John Ford’s mortal sin

by David Benjamin

 

“The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that Negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” 

—Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, after the Fort Pillow massacre

 

MADISON, Wis.—It’s fair to accuse me of applying a 2024 analysis to a work of fiction that reflects a bygone standard of social mores, but I still find myself judging John Ford’s 1948 classic film, Fort Apache, as a betrayal to storytelling, a surrender to bigotry and a stain on the legacy of its great director. 

I reached this conclusion some years ago, but forgot my reaction until the other day when I caught Fort Apache again on TCM. I tuned in because, simply, the director was John Ford, whose genius—even in his lesser films—transcends almost all his contemporaries, especially in the Western genre.

Of course, Fort Apache has myriad virtues, not the least of which is the electric tension between Henry Fonda, as the fort’s new commander, Lt. Col, Owen Thursday and John Wayne as his subordinate and antagonist, Capt. Kirby York. Wayne is challenged and elevated by sharing the screen with Fonda. His performance is mature and nuanced. In this film, Wayne muted critics who questioned his ability to climb down from his horse and actually act.

Fort Apache’s high notes also include the debut of John Agar, who forged a prolific career in B movies, and the presence of Shirley Temple, then nineteen years old, who had added sex appeal to her limitless reservoir of girlish charm. And, of course, it features familiar faces from Ford’s cast of regulars—among them Ward Bond, Victor McLaglen and the innately comical Hank Worden. 

In Fort Apache, Ford exerts his typical tyranny over black and white imagery. One nakedly manipulated scene is shot from ground level, as Col. Thursday’s mounted troops canter in formation across the Arizona desert. To achieve Ford’s desired effect, cinematographer Archie Stout filtered the dark hue of the cavalry’s uniforms to a soft gray. This trick threw into vivid contrast the towering clouds that appeared during that day of shooting, set against the steeples and promontories of the Monument Valley. The result was a textured tapestry in languid motion—a sky of feathers, flowers and fists of singular depth and intricate dimension.

Strangely, Fort Apache is still regarded as nice to the Apaches. In a 2012 review of the movie’s DVD release, New York Times critic Dave Kehr called it “a film of immense complexity that never fails to reveal new shadings with each viewing” and “among the first ‘pro-Indian’ Westerns,” portraying indigenous Americans with “sympathy and respect”.

This summary rings fairly credible ’til the last scene. But even before the film’s whiplash epilog, it betrays an ambivalence toward racial equality that prevailed in the society of 1948. The Fort Apache troops are heavily and stridently Irish, with an immigrant tendency toward vulgarity, impetuosity, drunkenness and mawkish sentimentality. The only Hispanic trooper, played by Pedro Armendariz, is named Beaufort. He’s lingeringly nostalgic about his service in the losing side of the Civil War, which he calls by its Confederate euphemism, the “War Between the States.” Señor Beaufort bonds with a fellow CSA veteran (Hank Worden) who proudly trumpets his service under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, an antebellum slave trader who ordered the fish-in-a-barrel massacre of Union captives at Fort Pillow and later became the founder and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

To anyone who reads American history, this moment rings a jarring note.

Appropriately, Henry Fonda’s character, Col. Thursday, also aspires to racist war crimes. Contemptuous of Capt. York, who has learned Apache ways and developed a tenuous bond with their chief, Cochise, Col. Thursday asserts himself as the defender of white supremacy and the caricature of Manifest Destiny. Despite the Apache leader’s repeated victories over the cavalry, Thursday refers to Cochise  dismissively as a digger Indian, a breech-clouted savage, an illiterate, uncivilized murderer and a recalcitrant swine. Thursday declares to York that his only purpose in this godforsaken outpost is to lure the Apaches into an ambush, so that he can reduce them to ghetto-dwellers in a parched desert gulag or wipe them entirely off the face of the earth—the sooner the better.

In the film’s turning point, he submits reluctantly into a parley with Cochise, With dignity and eloquence beyond the abilities of Col. Thursday, Cochise denounces Silas Meacham, the corrupt Indian agent, and offers a solution: Get rid of him. “He is worse than war,” says Cochise, “He not only killed the men, but the women and the children and the old ones. We looked to the Great White Father for protection. He gave us slow death. We will not return to your reservation while that man is there or anyone like him. Send him away and we will speak of peace. If you do not send him away, there will be war. And for each one of us that you kill, ten white men will die!” 

Easy, right? Everybody, white and Apache, hates Meacham. But, given a chance to make peace with a war-weary foe by firing one white guy, Thursday insults Cochise, stomps back to his horse and orders a cinematically spectacular and abysmally stupid charge into a box canyon lined with concealed Apaches armed with repeating rifles. The attack kills no Indians but leaves the canyon floor carpeted with dead soldiers, including Thursday himself.

If this movie had a logical ending, it would fade into York at the Colonel’s grave—his arm around Thursday’s daughter (Shirley Temple)—wracked with guilt and anguish over the loss of so many loyal troopers doomed by the vainglory of a bigoted madman. This honest script would depict Thursday as a tragic figure who symbolizes the inhumanity and vicious folly of America’s great Western genocide.

Instead, it ends with what one critic mildly refers to as a “strange twist.” 

Throughout, Fonda plays Thursday as the biggest asshole in the cavalry. But suddenly, after killing all his soldiers and losing a battle more humiliating than Custer’s last stand, he’s resurrected as the hero of “Thursday’s Charge.” His skeptic, Capt. York, has become his cultist. York spews a eulogy so incongruous and shmaltzy that the intelligent viewer reels with bewilderment. Gazing reverently at Thursday’s portrait, John Wayne preaches that all those cannon-fodder carcasses in the canyon live on, “… as long as the regiment lives. The pay is thirteen dollars a month, their diet beans and hay. Maybe horsemeat before this campaign is over. Fight over cards or rotgut whiskey, but share the last drop in their canteens. The faces may change … the names … but they’re there. They’re the regiment … the regular army … ” Yada yada.

The moral of the switcheroo seems to be that the Army reserves its prerogative of elevating a pious sadist to a position in which he can exercise his ugliest impulses and plunge hundreds of men into dubious battle to die nameless in his name, so that he can be sanctified in a pedestaled martyrdom that inspires future sadists who pit millions more mongrel enemies against vast loyal armies of dumb, obedient kids and leave, at last, nothing more lasting than rivers “dyed with the blood of the slaughtered.” 

Ah, Hollywood!

Ford could have demanded a script that acknowledged the malignancy of its worst— most significant—character and the culture that had made him possible. Instead he bowed to the politics and prejudice of the moment, ended his movie with a moral fraud and committed a mortal sin for which he only partly atoned in later, braver films.