By Scott Ross
The first picture in what later became informally known as John Ford’s “Cavalry Trilogy,” Fort Apache (1948) is the most deeply flawed yet also the most visually and dramatically overwhelming of the three. It’s the kind of story that emphasizes both its maker’s greatest strengths and his worst impulses, exacerbated by his wartime experience and indicative of the destructiveness inherent in falling in love with, and worshiping, the American military structure. In his critiques of the Custeresque Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda) John Wayne’s Captain Kirby York is right about every aspect of Thursday’s command — his rigidity, his ignorance and bigotry concerning the Apache, his overweening desire to get the attention of the higher-ups he feels have not rewarded him sufficiently by tricking Cochise (Miguel Inclán) back into the country from his self-exile in Mexico and then attacking him and his people, his willingness to blacken the reputations of his officers and men and to lead them pigheadedly into certain and unnecessary disaster about which he has been explicitly warned and is too arrogant to heed. (In the talks that precede the battle, Thursday, with breathtaking disdain, deliberately insults Cochise to his face, telling that proud man he has no honor.) Yet at the end of the picture Ford has Kirby reverse his own quite sane opinions and sing Thursday’s praises as an officer. The last scene of Fort Apache is a complete refutation of everything that comes before it, and that volte-face leaves a deep, bitter aftertaste.
At least the screenplay, by Frank S. Nugent, removes some of the racism of its source, James Warner Bellah’s Saturday Evening Post story “Massacre,” which blames the Apaches for everything. (Bellah’s son famously described his father as “a fascist, a racist and a world-class bigot.”) While Fort Apache is very much concerned with the clash between the Cavalry and the Apache the picture is also one of Ford’s rich depictions of community, here the families and men of the fort. Alas, that includes, as is depressingly usual for Ford, the resident “comic” Irish sot, also (as usual) played with adorable bibulousness by Victor McLaglen. (Dick Foran and Pedro Armendáriz play lesser drunks.) You’d think the former John Martin Feeney would have had more Celtic pride than to indulge in the stereotype as often as he did, particularly when he was himself a nearly legendary (and I use the word advisedly) alcoholic. Deflection? Fortunately, McLaglen is offset by Shirley Temple as Thursday’s eligible daughter, John Agar as the West Point graduate with whom she falls in love, Ward Bond as his soldier father, Irene Rich as his gentle mother and Anna Lee and George O’Brien as a devoted older couple hopeful of change.
It’s surely not accidental that the two most interesting characters in Fort Apache are portrayed by the two most interesting actors in it. Wayne’s Captain York is not insubordinate with Thursday (at least until the climax) but through experience and attrition he knows the land, the fort and the Apache intimately, and in way Thursday does not and cannot. He knows his commander is blundering into untenable (and entirely avoidable) conflict, just as Custer did, and Wayne plays his scenes with Fonda with a subtle, ambivalent sense of rue. Fonda for his part gives in entirely to Thursday’s arrogance, his coldness and his overweening air of noblesse oblige, and it’s a portrait of doctrinaire military hubris that seems both a nod to Custer’s ruinous self-regard and a prescient look perhaps at what was developing in the Far East as Fort Apache was being prepared. (An unintentional allegory the geopolitically reactionary Ford would no doubt have disputed vehemently.) The director and his superb cinematographer Archie Stout, working in black-and-white, offer up images of Monument Valley that act as their own metaphor: The people, measured against the astonishing geophysical landforms that dwarf them, are rendered as insignificant as a line of snails to a herd of mastodon. More moving for Nugent’s and Ford’s narrative, the filmmaker’s framing of the climactic battle between Cavalry and Apache has a terrible, shattering power. When Thursday’s troops are contrasted to the hordes of Native warriors about to descend upon them, their number is shockingly puny and may remind you of Evan S. Connell’s vivid description in Son of the Morning Star of Custer’s men roaring foolhardily into the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment at Little Big Horn and being submerged under the swarm of angry hornets they’d arrogantly aroused. It’s the sheer fact of that appalling blunder as re-imagined by Ford that makes Kirby’s defense of Thursday at the end of Fort Apache so disgusting, and such a profound betrayal of what we’ve just seen, and felt.
Rio Grande (1950), the final entry, after the wonderful She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), in Ford’s unofficial trilogy isn’t quite as emotionally plangent as its immediate predecessor, nor as visually arresting as Fort Apache. But it occupies a nice middle-space between the two and is the least thematically and technically flawed of the trio. As beautiful as Winston Hoch’s Technicolor photography in Yellow Ribbon, Bert Glennon’s black-and-white images here are glorious, particularly in several day-for-night sequences including one in which John Wayne walks by the Rio Grande and, as Nancy Schoenberger notes in her commentary on the Olive Films Blu-ray, seems to merge with the landscape. There is also a moment, rare in John Ford’s oeuvre, in which the camera, fixed on a line of Conestogas moving under protection of the soldiers, pans swiftly to the left to reveal, with shocking suddenness, a phalanx of Indian warriors aiming their rifles at the approaching wagons.
