John ford cheyenne autumn8/23/2023 “I never knew what was going on, but I chalked it up to my being just plain dumb. Harry Carey watched day after day as the Indians marched across Monument Valley, stopping to deliver some dialogue, then marching some more. Still, Ford told George O’Brien (playing an Army major), “George, it’s not fun anymore.” O’Brien told his son that Ford had lost touch with his own gift, that he had a low attention span and had no real interest in making movies “but continued to work because of a lack of any real alternatives”. Ford of course loved it there and on this, the last time that he used it as a setting, he lorded it as if he owned the valley. The Cheyenne leave Monument Valley (we wonder what they were doing there in the first place), travel 800 miles and end up in – Monument Valley. And I wanted to show their point of view for a change.” But these schmaltzy generalizations come across, to me anyway, as paternalistic and patronizing. They love their children and their animals. Here we have the plight of a brutally mistreated Cheyenne people, sympathetically treated. The story goes a long way to redressing the wrong of Ford’s early treatment of Native Americans, whom he represented, for years, as savages to be shot down without compunction. He almost sinks the picture single-handed. ![]() The worst performance of the cast, understandably because he was such a ham, is that of Karl Malden, here playing a drunken German officer on the edge of insanity such a role gave him license to chew the scenery and boy, does he make the most of it. ![]() Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr and Denver Pyle are in it but wasted. Carroll Baker is OK as the earnest Quaker schoolteacher Widmark falls for, though nothing special, I thought. The role would have suited other actors, John Wayne, most obviously, or Wayne’s co star on The Horse Soldiers, William Holden. Of the principal white characters, Richard Widmark leads, playing a soldier again, as he had for Ford in Two Rode Together, and he was always good in Westerns, but the Westerns he was in weren’t always so good.
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