March 2006

John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy: Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and Rio Grande

The picture to the right shows John Ford’s director’s chair. It resides at Goulding’s Trading Post, which was set up in the 1920s in Utah, on the Navajo Nation, by Harry Goulding and his wife, Leonne, better known as "Mike," to buy Navajo jewelry and arts and to sell food, clothing, and day-to-day necessities. John Ford’s main connection with Native Americans prior to coming to Goulding’s in the late 1930s had been in Hollywood, either meeting them as actors or hearing tales from people like Wyatt Earp. Harry Goulding convinced Ford to come to Monument Valley to film, hoping to help the poverty-stricken Navajo of the Depression get work. Then as now, the only place to stay in Monument Valley was Goulding’s.

Ford got on well with the Navajo. They made him a member of the tribe, naming him Natani Nez, or Tall Leader (Ford was 6’ tall). The Navajo loved Ford, and he loved them. When he was making a film, jobs were abundant, pay was at union scale (even though the Navajo weren’t union), Ford showed respect for their culture (he hired one of their medicine men, Hosteen Tso, to make sure the weather cooperated with the filming schedule), and the Navajo were proud to see themselves on screen. But it went beyond that. When a terrible snowstorm hit Monument Valley in December 1948, Ford airlifted food for the people and hay for the horses and cattle. And if families needed money between films, all they had to do was ask, and a check would show up in the mail. It’s important to understand this shared affection before you step into the world of Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy.

Ford had served in World War II, during which he rose to the rank of Admiral. He was a great believer in the Armed Services, loving the rituals and systems of order. What he never believed in were small-minded despots, young officers who tried to push around seasoned enlisted men. In fact, Ford hated authority figures of all sorts, and was notorious for spitting in the eye of any Hollywood mogul who tried to bully him. Sometimes literally.

Many writers have had a hard time juxtaposing Ford’s seemingly contradictory stances toward the military and Native Americans, thinking he couldn’t simultaneously be pro-Cavalry and pro-Indian. But it’s really quite simple. What you should be prepared to see in a Ford western are honorable Indians who are willing to fight dirty to protect their land, straight-talking service lifers, and sneaky, backstabbing officers trying to work their way up on the backs of honest grunts. Good people, both Indian and Cavalry, die because of mistakes made from above, but the soldiers in the Cavalry survive by depending on each other. Like the details of the plots, these givens are ultimately unimportant in the final understanding of Ford’s westerns. What matters is how all of these things change the characters. While you’ll see characters’ actions shifting in these films as their stories unfold, in a Ford film the internal changes a character is going through are always revealed in the eyes. Watch their eyes.

The Cavalry Trilogy is not a trilogy like The Lord of the Rings. It’s not a continuing story, and while John Wayne stars in all three, he plays a different character in each. Ford himself could never call it a trilogy because of the problem of distribution. All three were made by Argosy Productions, the company owned by Ford and the miracle-working Merian C. Cooper (profiled in my review of the original King Kong), but the first two were distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, the last by Republic Pictures. Even today, you can buy a CD boxed set comprising songs recorded by Johnny Cash for every label he ever signed to, but no one in the US has been able to talk Warner Bros. and Republic into pooling their wealth and releasing a historic boxed set of Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy. Assembling one will take a bit of legwork on your part.

The first film is the hardest to find. Fort Apache (1948) is available on DVD only in Korea and Germany, and I can’t vouch for the quality of either. The good news is that Turner Classic Movies shows it all the time -- all you need is a DVD recorder and you’ll have a good copy for yourself. This film is the one that gives Ford critics the hardest time. Henry Fonda plays a George Custer-ish character, Lieutenant Colonel Owen Thursday, who has been recently demoted after his successes in the Civil War and, in his opinion, shunted off to no-man’s-land. Thursday’s only goal is to kill enough Indians that the war office back in Washington notices him and brings him home. Fonda plays the role with a rigid backbone, few redeeming qualities, and, ultimately, little redemption. Wayne plays Captain Kirby York, a veteran who enjoys the support of his men, and who is recalcitrant enough to be a problem for Thursday, though not enough of one to be court-martialed. Thursday’s daughter, Philadelphia, played by 20-year-old Shirley Temple, is in love with an enlisted man, strictly against her father’s wishes.

What tends to throw the casual Ford fan is the ending, which turns on Capt. York’s apparent change of heart. As always with Ford, the story’s events serve to create change in the characters. Wayne’s stance is both a toughening of formality and a sentimental, heartfelt piece of re-examination. It makes perfect sense if you understand Ford’s stance on military order.

Lt. Col. Thursday is a racist. But in his role as York, Wayne, in many ways Ford’s alter ego, forges a relationship with the Indians based on honor and mutual respect. While Fonda gets opportunities to chew the scenery, Wayne tries to come to grips with the fact that he has more respect for his "enemy" than for his C.O., all the while reserving his greatest respect for the US Cavalry. The ending, which seems to confuse so many writers, is really the most intelligent solution to how Wayne can honor his own beliefs.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) is one of the greatest westerns ever made -- indeed, one of the greatest films in any genre. Filmed in Technicolor and Panavision, it fully captures the beauty of Arizona and Utah’s Monument Valley. Winton C. Hoch won an Oscar for Best Color Cinematography for his gorgeous shots, which even today will take your breath away.

