling guns to the Indians and coming to a nasty end. That’s a lot to pack into the movie’s narrative, yet nothing in it feels either lingered over or rushed.

Wayne, cast after Ford got a look at his performance in Red River, is marvelous as Nathan Brittles, and I mean that not as meaningless linguistic decoration but in the dictionary sense (in this case the American Heritage): Causing wonder or astonishment; of the highest or best kind or quality; first-rate. Those who had been paying attention to Wayne’s development, particularly since the end of the war, would not have been astonished at the range he displays in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, but anyone else might well have been. Brittle is a man largely at ease with himself, and the soldiers under his command have the measure of him; he doesn’t need to bark or bully to gain their respect. Wayne even carries off, with deceptive ease, two sequences that could fell greater talents than his: Talking to his dead wife at her graveside, and receiving a token, in the form of a gold watch, of the esteem and affection of his men and getting noticeably choked up about it. He’s enormously affecting in these moments without succumbing to the sentimentality implicit in them. Wayne, nominated for a Best Actor Oscar that year for Sands of Iwo Jima, felt that the nomination should have been for She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. He was right.

_{Wayne, George O’Brien and Mildred Natwick in “the dad-blastedest outfit” Nathan Brittles has ever seen.}

Joanne Dru is a bit better here than she was in Red River, but she seems to have carried over some aspects of that character, and the femme fatale sits uneasily on the mantle of an innocent young woman from the east. And she still has too damned much make-up on. John Agar and Harry Carey Jr. do good enough, if not exceptional, work as the men she leads on, only one of whom she is truly interested in, and George O’Brien is almost wasted as the Major. The young Ben Johnson has a much better role as Brittles’ wry, indispensable runner Sergeant Tyree, as does the always wonderful Mildred Natwick, as the Major’s wife. Playing Pony-That-Walks, Chief John Big Tree, perhaps best remembered as Blue Back, the Indian whose appearance terrifies Claudette Colbert in Drums Along the Mohawk, has a beautiful scene with Wayne; there is nothing maudlin about it, but the way the sequence limns the impotence of old men who have outlived their ability to contribute meaning or effect change is as unforgettable as the man’s big, weathered face.

_{John Wayne battles a storytelling cliché, a mediocre studio interior and a phony desert sunset and still triumphs.}

There’s a sequence late in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon that at first glance seems exceptionally cold-blooded: As the duplicitous sutler played by Harry Woods is being tortured by the natives to whom he’s just tried to sell arms (his being repeatedly thrown onto a campfire is all we see) Brittles, Tyree and Pennell (Carey), watching from a distance, debate the relative merits of chewing tobacco. Their chilling indifference to the gun-seller’s anguish appears comic in the darkest possible fashion. Yet what are they to do? Reveal themselves to a large war-party for the sake of a man who with mercenary indifference sells firearms to both soldiers and Indians indiscriminately, rifles which may shortly be used on the Cavalry men themselves? As terrible as the man’s impending death may be, he knew the risks when he took them, and money mattered more to him than professional ethics. Ford and his screenwriters aren’t endorsing murder; the trio’s tobacco discussion is a form of whistling past the graveyard, and no filmmaker of the period other than Ford, with the possible exception of John Huston, would have paused in his picture’s action this way to comment on what we’re seeing in it. That’s one difference between hackwork and artistry. Whatever his blind-spots or excesses, Ford if he did not always achieve the latter was almost never guilty of the former.

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*Bellah, either the source for, or the author of, numerous Ford movies (all three of the Cavalry pictures, which included Fort Apache and Rio Grande came from Bellah stories, and he co-wrote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) was and remains an uneasy figure. His son James, Jr. described him as “a fascist, a racist and a world class bigot,” so one can only imagine how much Ford toned down the scripts that sprang from Bellah’s pen. For today’s reactionary, self-described leftist-liberals, of course, John Ford himself was a racist, so the distinction for them between him and Bellah is probably too fine to register.

Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross