Cheyenne Autumn

CHEYENNE AUTUMN         C-  
USA  (154 mi)  1964  d:  John Ford

Even a dog can go where he likes... but not a Cheyenne.    —Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland)

No self-respecting Quaker could fall in love with a soldier.    
—Deborah Wright (Carroll Baker)

An apologetic film that attempts to right the wrongs of the racist and historically inaccurate portrayal of Indians in the John Ford mythology, one the director is responsible for creating throughout his storied career, where he unapologetically portrays Indians as savages while anointing the white settlers and Cavalry officers to noble American heroes, where the contrast between the two differing characterizations couldn’t be more imposingly different, where in Ford’s filmography, whites are the master race, the one’s with superior intellect and culture, and the only ones to ever display any hint of personality and character, where we never follow the lives or families of Indians, who were never seen in a sympathetic light and never written into the storyline of the films except to be killed, as Indians were utilized only as barbarous objects standing in the way of civilized white progress, where their eradication is always seen as boldly heroic and noble, as if this is how the West was won.  Even if nothing could be further from the truth, this is the West as John Ford tells it, building his career on capturing the so-called authenticity of the Old West in his westerns, becoming the most esteemed movie director of the entire western movie genre.  Simultaneously fixated on the beads and buckskins of the plains Indians, Ford brought his cameras outdoors to the breathtaking desert topography of the Southwest’s Monument Valley, both of which he described were for “aesthetic reasons,” where generations of moviegoers were led to believe that western Kansas looks just like northern Arizona, where the territories of the Commanches and the Cheyenne are indistinguishable from that of the Apaches.  Ford made seven Monument Valley westerns, which is actually located on Navajo Indian Territory, where the untranslated Indian dialogue is in Navajo, not Cheyenne, and he was proud about employing Navajos as movie extras, though he paid them less than what he paid whites, winning Academy Award nominations for two of the pictures, STAGECOACH (1939) and THE SEARCHERS (1956), while the others include MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946), FORT APACHE (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), which won Best Cinematography, WAGON MASTER (1950), and CHEYENNE AUTUMN, also nominated for Best Cinematography. 

CHEYENNE AUTUMN is what you might call a patronizing view of Indians, where only whites can be trusted to tell the “right” story to the audience, so in the end, despite its obvious sympathies for the plight of the Indian, it is equally misguided with its overly stiff and near cardboard cut-out, Hollywood portrait of Indians, starting with the miscasting of Cheyenne chiefs Dull Knife and Little Wolf with Gilbert Roland and Ricardo Montalbán, while Red Shirt is played by Sal Mineo, who never utters a word, while an Indian wife known only as Spanish Woman is played by Dolores del Rio.  Making the case that the Hollywood studios just couldn’t find Indians capable of playing themselves on screen “convincingly,” they instead consistently hired whites or Hispanics to impersonate Indians in a more “believable” manner.  This practice backfired, as the wooden performances are projections of Indians as stereotypes, where nothing more detailed or complex was ever written for them.  This is in stark contrast to the meticulously researched book that inspired the film, written by Mari Sandoz who wrote extensively about pioneer life and the Plains Indians, known for her attention to detail.  She was not used as a consultant on the film, though she was available, where Ford’s screenwriter James R. Webb, and the near stolen contribution of Howard Fast’s The Last Frontier (whose left-wing politics Ford despised, so he was not credited or paid for his story), literally combine to include the absurd presence of a pacifist white Quaker teacher (Carroll Baker) driving her buggy with the desperately fleeing Cheyennes during the 1878 Breakout, when a band of less than 300 Cheyenne Indians decide to flee from Oklahoma Indian Territory, a makeshift reservation where they had been sent by the U.S. government, which then failed to provide adequate food and shelter, causing an epidemic of famine and disease where more than 700 of them died, so they escaped to their original Wyoming homeland in the Yellowstone country mostly walking on foot, avoiding the chasing U.S. Cavalry troupe led by the film narrator, Richard Widmark as Captain Thomas Archer, who had orders to return them to the reservation.  The inclusion of an attractive white teacher among the Indians softens the genocidal implications of what was actually done to the Cheyennes, inappropriately and inaccurately generating Indian sympathy through her “whiteness.”  Even in a film that attempts to portray Indians in a sympathetic light, highlighting the historical implications of grievous mistreatment, John Ford requires the presence of whites to generate the sympathy.    

