Casting Henry Fonda, longtime hero of Ford’s earlier films, as the arrogant and wrongheaded Colonel Thursday, and Duke Wayne as the truly heroic, if conflicted, Captain York, marks an interesting stage in Ford’s expression of the American hero. Part of it has to do with sheer physical presence—for John Ford, size mattered. His heroes (and antiheroes) were, increasingly, outsized men with impressive physiques—George O’Brien in The Iron Horse, Victor McLaglen in The Informer, John Wayne of course, and brawny Ward Bond, often the hero’s second-in-command.
Henry Fonda, tall but lean, lacks the burly physique that makes natural-born leaders out of O’Brien, McLaglen, Bond, and Wayne. Fonda is more convincing playing outsiders and loners struggling for a place in the sun—Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a Wyatt Earp who reluctantly takes up the post of sheriff in My Darling Clementine, and Abraham Lincoln as a young country lawyer no one expects to achieve great things in Young Mr. Lincoln. These characters are complex, somewhat intellectual; they stand at an oblique angle to the world, are forced by circumstances to act and to lead. They embody the reluctant hero model that anchors Ford’s earlier films: a man who is nuanced and sometimes skeptical of what he has to do, but as the hero he does it anyway.
After World War II, Ford’s idealized hero became less nuanced, less introspective. He moved away from Fonda and increasingly replaced him with John Wayne and his ilk, whose valor and leadership are immediately obvious and who instinctively take command with little or no soul-searching. One film critic likened it to replacing a first wife who had become troublesome with a more pliable second wife; though Wayne’s persona was never pliable, the actor himself remained grateful and obedient to John Ford throughout his lifetime.
On Fort Apache, Ford bullied and enraged Fonda, to the point of making him cry. “I literally saw tears coming out of Henry Fonda’s eyes on Fort Apache,” recalled Michael Wayne, the actor’s son who had accompanied his father to Monument Valley. Years later, Ford would famously break with Fonda when he took over the direction of Mister Roberts, bullying the cast Fonda had transported from the drama’s long-running Broadway incarnation and causing such strife on the set that Ford ended up punching Fonda in the nose. The two never spoke again.
Another difference between Fonda’s Colonel Thursday and the other men at Fort Apache is Thursday’s pinched humorlessness. Victor McLaglen’s Sergeant Mulcahy especially provides comic relief as a hard-drinking, brawling Irishman who lands in the brig with two cohorts after drinking up the illegal firewater being sold to the Apaches by a nefarious Bureau of Indian Affairs agent. The cavalrymen express their camaraderie with jokes and banter, all of which offends Thursday. But what really marks Thursday as a failed leader is his complete misjudgment of the enemy, the Apache nation.
Captain York, who respects the valor and bravery of Cochise (Miguel Inclan), the great Apache tribal chief, promises his war party safe passage back to the reservation, but Thursday goes against that promise and plans an attack. York is furious that Thursday has made a liar out of him, violating his sense of honor, and he recognizes that the battle Thursday has planned will lead his men into a box canyon where they will be slaughtered. It’s a suicide march, and York knows it, but no one can convince Thursday otherwise. Thursday is motivated not just by his low regard of the Apache warriors but by his realization that a victory against Cochise would bring him personal glory, redeeming his demotion to what he considers an ignominious post.
On the cusp of the disastrous battle, unable to change Thursday’s mind and blinded by righteous anger, York breaks rank, literally throws down his gauntlet challenging his superior officer to a duel, and is of course immediately ordered to leave the battlefield to be court-martialed. Sending York to the back of the lines, he orders young Mickey O’Rourke to go with him, a tacit acknowledgment that York may be right about the impending slaughter and an effort to keep O’Rourke alive to marry his daughter. If Thursday has had a change of heart about O’Rourke’s suitability as a son-in-law, it’s only because he’s now facing the prospect of his own death, which would leave his daughter orphaned. It’s a moment of insight that things will not go his way, but it’s too late to change the course of events and still remain the leader he believes himself to be.
The rest is history. All the men are slaughtered, but Thursday makes one last, heroic stand with his men, taking a fatal arrow for one of his soldiers. York witnesses it.
