You know, if you picture a traditional movie Western, there’s a really good chance the movie probably features John Wayne and was also directed by John Ford. While the pair worked together many times and made movies that weren’t Westerns either together or separately, that is essentially what the pair are known for. And it’s not like they were friends or anything. From what I have read, Ford was highly abusive to Wayne (and pretty much everyone else) while on set. Still, they made a lot of Westerns together, including a loose trilogy about the U.S. Cavalry.
The second of the three, and the only one in color, is She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.
Cavalry Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne, only in his early 40s when he made the movie) is due to retire from the cavalry within a week. A frontier war is on the horizon if Brittles can’t fulfill one last mission: prevent the war and get the Cheyenne and Arapaho back to their reservations. Brittles’s fort is out in the middle of nowhere, and he doesn’t really want things to get violent. He’s been out there for a long time. His wife and two young children are buried there, and he’ll have one last patrol with his men to get things settled. That’ll be hard enough when the local Natives are feeling powerful following the recent defeat of George Armstrong Custer at Little Bighorn.
There’s not actually a lot of plot here, truth be told. Brittles heads out and has to deal with a variety of problems ranging from a love triangle between two of his officers and the daughter of his superior, impromptu surgery, and the commander’s wife, going along because Brittles is supposed to be escorting the women to somewhere safer. It’s actually a pleasant movie as a result, acting as more of a character study than anything else. Brittles is an older man now, one feeling his age and both looking forward to leaving the army and not really wanting to. Sure, he’s crossing days off on his calendar, but he wouldn’t mind sticking around since this has been his life.
By the by, that love triangle between Lt Cohill (John Agar), Lt Pennell (Harry Carey Jr), and Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru) didn’t exactly end in a shocking way, but it did remind me a lot of many more modern romantic subplots. There are two men who are in love with the same woman, one of whom is kind of a jerk or doofus (that’d be Carey) who has a bit of an attitude and is obviously not the guy for Olivia while Cohill is the down-to-earth guy who isn’t afraid to argue with the young woman. If anything, when the movie ends with the predictable outcome, Pennell seems to take it pretty well with a shrug and the knowledge he can just find someone else. He’s not really punished like some such characters are today, but the closest the movie comes to suggesting he might be at least a little heartbroken is the look on his face as the various couples pair off to dance and he’s alone. It just was something that struck me.
Now, granted, this is a movie from the 40s, so there are bound to be some parts, particularly anything with the Indians, that haven’t aged well. The cavalry’s ultimate victory is set up as something of a pro-Manifest Destiny sort of message where it all comes down to the birth of the United States as we know it today. But this isn’t the sort of the movie that I would think promotes that sort of thinking. It’s just a chance to see some soldiers go out on a mission, maybe prevent a war, and then go back and do it all over again the next day. There’s a bond and a camaraderie among the men, and near the end, Brittles’s First Sergeant, Quincannon (Victor McLaglen), likewise getting ready for retirement, takes his commander’s approval to get a drink while on duty in his civilian clothes, an incident that leads to Quincannon taking on seven soldiers at once and easily winning before allowing himself to be escorted to the guardhouse by the commander’s wife. It’s the sort of movie, I suppose, where giving the hard-drinking Irishman a comic relief fistfight is just something it does, and I had a lot of fun with it.
Grade: A-
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