Ironically, it was white activists from the 60’s who were protesting the war, fighting for Civil Rights, or even making movies in Hollywood who were predisposed to think well of American Indians.  Following the Kennedy assassination, the nation was charged with emotion, led by youth protests publicly demonstrating against an increasingly unpopular war, where change was the order of the day.  It was in this rapidly changing social and political climate, attempting to deliver a film in step with the liberal mood of the country that Ford made CHEYENNE AUTUMN, using the American Indian as a metaphor against oppressed people.  Reflecting back on his own legacy, Ford reevaluated his own role when he previously turned a blind eye to the idea of Indians not only as an oppressed people, but mystical and in harmony with their natural environment.  This film goes against the grain of everything John Ford stood for, where he fictionalized events to create mythical white heroes, which were extremely popular with the public, while here he bases the film on the Fort Robinson tragedy, an actual historical incident, destroying the legend that he himself created, which may be one of the reasons it was less successful.  Contrary to the previous methodology of Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy pitting two conflicting forces against one another, Captain Archer is actually an admirer of the people he is ordered to chase across the American plains, a nearly decimated people, the reservation Indians, whose arduous trek marching across nearly 1500 miles of heat and dirt and snow and ice only reinforces his admiration.  The point being, once you remove the blinders of the Hollywood stereotype and the reality of the situation comes into focus, respect and justice can finally occur.  The problem lies in the distorted imagery.  No clearer example of this exists than the scene where a cowboy shoots down an unarmed Cheyenne begging for food, where the cowboy sentiment is reflected in his view that “I always wanted to kill me an Indian,” because he’s the only one of his friends not to have an Indian scalp.  Cold-blooded murder is justified in his eyes based on the racist imagery.  Ford follows this with a host of wildly exaggerated newspaper headlines, each one a greater distortion of the truth than the last, until one publisher finally insists, “From now on we’re going to grieve for the noble red man.  We’ll sell more papers that way.”  This seems to be the sentiment behind this film, which ironically was a box office flop, showing perhaps how out of step Ford was with the times, where both he and his iconic movie star John Wayne, incidentally, were two of the most outspoken supporters in favor of the Vietnam War.   

The opening credit sequence of Frederic Remington Indian sculptures suggest shedding a different light, showing, finally, a nobility in being Indian, and while the beautiful panoramic vistas of Monument Valley are used to wondrous effect as visual poetry, this time telling the story from the Indian’s point of view (though narrated by a white Army officer), with a near burlesque Dodge City sequence that goes for over-the-top humor, this sad and melancholy movie is the most expensive in Ford’s entire career, but is never very engaging.  From the outset, the Cheyenne Indians are already dying by the hundreds of famine and disease, but Ford makes no reference to a systematic policy of genocide, but blames the circumstances on utter indifference, so when the Indians stand around in the hot sun all day to meet a congressional delegation that never shows, it’s clear that words, especially white man’s words, so essential in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), have been reduced to nothing here, just empty rhetoric with no meaning, where Dull Knife utters “We are asked to remember much. The white man remembers nothing.”  Despite Ford’s claims that this was “a true story, authentic, the reality as it was,” the movie is filled with more historical inaccuracies that are quite different from the book, as the Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz never traveled West and was basically uninvolved with the Cheyenne affair, Dull Knife never killed Red Shirt in a tribal ceremony, but Thin Elk at a trading post.  Lone Wolf was never a noble warrior, but a drunk, where the runaway girl in question was his daughter, not his wife.  Ford, one must remember, is the director who told Peter Bogdonovich in an interview, “I’ve killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher, and Chivington put together,” something he was proud of, as if this was the legacy he was looking for in his lifetime.  And without Indian killers, he’s made a movie without heroes, without any clear depiction of purpose, where much of its overlength feels lost to aimless wandering, like Moses wandering in the wilderness searching for direction.  Even when Ford darkens the skies with a landscape of dead buffalo bones, all senselessly killed for buffalo hides, we see no evidence of who slaughtered them.  Who is to blame?  Everyone?  And when a similar landscape of dead bodies lay upon the frozen ground just outside the Fort Robinson prison gates when Indians made their suicidal escape, where are the heroes, and who does one sympathize with?  While there is a contrived, Fordian feel good ending tacked on at the end, this is mere make believe, as in real life, those escaping Cheyenne were all tracked down and either killed or returned to the fort, hardly a noble victory, captured in a painting entitled After the Final Battle at “The Pit” FortRobinsonPit006.jpg, by Frederic Remington, originally appearing in the August, 1897 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON                B                   

USA  (103 mi)  1949  d:  John Ford

Never apologize, mister, it’s a sign of weakness.   —Captain Nathan Brittles (John Wayne)

A movie that typifies director John Ford’s Achilles heel, a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions.  Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939).  Compare that to the elevated sympathy offered in this overreaching drama when a cavalry troop escorts two white women through hostile Indian country.  The film opens in 1876 just as news is spreading about the defeat of General Custer at the hands of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, sending waves of anxiety and fear throughout the West, where a newsreel style narrator misinforms the audience straightaway, probably exactly as the newspapers speculated in that era, believing various Indian tribes were gathering together in great numbers to purge the West of white settlers. 

