Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Shirley Temple, John Agar. Dir. John Ford, Fox, 1948
Setting aside Disney's THE APPLE DUMPLING GANG, my first westerns were THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES and LITTLE BIG MAN. Given that, it does not surprise me that I gravitate to the revisionist western, often without consciously realizing it. I always thought of it as loving the underdog, but in all my favorite westerns the underdog is always the outlaw, the Native American, the figures the traditional western employs as its stock villains. Growing up in the shadow of Watergate and the end of the Vietnam War, it's perhaps a natural inclination to prefer the movies that questioned and/or rejected the common, received wisdom about the Old West.
Yesterday felt like a good day to watch westerns. As a child, the independent TV stations in my hometown tended to feature westerns on their weekend movie-blocks. Saturday and Sunday afternoons sing out to me to watch genre films, from THE SEARCHERS to DIRTY HARRY to THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, but especially the westerns. So, picking at random (I thought) I selected two classic and two underappreciated westerns with one thing in common: they're all antihero pictures, all revisionist westerns.
The running joke in this blog, up until now, has been that its address is Johnfordisgod.blogspot.com and yet it contains no writeups of any of Ford's pictures. That's attributable to sheer laziness on my part. I don't own a laptop or desktop. I do all this with my $65 Straight Talk burner, with which copying and pasting any of the hundreds of movies I've written up on Facebook over the last four years - at least 15 of them Ford titles - has proven impossible. Our local library restricts access to Gmail, Facebook, twitter, and Letterboxd and the University's library has been closed to non-students ever since the pandemic started last year, so I'm having to write all-new pieces on films I already wrote about with passion once. Don't know about anyone reading this but duplication of effort makes me a little crazier than usual.
Seen for my first time last Spring, FORT APACHE merits more than one effort. I grew up knowing about Gen. George Armstrong Custer and Sitting Bull and Little Big Horn, but not with the mythology of Custer-as-martyr in America's westward expansion. I think the best that can be said of the histories I encountered is they tended to be ambivalent about Custer. By the time I visited the Custer Memorial with my family when I was eight, I already understood Gen. Custer as a victim of his own hubris rather than some sort of tragic hero to revere.
I got lucky there. To many who saw FORT APACHE on its release in 1948, Custer defined the ideals of the romantic hero and great patriot. John Ford, a close student of US history, was having none of it, making what is largely recognized as the first American motion picture to see Custer as an incompetent ass who got his entire company massacred.
He does so in his own classic style, establishing his one enduring theme - the loss of community/family's effects on the individual - by spending the picture's first half building the world of a US cavalry outpost: the officers' wives and families, their social customs, and the low-comedy antics of the noncoms and recruits (played by Ford Stock Company regulars like Victor McLagen, Hank Worden, and Pedro Armandariz.) As in any Ford film, we know this community will be at least shaken to its core if not outright destroyed, but unlike many of his westerns the destroyers are not marauding Native Americans or black-hat gunslingers but the main character of the piece.
That character, Ford's stand-in for Custer, Lt. Col. Owen Thirsby, may be the main character but he's not the hero. Henry Fonda plays Thirsby as a Civil War hero whose dreams of glory, stymied by post-Civil War politics, have turned him into an embittered, brittle man always ready to blame others for his own failings, always certain of his own infallibility, never willing to hear opposing points of view even when he clearly doesn't understand his situation. Early in the movie, Thirsby assures his officers he is not "a martinet," before proceeding to give the lie to that claim in his every word and action. Fonda, one of our best actors, plays Thirsby as a humorless snob, a man with a Monument Valley-sized stick up his ass, a man absolutely sure his shit doesn't stink even as his officers walk around holding their noses. It's a career-defining performance in a career filled with same, from Ford's THE GRAPES OF WRATH to Mervyn LeRoy's MISTER ROBERTS to Leone's ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST to Mark Rydell's ON GOLDEN POND.
John Wayne's Capt. Kirby York is FORT APACHE's true hero and it's one of my favorite Wayne performances. By 1956's THE SEARCHERS Wayne had perfected his enraged-man persona yet in FORT APACHE, where rage would be the minimum reaction to a vain and self-destructive force like Thirsby, Wayne doesn't come across angry, and he does not swagger. He's the soul both of Fort Apache's community as well as of the movie, itself. Wayne always did his best work with Ford, and Kirby York runs in a dead heat with THE SEARCHERS' Ethan Edwards as Wayne's acme.
Shirley Temple, who had worked with Ford previously on WEE WILLIE WINKY, only did two roles as an adult before retiring to concentrate on a career in public service, and her role as Philadelphia Thirsby, Owen's headstrong daughter, makes me wonder what might have been. She's terrific here, all those years as a child star paying off in a seemingly effortless, naturalistic performance which sees her make mincemeat of poor John Agar, her on- & off-screen suitor. Married for only a couple years, the two don't have to act at all to show the audience how crazy they are for each other.
Then, as now, audiences know Custer's fate going into the picture. That helps cement Ford's reputation as perhaps the greatest director in Golden Age Hollywood for me, because FORT APACHE's final battle sequence and Cochise's charge at Thirsby's pinned-down command leaves me breathless. To know what's coming, in a general way, and yet still feel devastated by the specific vision is one of the great pleasures of being a film fan, and particularly a Ford lover. Though THE SEARCHERS is often cited as Ford's magnum opus, I have to give FORT APACHE the edge. Between the two, I had to completely rethink my top ten films of all time. Whatever one thinks of Ford - his cult of haters must rival his cult of admirers in both size and vitriol - it's impossible for me not to credit him with redirecting the conversation about Custer as a great American hero. Which makes FORT APACHE not only one of the great revisionist westerns but one of the more important films in US history. I did not choose Johnfordisgod as my email addy and blog name on a whim.
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