No questions

Fort Apache

(1948)

The first and best of John Ford's cavalry triad, maybe the best cinematic treatment of the Indian wars full-stop, certainly decades ahead of its time in sociohistorical consciousness of the terms of the conflict and the share of blame falling on the white man. It also goes a long way toward disproving the conventional wisdom that John Wayne couldn't act, though it does nothing to suggest that the postpubescent Shirley Temple had any business in front of a camera, or that John Agar was ever in any danger of committing drama. Their young love story could have been happily cut and the film brought in 15 minutes shorter and better.

Finally, the most interesting and bizarre element--looking ahead to the "print the legend" epilogue of Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance--is the coda in which Wayne's Kirby York, now in command of the regiment we've seen nearly wiped out by the Custeresque blundering of Colonel Owen Thursday (Henry Fonda), feeds the fatuous mythmaking of the ignorant press. "No man ever died more valiantly," York says (or words to that effect), and here he's on fairly solid ground: Thursday was a terrible tactician in the face of an enemy he didn't understand and treated with racist contempt, but he didn't lack for courage and refused an opportunity to escape his doomed men's fate. But then you almost see York screwing up his own courage for the Big Lie: "Or brought greater honor to the regiment." Well, honor in the sense of Rick Blaine's "Yesterday they were just two German couriers; now they're 'the honored dead'": if dying for a cause is honor, no matter how stupidly the death is offered up, then the regiment was bathed in bloody glory under Thursday.

And yet the cavalry and the army come off looking good: after laboring to praise Thursday, York then segues effortlessly into the most trite platitudes about the institutions, and you get the idea that Ford buys them too. I guess the idea is that slinging horseshit (done literally earlier in the film, incidentally) about the occasional Custer, the occasional Thursday, is a small price to pay in service of the greater truth about the honor of the army. Interesting, whether true or not.