Fast-forward to several years later. York is visited by journalists asking for his comment on a famous painting heroically portraying Thursday’s last battle against the Apaches. Was he really the valiant warrior depicted in the painting, which has made Thursday the hero of schoolboys everywhere? York now has his moment of truth: Should he tell them what really happened, or let the falsehood, now legend, stand?
York, who now commands Fort Apache, defends Colonel Thursday’s honor. Yes, it was just as it’s portrayed in the painting, he lies, and as we see him don the same uniform as his ignoble predecessor, he makes it clear that the legend should be preserved to uphold the honor of the cavalry and the men who will carry on its tradition. The cohesiveness of the cavalry is worth more than the truth. If Captain York was disloyal to Colonel Thursday in life, in death he proves his enduring loyalty both to the institution and to the memory of Thursday’s last act of heroism, fighting to the death alongside his doomed men. In York’s eyes, that final act has redeemed Thursday’s terrible blunder, brought about through ignorance, stubbornness, and pride.
To a contemporary audience, it seems a shocking conclusion. We know the truth, yet here is the film’s hero, the character with whom we most identify, perpetuating the lie. By preserving the esprit de corps at the expense of truth, Fort Apache eerily foreshadows the Vietnam War roughly fifteen years later, the conflict that made America question itself, that turned generations against each other and against the military, ending the draft. As in Fort Apache, the Vietnam War hinged on underestimating and reviling the enemy as savages, less than human, and without honor. Curiously, John Wayne’s Captain York takes the position of the man who refuses to fight in a battle he knows is unwinnable because it’s based on wrongful contempt for and ignorance of the enemy and the battlefield. In this instance, it’s Wayne who’s the pacifist!
The audience sides with Wayne’s character because his is the side of truth, and yet Ford backs away from that daring refusal to fight a lost cause based on false premises. Instead, he resolves that the purpose and the glory of the military unit are worth more than individual battles, right or wrong. Again Fort Apache works as a paradigm for the ill-fated Vietnam War several decades later: those who defended the war often did so by claiming that America’s glory and self-image were at stake and that the United States needed to act out of loyalty to its allies, no matter the cost of an unwinnable war. For those in the military, the sacred rule is to always follow the chain of command, to show obedience and respect to the rank, if not the man—in other words, unquestioning loyalty. For those not in the military, blind loyalty is far harder to stomach.
At the end of the battle, Captain York orders Mickey O’Rourke to “go back and marry that girl!” meaning the colonel’s daughter. The directive is as much a continuation of the officer’s legacy as a sentimental recognition of the couple’s love for each other. For Ford, at least in the Cavalry Trilogy’s first two films, the importance of marriage lies in its preservation of continuity—especially male continuity—and indeed Philadelphia and Michael have a baby boy at the end of the movie, no doubt headed to West Point one day. Perhaps that’s the deeper reason that Thursday ordered York to take Michael safely with him, behind the fray, so he could marry his daughter and produce a male heir, carrying on the military tradition.
Mission accomplished.
Like Alfred Hitchcock, Ford returned to the same themes and milieus throughout his long and productive career, and the value of myth would occupy him again in later films, most famously at the end of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, when
newspaper editor Maxwell Scott actually says, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” But does Ford believe that the “legend”—that is, the myth—is more important than the truth? Does it just have to do with storytelling, the basic business of the movies? In Ford’s films, to what extreme will men go to protect the legend? Captain York is portrayed as a truth teller with respect for and understanding of the Apaches, but he does the unthinkable: he disobeys orders. Yet he ends up as commander of the outpost, following in Thursday’s (wrongfully) hallowed footsteps. For John Ford, Captain York’s refusal to loyally follow the disastrous orders of his commanding officer is the right thing to do, but so is remaining loyal to the memory of Colonel Thursday for the sake of the cavalry.
So in Fort Apache, it seems Ford wanted it both ways: to recognize York’s courage in refusing to fight, and to insist on the importance of maintaining esprit de corps. In real life, that is almost impossible to do. Ford knew that history is replete with myths that crowd out truth. Peter Bogdanovich has noted, “A lot of people thought that in that last scene in Fort Apache, Duke was making an apologia for Fonda’s character; it wasn’t that at all. The conception was that the spirit of the army was more important than the misdirection, or the racism, of one leader. It wasn’t an apologia: he’s not saying that Fonda was right but that history would say that Fonda was right.”