John Wayne plays Captain Nathan Cutting Brittles, who, six days short of retiring in 1876, is asked to escort two ladies, Olivia Dandridge and Abby Allshard (Joanne Dru and Mildred Natwick), to a stage depot so they can return to an existence more proper than life at a Cavalry fort. The problem is that the Indians are on the warpath, and Brittles is intent on making it through his last six days without killing anyone or losing any of his troops.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon focuses more on day-to-day life at a frontier fort than on thorny plot complications -- to some, it may be a bit too gemütlich and pastoral to even pass as a western. In fact, Ford aims straight at the tear ducts three different times during the film. In chapter 5, Brittles walks out to a graveyard, sits by the graves of his wife and two children, then has a sweet conversation with his wife’s tombstone -- the sort of chitchat you’d have over breakfast, but so touching for her absence. In chapter 15, they bury three people, one a Confederate General who’s been passing incognito as Trooper John Smith. The Civil War was still fresh on everyone’s minds in 1876, and the generosity shown by Brittles, the compassion shown by Abby Allshard (played with frontier gumption by Mildred Natwick), and the concern of the other clandestine Confederates is heartbreaking. Finally, in chapter 24, Brittles is shown the affection his troops feel for him in a moment of true grace. This film’s ending is the happiest of the three: just rewards for a bunch of good people.

In the third film, Rio Grande (1950), Wayne plays Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke, though there’s little here to lead us to believe that this Kirby Yorke is the Kirby York of Fort Apache (note the different spellings). The Yorke of Rio Grande is a hard-assed, by-the-book officer who learns that one of his new recruits is his own son, Jefferson Yorke (Claude Jarman, Jr.), who has just dropped out of West Point. Yorke’s estranged wife, Kathleen, played with fiery abandon by the lovely Maureen O’Hara in her first film with Wayne, comes west to demand that her son be freed to go home. Rio Grande is jammed with military pomp, folk songs sung by the Sons of the Pioneers (who sound gorgeous), and peppered with a little romance and the occasional bit of action.

As in the other two films, Victor McLaglen provides larger-than-life comic relief as a hard-drinking, brawling, sentimental Sergeant, this one named -- as he was in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon -- Timothy Quincannon. McLaglen and Ford were drinking buddies, and McLaglen had been the star of Ford’s first Oscar-winning film, The Informer (1935). Ford kept McLaglen working in his films until The Quiet Man (1952), when the actor was 70 and declining health had reduced his ability to go on long binges. (McLaglen continued working in films and TV until his death, in 1959.) One of McLaglen’s great assets was his plastic face, made so expressive by the pits and lines the actor had earned as a prizefighter around the turn of the century -- he even fought Jack Johnson. He was 67 when he made Rio Grande, and at 6’ 3", with shoulders as broad as an ox, he could probably still take most men on the set.

Other stock players who appeared in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and shine again in Rio Grande are Harry Carey, Jr. and Ben Johnson (who appears as Travis Tyree in both films). Carey, Sr. had worked with Ford in the silent era, and Ford always took an interest in his son. Johnson was a true cowboy whom Ford had plucked out of a crowd. Watch these two in chapter 6, when they go "Roman riding" -- standing on the backs of two horses, one foot on each horse, jumping fences at full gallop. No CGI here. These were tough hombres doing their own stunts.

As in the two earlier films, Rio Grande’s strength is its focus on the characters. The difference between a Ford film and most of what’s seen in American films today is that Ford made movies about people’s daily lives, sometimes exploring minutiae of those lives in order to give us the feel of the character, then adding some action as seasoning. Today, the vast majority of films made in this country are primarily action; we feel grateful for even a soupçon of character development.

Alfred Hitchcock always believed that the action was meaningless and should be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible so the audience could settle down to delve into its effects on the characters. Ford didn’t go quite so far. He knew how to build to an action climax with the best of them, but the action was always in the service of showing us more about the characters we were already living with in our imaginations. Powerful stuff, and precisely what made Ford one of the greatest -- perhaps the greatest -- directors who ever lived.

Ford was the very first recipient, in 1973, of the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award. Orson Welles, who is frequently mentioned as the greatest director, considered Ford to be the best director of all time. Ford’s peers -- directors such as Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and especially the foreign directors Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut -- put Ford at or near the top. He won more Oscars for Best Director than anyone before or since.

But for all the honors Ford has received, nothing matches what the Navajo have done.

A few months ago, I made a pilgrimage to Goulding’s Trading Post to try to get a feeling of what it must have been like for Ford and his cast and crew to be isolated hundreds of miles from the closest city, with only Goulding’s and the Navajo people. Though tourism has helped make Goulding’s a bit more accessible, it’s still primitive. Inside the trading post are pictures of Ford and the stars, along with such memorabilia as Ford’s director’s chair. Outside, stunning vistas are everywhere. No other place on earth feels like Monument Valley.

We went for a long drive down a dirt road to see some of the gorgeous rock formations. We saw only a small portion of these, though from a high vantage point on a clear day you can see a good deal of the Navajo Nation’s 27,000 square miles. It is some of the most beautiful desert country on earth. In the middle of the Nation is a point. When you get out to the tip, you see a 360-degree view; when you stand right at the point, it’s as if you’re suspended in the middle of space. Of all the Navajos’ blessed territory, all those thousands of square miles, this is the single most beautiful spot, the one with the most breathtaking view. They have named this spot John Ford Point. Natani Nez would be proud.

...Wes Marshall
wesm@hometheatersound.com

• Go Back