She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
This week our series of eight films directed by John Ford reaches its second-last movie. It’s a cavalry picture from 1949 called She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and I think it’s one of the most loveable movies Ford or anybody else ever made. This is the second of Ford’s so-called “cavalry trilogy,” after Fort Apache (which we looked at last week), and before Rio Grande. It’s my own favourite of the three, for a number of reasons. For one thing, it has one of John Wayne’s very best performances as the movie’s central figure, Captain Nathan Brittles, whose 35-year career in the army is about to end in his mandatory retirement 6 days after the beginning of the story. Here, Wayne at the age of 42 is playing a character significantly older than himself, and doing it brilliantly—a nice contrast to all the roles he was playing 20 years later that would pretend he was still in his 40s. With grey-tinged hair and mustache, and a rueful, weatherbeaten manner, Wayne has never been more appealing.
Right from the beginning there’s a quality of melancholy about this figure, who has no home or family outside the army, and who represents for Ford—and also for everybody in the movie—the very epitome of what a serving officer should be. He’s totally capable but unassuming; he’s prepared to take the responsibility of leadership without thought of glory; he’s wise but conscious of his limitations; and he’s selflessly dedicated to duty without losing any of his humanity. The qualities of loyalty and devotion are emphasized in his gentle remembrance of his dead wife and children, and there’s yet another of Ford’s scenes where a person talks unselfconsciously to the tombstone of a departed loved one (we’ve already seen examples of this in Young Mr Lincoln and My Darling Clementine).
The notion that such a man as Nathan Brittles will reach a time when his usefulness to the society he’s sacrificed everything to will be at an end is a sad one—but that sense of loss is an essential quality in Ford’s romantic vision of sacrifice and service to the community. The spectacle of this man’s ageing and passing is deeply-felt, and even sentimental, though the sentiment is always qualified by the earthiness of the environment and the people inhabiting it. Ford is an idealist and a poet, but his feet are always on the ground.
As in so many of Ford’s postwar films, the plot really isn’t much of a plot. Wayne’s last mission is to go out on patrol in search of some bellicose Indians on the loose, and simultaneously to deliver to the stagecoach station a pair of females who are not going to stay in the fort over the winter. The film then covers the final handful of days of Wayne’s command by following this mission—its frustrations and failures and its strategies in reacting to them. Off to one side is a subplot involving a pair of young officers who are rivals for the favours of one of the women, the fetching Joanne Dru. But really the movie is basically a mission log. And if it proceeds in a leisurely fashion without much regard for plot development and three-act structure and all the other conventions of a regular script, it does capture the ebb and flow of time and location in an admirable way. I can’t think of another movie, for example, that does such a good job of making you realize what the logistics of horse-mounted transportation on the frontier are. You get a real idea of how far thirty miles is, how long it takes to traverse, how much rest the horses need, how physically exhausting and messy a long march in open country during inclement weather is. And the climate—cold weather in a hot part of the world—is beautifully captured too.
These scenes in the open wilderness (Monument Valley once again) have a wonderful evocative power that even Ford never surpassed. Simply all the shots of the troop proceeding across desert and scrub, the horizon low and the sky big, with giant rock-sculptures grand in the distance, are fabulous. Ford’s camera inevitably frames all of these moments in the most unselfconsciously poetic compositions—so many of the shots I’d just love to take off the screen and hang up on a wall to look at indefinitely. And when the sky clouds over, and banks of mist gather, and great bolts of lighting break out in the distant background of the huge sky—well, you ought to get goose-bumps. These moments are visual poetry that are pure 100% John Ford.
Speaking of the visuals, I have to mention the colour photography. Technicolor of this period—the late 1940s and 1950s—is like nothing else on earth. It certainly isn’t like life—but then neither are Van Gogh or Matisse. Hollywood colour photography 40 or 50 years ago had a startling vividness and strength that could take your breath away—and still can if you can see it in its ideal forms. The colour in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is so gorgeous that I would go and sit in a theatre to watch a mint 35mm print of it even if it were projected backwards and upside down.
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As he did in Fort Apache, Ford here once again gives us the cavalry outpost as a miniature ideal community—and a community which captures the essence of the American social ideal as Ford understands it. To me, perhaps the most important factor in conveying this is Ford’s repeated focus on the nascent civilizing moment. By that I mean not the arrival of white people in the west, and not the final victory of a completely finished culture, but rather the moment at which cultural forms first put down their roots. In Ford’s period films you see this in the community rituals of dances and celebrations, of marriages and funerals—and in his cavalry films you see it in the rituals of military hierarchy and protocol, and the language it uses. These dances and marriage ceremonies are not as polished as they would be back east, and the army protocol not as refined as at West Point, but their very lack of refinement is what makes them touching. In a long-established civilization such as our own these rituals have almost lost their significance. But here on the frontier, where they’re being taken up for the first time, the full force of their meaning is uniquely present and visible. When Captain Brittles submits his official written protests to orders and has to ask about the spelling of long words, that captures the essence of it—and so does the formality of his language in dressing down Lt. Cohill for brawling with a fellow-officer. Similarly, this culture expresses profound chivalry towards women by taking special precautions to ensure their safety; but at the same time their hardships in walking for miles on a march or being brutally bounced up and down on a springless wagon are noted in detail. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon doesn’t have quite as transcendent a moment of army-post culture as the Grand March of the Non-Commissioned Officers’ Ball in Fort Apache, but its easy integration of official duty and humanity in Wayne’s characterization of Captain Brittles is more extensive, and just as effective. Then there’s rubber-faced Victor McLaglen as a hard-drinking Irish sergeant again, and Ford’s insatiable taste for these strange combinations of formality and boisterous roughness is nowhere more clearly visible than in Quincannon’s brawl in the bar, with people getting knocked across the room and out the door but with timeouts for toasts and other politenesses.
I have met people who can’t figure out why anybody could get excited about this movie, and others who are turned off by its sentimentality and conventionalism, or simply by the historical racism of the whole Western genre. My feeling, though, is closer to the Joanne Dru character’s when she says, “it makes me want to stand up and cheer.”