In reality, Indians were gathering in record numbers to defend themselves against the inevitable advance of the whites into their territory.  After the Custer debacle, however, rather than remain a fighting force of multiple tribes united in opposition, as is suggested here, they split back up into smaller tribes, each going their own separate way, as they had always lived, reflective of their nomadic lifestyle of living off the land.  But that’s not the way the movies tell the story, instead projecting a view of the white settlers as victims of random and indiscriminate Indian violence, overlooking the genocide initiated against Indians by the U.S. cavalry throughout the West, ordered to militarily defeat one tribe after another, rounding up all free Indians in a form of ethnic cleansing, eventually forcing them into submission, legally requiring that they live away from their traditional hunting grounds, forcing them to live in isolation on desolate reservations, subject to rampant disease and the rotted food of government rations where more than half died within the first few years.  Ford conveniently leaves out all references to the true story of “American” history and instead recounts the same mythological racist lore that turns Indians into savages while the whites are noble heroes. 

In this film, the second of a 3-part cavalry trilogy, between FORT APACHE (1948) and RIO GRANDE (1950), Ford is really paying tribute to the men in uniform, offering a glowing and idealized portrait of romanticized courage under fire.  James Warner Bellah wrote the short stories on which the entire trilogy is based, while screenwriter Frank Nugent adapted the first two into movies, a character driven and nearly plotless story offering an intimate glimpse of military life at a remote cavalry post.  This is largely a nostalgia piece, complete with a rousing Americana musical score that doesn’t shy away from playing Dixie, The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and several variations of the title tune, which is still the official anthem of the United States Cavalry, where despite some strong individual performances, the collective portrait of the Second Cavalry Regiment is really the featured star of this film.  Ford and his cinematographer Winton Hoch, who won an Oscar, use vivid Technicolor to continually frame them on the move in single file formation while traveling through the stunning panorama of the natural backdrop of Monument Valley in Southern Utah, which is now part of the Navajo Indian Reservation.  These compositional images so completely resemble authentic Western artworks, particularly those of Frederic Remington, that Ford’s Westerns are forever associated with Old West authenticity.  The same can’t be said for the subject matter, however, where Ford tends to mythologize the West, once more overlooking the real history of the Second Cavalry, which was responsible for the Marias Massacre in 1870, where despite warnings from scouts that they were attacking the wrong camp filled with Blackfeet Indians friendly to whites, some 200 Indians, mostly women and children were slaughtered in an act of wrongful brutality, while the Piegan tribe and their Chief, the military’s actual target, escaped safely to Canada.     

Here, however, the cavalry is depicted as a harmonious place where soldiers from both the North and the South have come together after the Civil War under one flag and one common purpose, to keep the West safe from Indians.  The charismatic leader holding them all together is John Wayne in one of his better performances as Captain Nathan Brittles, a savvy veteran of 40-years in service whose long deserved retirement is expected within a few days, though he has mixed feelings about becoming a civilian.  This is one of the first Westerns to pay tribute to an aging Western hero, along the lines of Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott in Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) or Clint Eastwood’s aging gunfighter in UNFORGIVEN (1992).  Still served by his orderly Quincannon (Victor McLaglen) from their days together in the Civil War, their morning ritual has a relaxed, comic flair of longtime friends as Quincannon is expected to join him in retirement just two weeks afterwards.  Also interesting is Brittles’ respectful relationship with Sgt. Tyree (Ben Johnson, a real cowboy, a champion calf roper discovered by Ford), a man with equal rank while serving the Confederacy, whose opinion he values, but Tyree is reticent to offer, claiming “That’s not my department,” sarcastically claiming the orders come from the Yankee War department.  When a fellow Southern soldier dies, Brittles finds it noble and befitting to bury him with a Confederate flag.  

When a paymaster stagecoach carrying the troop’s wages is attacked by Indians with the passengers murdered and robbed, Brittles is ordered on one last patrol to quell the vicious outbreaks by a band of renegade Indians who have broken from the reservation.  Added into the mix are his orders to escort the commanding officer’s wife and niece, Abby (Mildred Dunnock) and Olivia (Joanne Dru) to the nearest East-bound stagecoach, claiming they could not withstand an “Army” winter, where Olivia has inflamed the hearts of a few soldiers by adhering to a cavalry tradition of wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair, which symbolizes her faithful devotion to one of them.  But this doesn’t prevent two young officers, John Agar and Harry Carey Jr., from spending more time fighting one another than they do with her, a sign of their youthful inexperience for leadership, making Brittles even more reticent to give up his command. When a long line of Indians is spotted moving their entire village with them, Brittles thinks it wise to avoid contact, as they’re not in battle mode, preferring to take a longer route, even though the delay has serious consequences, eventually missing the stage which is destroyed in a violent Indian encounter at the stage post, including several lives lost.  Flabbergasted at the turn of events, believing he failed every mission he was assigned, this tribute to an old soldier reveals Brittles has a few more tricks up his sleeve, all of which exhibit a flair for intelligence and cunning, displaying the kind of wisdom and experience that endear him to his troops.  In the end, Ford depicts them as one and the same in this loving tribute to “the regulars, the fifty-cents a day professionals riding the outposts of a nation.”