The first in the "Calvary Trilogy" (She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande). Set in 1876, Lt. Col. Thursday is an ambitious, class conscious and strict Eastcoast career officer who is bitter at being demoted from Civil War general to peace-time Lt. Col. and then being sent to the frontier to fight Indians instead of serving at a more prestigious post. He is not familiar with the special demands of fighting Indians on the frontier (a form of guerrilla warfare), ignores the advice of his more experienced sergeants (like Wayne/York) who wish to make peace with the Indian tribes led by Cochise, and so sends his men to a disastrous defeat (compare Gen. George Custer at Little Big Horn). Luckily for him, the new commander Wayne/York refuses to disabuse the eastern press representatives who interpret his defeat as a heroic "last stand". After singing the praises of the old commander York leads his men out of the fort to fight Geronimo.

The American film historian and critic Andrew Sarris discusses Ford's career during and immediately after the Second World War:

After How Green Was My Valley Ford went on active duty in the Navy as Chief of the Field Photographic Branch, a unit of the Office of Strategic Services (later glorified on the screen as the O.S.S.) (the OSS was the precursor to the CIA - DMH) with offices in Paris and London... He even picked up an extra Oscar for The Battle of Midway, America's first war documentary, and also a Purple Heart for wounds incurred in the engagement. This was shooting in both senses of the word... He is the only American film director who lent his artistic services to the Government through World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War... (pp. 109-10)

... Fort Apache was released at a time when Hollywood was afflicted with realistic rigor mortis. Critics of the period lacked the language to describe and evaluate myth and romance. Problems and polemics were the order of the day, and Fort Apache seemed to have nothing new to say. The film's attitudes towards Indians, women, and military discipline seemed either convential or conservative. Indeed, the final eulogy of John Wayne's Captain Kirby York for his fallen Custer-like commander, Henry Fonda's Colonel Thursday, tends to glorify command decisions to the point of incompetence and even insanity. Moreover, Ford seemed unduly sentimental in healing old wounds incurred in the Civil War by proud soldiers on both sides. Hence, much of the tension between the Fonda and Wayne characters is generated by a series of Yankee-versus-Reb insult routines in which Fonda's officious nastiness is allowed to play against Wayne's submissive exasperation. What unites them - the Seventh Cavalry rather than the Union - is much stronger than what has divided them in the past largely through an accident of geography... (p.126)

... Ford preferred to accept history and even legend as it was written rather than revise it in a radical or derisive spirit. Why are the Indians on the war path from Fort Apache to Cheyenne Autumn? Not, according to Ford, because of American Imperialism or White Racism or Manifest Destiny, but because of the derelictions of the Indian Ring, 'the most corrupt band of politicians in our nation's history'; graft and corruption on the local level rather than greed and conquest on the national level. Thus, the Indian remains the Other in American history and mythology to the end of Ford's career. (p. 128)

In his oustanding work Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20thC America Richard Slotkin argues that:

In 1948 John Ford added a major variation to the Western genre by uniting the conventions and concerns of the combat film and the Western in a single coherent fable. In his cavalry trilogy - Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1950), and Rio Grande (1950) - Ford used the time and resources of three productions to create and intensively develop a single set of themes, characters, and images. His success was such that he and his many imitators were able to draw on the formulas developed in the sequence to make numerous cavalry Westerns over the next two decades. By transferring the ideological concerns of the World War and its aftermath from the terrain of the combat film to the mythic landscape of the Western, Ford proposed a mythic response to the crisis of postwar ideology that is at once a moral critique of our 'victory" and an affirmation of the importance of the patriotic solidarity that made victory possible. (p. 334)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Andrew Sarris, "1848-1966: The Poet and Rememberer of Things Past," in The John Ford Movie Mystery (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), pp. 124-82.

Dougals Pye, "Genre and History: Fort Apache and Liberty Valance," Movie, Winter 1977-78, no. 25, pp. 1-11.

Andrew Sinclair, John Ford (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979).

Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington, John Ford (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974).

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993).

THINGS TO NOTE

• The trade mark Ford exterior scenes shot in Monument Valley, a Navaho Indian tribal park on the Arizona-Utah border which consists of 2,000 square miles of desert and sandstone buttes or massifs. Described as "painterly", due to Ford's early training as a painter and the influence of Frederic Remington's western paintings.
• The richly depicted communal social life of the fort, the role of the women in maintaining a semblance of civilised life, the dances, the meals, the help they give each other in setting up home, the function of the family in creating new members of the armed forces and socialising them into ints traditions. The demands of family even take precedence over military rank. The argument between Lt. Col. Thursday and Sgt. O'Rourke over the courting of the officer's daughter by an enlisted man is that of equals (fathers).
• The routine life of the enlisted soldiers, the sergeants training recruits, their good natured humour, their ethnicity (Irish). Military tradition and routine provide the "law and order" of the community.
• The parallels Ford draws between Thursday and Custer and the implied criticism of narrow-minded, glory-seeking, ambitious, tyrannical and ultimately stupid career officers like them. The depictiom of a Custer-like" last stand (one of many in Ford's work). The similarity to They Were Expendable (1945) - ending with defeat but ultimately optimistic about the possibilities of others to turn defeat into a victory for "civilised" American values.
• John Wayne's liking for the name "Kirby": a name he assumes in his film about the Vietnam War The Green Berets (1968). Wayne plays "Kirby York" again in the final film of the trilogy Rio Grande (1950).
• Ford's realisation that the "myth of the west" and the ideal of "heroism in defeat" is made up of misinterpretations and outright fabrications of history. What role has film (especially the genres of western and war movies) played in this "remaking of history for ideological ends" (Pye, p. 7)? Although Thursday was stupid York says to the reporters "No man died more gallantly nor won more honor for the regiment". As images of his dead comrades are shown reflected on a window pane and as "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is sung Yo1. rk states:

They'll keep on living as long as the regiment lives... Their pay is thirteen dollars a month and their diet is beans and hay... and they may be eating horsemeat before this campaign is over... They'll fight over cards or a bottle of rotgut, but they'll share the last drop of their canteens... Their names may change and their faces change... but they're the regiment and the regular army... now and fifty years from now... They're better men than they used to be. Thursday did that. He made it a command to be proud of... and I'm proud to command it. (quoted in Sinclair, p. 144)

• Although set during the Indian Wars of the 1870s the significance of the Civil War should not be underestimated for Ford's cavalry trilogy. One critic Pye calls the Civil War "the central experience of the immediate past" both to the soldiers in the films (due to the loss of rank, change of allegiance, unwanted postings to remote regions, disruption to family life) and to Americans in general. Ford was a Civil War "buff" who could list the names of all the generals on both sides of the conflict.
• The role of women in the frontier Army Post - to maintain civilised community values, to support the men in their military activities (Collingwood's wife does not recall him when his transfer orders arrive); to remain faithfully behind when the men march off to fight ("I can't see him. All I can see is the flags"); Custer's wife developed the myth of Custer after his death with memoirs such as "Following the Guidons".
• Cochise's largely anti-war sentiments - tired of war, not for old men like him and Kirby. Provoked into war by traders and arrogance of Thursday.