This level of subtlety and ambiguity exists throughout Fort Apache. On the surface, Ford’s is an idealized world of honorable men living, working, and soldiering alongside each other, with their women providing emotional support. Yet the movie is replete with moral ambiguities and subtle hierarchies of power, such as when Ward Bond orders Lieutenant Colonel Thursday out of his house, because within his own home the master of the house has authority over his superior officer. An important nicety for Ford, who, at least in his movies if not in real life, celebrated the sanctity of the home and, more important, gave male societies a certain cozy domesticity.
But after his service in the Field Photographic Branch of World War II, and subsequent decoration as honorary admiral in his beloved navy, Ford’s belief in the military became an absolute, replacing his more nuanced view of what it meant to be a hero. His American hero—increasingly embodied by John Wayne—would eventually become an inflexible, tough-minded, solitary man, sacrificing all for patriotism and the cohesiveness of the military.
SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON
In Yellow Ribbon, the second film in the trilogy, heroic nuance is, thankfully, still in play. There are two tender scenes that belie any attempt to paint the stock Wayne hero as a gun-happy alpha male, one in particular that Ford—a merciless taskmaster but a sentimentalist after all—later said he felt was John Wayne’s greatest acting. Late in the film, cavalry post commander Captain Nathan Brittles says farewell to his troops on the day of his retirement and receives a silver watch as a token of their appreciation and respect. Playing a middle-aged man who must fish out his reading glasses to read the inscription on the back of the watch, Wayne brushes away a tear and then blusters his way through the rest of the scene. If nothing else, Ford’s admiration for this scene tells us a lot about John Ford.
Then there is the scene where Wayne’s Captain Brittles waters the flowers on the grave of his deceased wife, Mary, pouring out his heart to her. It’s an unusual scene. Although strong women do emerge in Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy, the emotional center of each film is found in the camaraderie of men—soldiers, sons, and commanding officers. Women primarily exist as the worthy objects of soldiers’ gallantry or as supportive military wives and daughters, but the important struggles occur among men, and the highest form of loyalty is always to the corps.
In Fort Apache, for example, Anna Lee plays Emily Collingwood, Captain Sam Collingwood’s wife. She is reluctant to see her husband riding off to one last battle under Colonel Thursday’s orders on the eve of his retirement, but she displays the loyalty of a good army wife by insisting it’s the choice Collingwood had to make to remain a good soldier—the highest good available to him and to all the men at Fort Apache. Joanne Dru, who co-starred in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, felt that Ford “really didn’t relate to women. I’ve often thought that Papa had tremendous insecurities—never regarding his talent, but as a man. He surrounded himself with these big, strong bruisers. He was an emotional man and a man of many moods.”
Duke Wayne as cavalry officer Captain Nathan Brittles in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon in 1949. This was Ford’s favorite performance of Wayne’s.
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon acknowledges the importance of women in the masculine world of the military, albeit in a limited capacity, beginning with the title of the film. “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” is a marching song used by the military to keep cadence, but it refers to the custom of young women wearing a yellow ribbon in tribute to a sweetheart in the army. Unlike Fort Apache, the title shifts focus away from an entirely homosocial setting to one that pays attention to women who would, through marriage, become soldiers’ wives, which Ford saw as a great calling.
Few women are “army enough to stay the winter,” as the commander’s wife, Mrs. Abbey Allshard, played by Mildred Natwick, says about her visiting niece, Olivia Dandridge, played by Joanne Dru, whose insistence at being escorted from Fort Starke to a stagecoach depot brings about a military disaster. Being “army enough to stay the winter” is an admirable trait in Ford’s universe; though their character is tested in somewhat different ways, women have to prove their toughness and their worth as much as men do.
In Yellow Ribbon, the cavalry is at war with Cheyenne and Arapaho braves who have been stirred up by the defeat of George Armstrong Custer and further encouraged by a mystical sign: the return of buffalo to their hunting grounds. Olivia’s presence on a rescue mission has slowed down the cavalry’s progress across the desert, so when they arrive at the stagecoach depot, only a few wounded soldiers and terrified women and children are left alive. The slaughter has already taken place, claiming the outpost’s commanding officer and his wife. Their mission aborted, the cavalry brings the survivors back to headquarters at Fort Starke, doubling up on their horses as they rescue the survivors.
