In 1964, there was his penultimate work, a nearly three-hour-long 70MM Super Panavision roadshow western epic for Warner Bros. There was the myth-breaking 1962 Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," in which Ford reexamines that whole mythos of the west he helped create. But Ford was also challenging the misty eyed, romanticized images of the west that he portrayed in many of his films about strong willed, determined, loner men battling a hostile environment. The result was a few films in which he seemed to be, in a way, apologizing for the wrongs he committed in terms of his distorted portrayals of people of color in his previous films. Maybe he saw his own mortality down the road, or simply changed his opinions to become more open-minded and accepting. Perhaps it was the changing times, especially after the emergence of the modern Civil Rights Movement era. However, by the mid-'50s, when Ford was nearing the twilight of his long career, the director seemed to have mellowed with age, discovering and exploring a more humanist side to himself. Griffith's notorious "The Birth of Nation." He can be seen as one of the Klansmen, who in the dramatic climax rescue the white people under threat by savage "renegade" Black Union soldiers. In fact, Ford started out his film career as an actor and stuntman in silent movies including, according to Ford himself, D.W. On top of that, in the early 1930s, Ford also made several films with long-lambasted black character actor Stepin Fetchit, like "Judge Priest" and "Steamboat Round the Bend," in which he, in all his films, played degrading and embarrassing roles as a slow-witted, lazy buffoon. He regularly portrayed Native Americans in most of his Western films as bloodthirsty savages. However, despite the fact that Ford considered himself a political progressive (though he was close friends with actors he worked with that were right wing reactionaries, like John Wayne, James Stewart, and the even more right wing Ward Bond), he was often labeled a conservative.įord's films were not above dealing in negative racial stereotypes. He directed so many that Ford once said of himself, "My name is John Ford. Though he made films in every genre, from dramas to historical epics, romances and even comedies, Ford has been justifiably associated with the Western and is considered one of the most influential directors in that genre. Contrary to popular belief, this episode was included in the earliest non-roadshow prints of Cheyenne Autumn the scene was excised only when the film went into its second and third runs in 1966 (it has since been restored).During his very long career as a film director, starting in the silent era in 1917 until "Seven Women" (his exquisite final film in 1965), he made more than his fair share of classics which still stand the test of time: "The Informer," " The Grapes of Wrath," " My Darling Clementine," " The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," and "How Green Was My Valley." people decided that the film ran too long, they chopped out the wholly unnecessary but very funny episode involving a poker-obsessed Wyatt Earp (James Stewart). It is weakest when arbitrarily throwing in a wearisome romance between Richard Widmark and pacifistic schoolmarm Carroll Baker, who out of sympathy for the Indians has joined them in their 1500-mile westward journey. Based on a novel by Mari Sandoz, Cheyenne Autumn is a cinematic elegy-not only for the beleaguered Cheyennes, but for John Ford's fifty years in pictures. Robinson) prevents the hostilities from erupting into wholesale bloodshed. Only the intervention of US secretary of the interior Carl Schurz (Edward G. Thanks to the cruelties of such chauvinistic whites as Captain Oscar Wessels (Karl Malden), the Cheyennes are forced to defend themselves-and whenever Indians take arms against whites in the 1880s, it's usually misrepresented as a massacre. While there was never any intention to shed blood, the white press finds it politically expedient to distort the Cheyennes' action into a declaration of war. Since the Cheyennes' trek is in defiance of their treaty, Captain Thomas Archer (Richard Widmark), who agrees with the Indians in principle, reluctantly leads his troops in pursuit of the tribe. They have done this at the behest of chiefs Little Wolf (Ricardo Montalban) and Dull Knife (Gilbert Roland), peaceful souls who have been driven to desperate measures because the US government has ignored their pleas for food and shelter. Set in 1887, the film recounts the defiant migration of 300 Cheyennes from their reservation in Oklahoma territory to their original home in Wyoming. John Ford's last western film, Cheyenne Autumn was allegedly produced to compensate for the hundreds of Native Americans who had bitten the dust in Ford's earlier films (that was the director's story, anyway).
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