It's a dog (soldier's) life.
Finally saw the second of director John Ford's so-called "Cavalry Trilogy," She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949); it won an Oscar for its color photography. The other movies in the trilogy are Fort Apache (1948, and sort-of remade as a cops-n'-crooks vehicle for Paul Newman, 1981's Fort Apache the Bronx) and Rio Grande (1950).
As seems to be typical of Ford's westerns, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was partly a civics lesson, partly a series of staged tableaux, and partly a broad, buffoonish ethnic comedy (the comedy -- or "comedy," if you're Pauline Kael -- here being devoted to stereotypical depictions of Irish and their stereotypical penchant for guzzling copious amounts of usquebaugh, or whiskey). It also had a wild inaccuracy: set in 1876 shortly after Custer's defeat and apotheosis at Little Big Horn, there is a reference to the Pony Express' concern over the restiveness and belligerence of the Indian tribes in the wake of their signal victory; however, the Pony Express terminated in 1861 after only a little more than a year in existence, although Wells Fargo used the Pony Express logo 1866 to 1890.
Three things stuck out for me about this movie:
As seems to be typical of Ford's westerns, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was partly a civics lesson, partly a series of staged tableaux, and partly a broad, buffoonish ethnic comedy (the comedy -- or "comedy," if you're Pauline Kael -- here being devoted to stereotypical depictions of Irish and their stereotypical penchant for guzzling copious amounts of usquebaugh, or whiskey). It also had a wild inaccuracy: set in 1876 shortly after Custer's defeat and apotheosis at Little Big Horn, there is a reference to the Pony Express' concern over the restiveness and belligerence of the Indian tribes in the wake of their signal victory; however, the Pony Express terminated in 1861 after only a little more than a year in existence, although Wells Fargo used the Pony Express logo 1866 to 1890.
Three things stuck out for me about this movie:
- Having grown up watching Shirley Temple's first husband, John Agar, in movies of quite a different genre (Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula, The Brain From Planet Arous -- "Arous" being a homonym for "Eris," not "arouse," BTW), it's still a little odd for me to see him in a John Wayne western, as here and in the previous movie in the "Cavalry Trilogy," Fort Apache (the latter of which he was paired with his then-wife).
- Man, did Victor McLaglen play anything but drunken brawlers? I mean, yeah, the "drunken" part wasn't so much front-and-center in Gunga Din (1939) and the "brawler" part wasn't as visibly prominent in The Informer (1935), but still.
- It was pretty funny to see the mutts of Fort Starke trotting merrily along with the cavalry, barking incessantly at the horses that were presumably as familiar to them as their own fleas. They looked like they were having the time of their lives, especially the one racing pell-mell ahead of the Indian horses that the cavalry stampeded at the end. I guess these guys lived about as exciting a life as a dog could hope for.