The movie was based, like the other Calvary pictures, on a Saturday Evening Post story by James Warner Bellah (James Kevin McGuinness did the adaptation, with the usual uncredited input from Ford) and here the familial situation inside the fort is of greater importance than the external conflict with the Apache, although the latter is not slighted and the Native rituals are given greater prominence than in Fort Apache, presumably due to Ford’s close relationships with the Navaho in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah areas, the latter of which provided the backdrop for the picture, the Colorado River filling in for the Rio Grande. The community inside the fort is not a focus of the narrative this time, although the movie begins with the women seeking the faces of their men among the returning soldiers and climaxes with Maureen O’Hara eagerly looking for her husband (Wayne) and her son Jeff (Claude Jarman, Jr.) Eschewing the wider community view of the previous Cavalry pictures, McGuinness and Ford contrast the relations between Wayne and O’Hara, estranged since the Civil War, with that between Wayne and Jarman and with the camaraderie between Jarman and two of his fellow raw recruits (Ben Johnson and Harry Carey, Jr.) There is a greater emphasis on group music here, particularly by Ken Curtis and the Sons of the Pioneers, both formally (their serenading first of O’Hara and later of J. Carrol Naish’s General Philip Sheridan) and informally (the soldiers while on maneuvers or in small groups, as when Curtis, Jarman, Johnson and Carey sing Dale Evans’ charming if anachronistic “Aha! San Antone.”) That’s not to mention Victor Young’s rich musical score, the most memorable in the series.
While I wish Ford, or his editor Jack Murray, had not manipulated the action in post-production, speeding it up at crucial junctures, it should be said that the stunt work on Rio Grande is remarkable. How much of this is due to Ben Johnson I don’t know, but you can certainly see him at work in his role as the recruit Tyree (the name, incidentally, of his character in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), especially in his brief battle with three Apaches and in the “Roman-riding” sequence where he, Carey and Jarman all perform with extraordinary grace. I’ve asked before, rhetorically, in these pages whether Ben Johnson knew just how good he was as an actor. I suspect he didn’t, but Ford certainly did, and having starred Johnson previously in Wagon Master, created the role of Tyree and expanded it for him during filming. “Dobe” Carey likewise has a nice little role as “Sandy” Boone who in Texas fashion calls other men “Doc,” Chill Wills is in fine form as the regimental surgeon and Victor McLaglen is easier to take than usual in his Cavalry appearances, largely because Ford doesn’t indulge in as much as his obnoxious “drunken Irishman” comedy this time out. I’m not sure quite how to judge J. Carrol Naish’s performance as General Philip Sheridan, particularly since the great bone of contention between Wayne’s Lt. Colonel Kirby Yorke and O’Hara’s Kathleen Yorke is his burning of her plantation under Sheridan’s scorched-earth treatment of the Shenandoah Valley during the Civil War despite their being married and having a small child (the infant Jeff). Yet Kathleen is both solicitous of Sheridan and, seemingly, not only unruffled by his presence at the fort but charmed by it; the conception of him by Ford and McGuinness is almost more that of a kindly uncle than a soldier who’d ruthlessly burned women and children out of their land and homes 15 years earlier.
Wayne and O’Hara are beyond reproach, however. And although she’s at least a decade too young for the role O’Hara carries herself with such dignified authority she allows you to imagine she isn’t. The only discomfiting aspect of her performance — and its oddness is inherent in Ford’s direction — is when she seeks out the runaway Jeff and kisses his forehead, his nose and then his mouth; she’s more like a lover at that moment than a parent. Was Ford, infamously susceptible to blubbering mother-love sentiment in his pictures, telling us something?
Wayne had eased into his own age so imperceptibly it’s almost a shock to see him here with a receding hairline and looking his 43 years. (He’d played roles older than himself in Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon but he looked less like those characters in actual age than like an actor wearing rather good old-age makeup.) The scene between the couple in Kirby’s quarters, and the one that follows in which she is serenaded with “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” are beautifully observed by Ford and wonderfully acted by his stars; the way they sneak looks at each other, embarrassed when one catches the other at it, is a perfect depiction of an estranged pair who despite the reasons for that estrangement still feel deeply and yearningly about each other. It’s almost a rehearsal for Wayne and O’Hara’s roles, and performances, in The Quiet Man, and I suspect that’s how Ford approached it.
Speaking of The Quiet Man: Rio Grande was not a picture Ford wanted to make. It was one he was compelled to by Herbert Yates, the president of Republic Pictures, as a condition for permission to film that Kelly green Technicolor Irish rhapsody, the pet project Ford had been nursing since the 1930s. The joke was on Yates, however: Rio Grande, which he thought sure-fire, under-performed while The Quiet Man, in which he had no faith, was an enormous hit.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 