Again, McLaglen plays a heavy-drinking, comic Irishman—Sergeant Quincannon—who is feminized despite his brawn and fighting prowess by his concern and care for the traumatized orphans. He rides back to the fort with a young boy on his horse, taking time to pull on a whiskey flask as he explains that it contains necessary medicine—“tastes awful!” he lies. But the tenderness he shows to the massacre survivor is undercut when McLaglen, back at Fort Starke, gets drunk in the bar and knocks out a small cadre of men sent to haul him to the brig. Ford loved these comic brawls, just as he loved poking fun at the image of the drunken Irishman, who is almost always a sympathetic figure who often rises to heroism.
Sergeant Quincannon is also part of the element that domesticates the masculine milieu of the cavalry, even to the point of referring to his commanding officer, his friend Captain Brittles, with the Irish term of affection “darlin’.” Another homey touch is the presence of a lazy dog who lies in the dirt during roll call, confounding McLaglen’s attempt at corps discipline.
McLaglen had been a formidable figure in his youth—a boxer who had gone fifteen rounds with Jack Johnson—a tough guy who became a gentle giant and whom Ford used not just for comic relief but, ironically, to embody the calmer, even feminine aspects of the soldier’s life. In all three films, McLaglen rescues children imperiled by Indian raids and provides for their comfort. That this sentimental role is taken on by the biggest, toughest, and burliest of Ford’s actors is part of the director’s genius, revealing his complexity by undercutting, or diluting, his long howl of praise for robust, masculine men. While the insight that men who are confident in their masculinity can be nurturing escaped Ford in the practice of his private life, it may be that McLaglen is Ford’s artistic stand-in: a big, tough guy on the outside—still very much a brawler, a drinker, and an Irishman—but a sentim
ental nurturer within. “My grandfather’s macho image was part of his time,” Dan Ford explained. “He was a Hemingway type of guy, a Bogart type of guy. He was a man’s man—hard drinking, carousing—and he enjoyed the company of men over women. That’s the way men were supposed to be in his day. The people associated with him were the same.”
One of the most moving scenes in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon occurs when Captain Brittles, who has now retired from the army and feels he can act alone, confronts Pony That Walks, the old chief of the Arapahos—played by John Big Tree, a Seneca—and both men regret the impending war between their nations. “We are too old for war. Old men should stop war,” they agree, knowing that their soldiers and braves will not listen to old men. As in Fort Apache, we see John Wayne as a peacemaker, with the implication that men who have seen war are cautious about starting wars.
Ford had complicated and complex feelings about Native Americans. They are depicted as mysterious and formidable enemies in The Iron Horse, indelibly communicated by the shadow of Indian warriors on horseback thrown against a locomotive. A line of warriors suddenly appearing against the horizon has become a cliché of Westerns, but it was Ford who perfected that ominous shot. In Stagecoach they are ruthless marauders, but in the first two films of the Cavalry Trilogy, Ford’s Native Americans are capable of both savagery—the slaughter of cavalrymen, women, and children—and a certain nobility, which is found in the tribal chiefs and elders.
His view was softened by the Navajo people in Monument Valley, whom Ford befriended and hired as extras in the films made there. The Navajo nation had been hard hit by the Great Depression and by fierce winters, so when Ford first arrived, they were experiencing starvation conditions. “The Navajo loved it when there was a movie coming,” recalled Mike Goulding, who owned the Goulding ranch that housed Ford while on location. “They’d travel in their wagons from a long way off. They wanted jobs, and they got a big lunch when they worked for Mr. John [Ford]. He always said the Navajo were natural-born actors,” and he considered many of them his friends. Rio Grande, though somewhat harsher than its two predecessors in depicting the brutality of Indian attacks, acknowledges Native American culture by showing ritual songs and dances, and indeed Ford’s significant use of the Navajos of Monument Valley adds authenticity to his depiction of the Indian nations.
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