fort apache (d. ford, w. frank s. nugent, james warner bellah)

Ford’s sweeping cavalry western is the kind of stuff we in the Anglosphere were raised on. The cavalry is coming. The injuns speaking ‘mexican’. John Fucking Wayne. Watching it one can trace a line in the thinking of those who believe they have a right to annex other people’s territory by any means possible; to trick, cheat and attack those ‘others’ who help to define the supposed values that the aggressor represents.

And yet, whilst being the kind of film that helped to consolidate those opinions, merely by presenting the matrix, Fort Apache is in fact a complex work of art, conscious of the moral ambiguity of the material. Hell, even Wayne feels betrayed by the American hero. In choosing to tell this story, Ford analyses the cruelty and duplicity involved in the conquest of the West. Fonda’s Captain Thursday is revealed in the end to be a foolish popinjay whose arrogance leads his troops to destruction. In one great scene between Wayne and Fonda, the tension between the two reaches boiling point. The casting of Wayne as Fonda’s rival is inspired: the true American is not the one who seeks a genocidal confrontation, it’s the one who is prepared to risk his life to achieve a peaceable settlement with the Apache.

One wonders if the sweeping cinematography and the comedic Irish characters work to obscure this message. The film is layered with enough sub-plots and B-stories to make the most exacting script doctor happy. The images are still breathtaking, all these years later. In so many ways it feels like an emblematic US film. But contained within the apple is the worm of rapaciousness. In a way Fort Apache might have been the place where Doctor Strangelove was born. 

the man who shot liberty valance (d. john ford, w. james warner bellah, willis goldbeck, dorothy m johnson)

I follow someone on twitter who has an Anglo Saxon name and goes to Cinemateca a lot. He’s one of a few regulars who I do not know, but who, I learn from their twitter posts, live alongside me as hardcore Cinemateca aficionados. Anyway, this person tweeted in Spanish the other day about how much he loves Liberty Valance, Ford’s last great western, one which is full of nostalgia for an era that has ended, whilst also seeking to celebrate the era that replaced it. I have a feeling the writer of the tweets is North American, and clearly has a far firmer footing on the Fordian ground than I do, but watching the film you can see where he’s coming from. Even in its attitudes that today would be questionable, there is a kind of gauche charm, the charm of the frontier, of men and women co-existing with the imminence of violence, and seeking to cherish every new day as a result.

Liberty Valance is also of interest in regard to its portrayal of the Mexican community, who have their own cantina, and to one of whom the hapless sheriff, Link Appleyard, is married. These Mexicans are seen knowing how to party, how to live each day at a time, and when Valance is killed, they come running over, as though they have no real skin in this game, which is after all, a battle between gringos. They are only really humanised when Jimmy Stewart is teaching the sheriffs daughter grammatical English and North American values. Here lurks a forerunning echo of Cormac Macarthy, the sense that that other world, the one which is being displaced by Stewart’s lawyer and is his ilk, will continue to flourish across the border, where the frontier rules will still apply.

There is also, in the film’s remate, an implicit critique of the way notions of history and even civilisation are constructed on the back of myths which are in fact false. The only man who could ever have killed the malevolent Liberty Valance was Wayne, another pea out of the same pod. But Wayne will be buried in a pauper’s grave, only retaining the dignity of his boots because the rival he sent on his way to Washington, and who has stolen the credit for Valance’s death, has come back to Shinbone to honour him.