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There can be no doubt of the importance to Ford of his wartime service with the Navy, nor of the imaginative stimulus to him of the experience of war - the quickened sense of community among fighting men, moral ends limited and made sharply manifest, physical action as fulfillment of part of man's essential nature, the charged atmosphere of tragedy ... all these things, to Ford, had been of deep significance. The fact that Ford's next film would be This is Korea underscores this drift back toward a closer identification with national policy and a nationalistic view of human community, a drift first evidenced in the ending of Fort Apache and continued in the comic treatment of Pony That Walks in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

Criticism should, when practiced rightly, renew and enrich the way in which we understand a work of art. That legitimate task of criticism is never finished, for we never remain in the same place, either individually or collectively, and our relationship to a work of art is consequently subject to perpetual change. When practiced badly, on the other hand, criticism limits and circumscribes the work of art, preserving a received dogma that violates both the work itself and life as we are coming to experience it.

I have come increasingly to feel of late that much of the criticism of John Ford's films has slipped into the latter category, perpetuating a critical idolatry of his poetry (for poet seems to have become the label of choice to hang on him) that fails to deal very exactingly with his work. Perhaps such idolatry is the inevitable result of the effort to legitimize study of the American cinema. I do not see this project as an effort at debunking, as I think Michael Dempsey's 1975 Film Quarterly article essentially is,1 for there is much in Ford that I have loved and love still; yet I do think that a clearer sense of some of the limits of Ford's work must be set alongside the reverent appreciation that work has received almost exclusively in recent years.

My point of departure is external to Ford's work, yet inseparable from it - the context of our age and our time, the circumstances under which we must now encounter his vision. And from that perspective, I wish to question what it is that Ford's military trilogy has to say to us, indeed is saying to us, in 1985 - to us who live in the shadow of MX missile production, of global nuclear proliferation. Indeed, it is interesting that we call these films the cavalry trilogy, not the military trilogy, betraying our interest in removing them and their message from current concerns. But in the current nuclear shadow, we find ourselves groping for larger visions of human community, for a more inclusive sense of our collective humanity than traditional national loyalties provide. I propose, then, to reconsider Ford's larger social vision here, though I think a rereading of his personal vision, perhaps by a feminist critic, is certainly in order as well.

Lindsay Anderson has argued that Ford deliberately sidestepped the controversial issues of his time by retreating into the past. Speaking of the trilogy, he argues:

And that this return to the past took the form at first of a fascination with nineteenth-century military life, is also indicative that this was no mere cynical retreat to the commercial security of the Western . There can be no doubt of the importance to Ford of his wartime service with the Navy, nor of the imaginative stimulus to him of the experience of war - the quickened sense of community among fighting men, moral ends limited and made sharply manifest, physical action as fulfillment of part of man's essential nature, the charged atmosphere of tragedy ... all these things, to Ford, had been of deep significance.

Such a fascination with the one-time profession of arms, with the theme of the "Happy Warrior," would in itself oblige a return to the past - for such sentiments, in an age of atom-bomb and hydrogen bomb warfare, have lost their validity.2

Clearly one essential quality of the Western is that it is retrospective. We are, as Anderson points out, always in the posture of looking back over our shoulder in the Western, and that posture is, I think, important for Ford, and not merely in the way that Anderson suggests. The idea of "printing the legend" from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence applies in some measure to all his Westerns, especially Fort Apache. Just as York decides to let the legend of Thursday's charge stand in the popular mind rather than debunk it, Ford chooses to paint our past in brighter colors and with more noble postures than it actually exhibited, I think, hoping to inspire us as a culture to live up to the demands of our ideals, to realize our own best selves.

One could argue that this quality does set Ford's Westerns off from other violent contemporary genres like the gangster film or the crime thriller, which may excuse the setting aside of our best selves for the brutal exigencies of the moment. Since Ford made his reputation with Westerns and not gangster films or thrillers, we could argue that the violence of these films is always framed in an historical context, never immediately accessible to excuse contemporary actions. We might be right to note such a distinction, but we would, I think, be wrong to make too much of it, as I shall hope to show with Rio Grande.

Rather than taking us safely away from contemporary issues, then, the military character of the cavalry films draws us uncomfortably into those issues, as Anderson finally admits. Today, when many would argue that war is outmoded and impossible, for nuclear powers at least, what indeed are we to make of these films and their clear affirmation of the life of the soldier and the national interest he represents?

But the tradition of Fordian criticism has nearly always avoided such questions. One seldom encounters the term military as a significant element in anyone's discussion of these films. The pattern was set, perhaps, by Peter Wollen"s semiotic reading of Ford, a reading that stressed a wilderness/garden "antinomy" drawn from Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land.3 Wollen did not mention any of the cavalry trilogy in his discussion, but the pattern he set has continued to dominate subsequent discussion of these films as well as the others.

Thus John Baxter, for example, casts nearly all of his discussion of the three films in terms of landscape,4 while McBride and Wilmington emphasize the historical reflection of the films.5 Place's argument on Fort Apache (and to a considerable extent in all these films) has to do with the relationship between freedom and responsibility, between individualism and the value of community.6 All of these latter critics, like Wollen, read Ford as presenting a set of tensions, as if the binary opposites Wollen discusses were sets of plusses and minuses which cancel each other out, or at best remain suspended in an unresolved tension. In fact, ambiguity is probably the key word in Fordian criticism at this point.

I should like to argue, not very originally at the outset, that the dominant pattern of Ford's military Westerns (as with all his films) is one that exonerates and praises generous acceptance of others, of their needs and failings. That pattern leads to a personal code in Ford that calls for submission to the needs of the group, for the submission of personal goals to the goals of society. In return. Ford presents a social code that demands indulgence of individual differences, patience with individual failings, and a generous tolerance of diversity that recalls that legitimate social goals must embody the hopes and dreams of the individuals who go to make up the group.

That is to say, then, that Ford is more internally consistent than ambiguous, and that to a large extent he demands the same thing of society that he demands of his individuals. In fact, Ford's personal code, which demands loyalty and submission to the social whole (often patriotism or a military code) tends to appeal to conservatives, just as Ford's social code, which demands social responsibility and tolerance, tends to appeal to liberals. And the whole model of antinomies, of tensions, of ambiguities provides critics with an easy way to avoid or explain away those aspects of Ford's vision they find uncomfortable. But Ford's ethic, appealing and powerful as it is, tends to break down at crucial points in the trilogy, and these points are best taken for what they are, betrayals of the dominant appealing pattern.

Let us turn to Fort Apache to begin. Fort Apache opens by pitting the inflexibility, arrogance, and ambition of Colonel Thursday against the informal, unassuming nonchalance of the Southwest desert. In the stage carrying him to exile at Fort Apache, Thursday mutters and grumbles, is demanding and highhanded with the stagehands, and gets put down as a "soldier boy" for his pains. He takes the accident of his unexpected arrival as a personal affront, commandeers Lt. O'Rourke's transportation, and dismisses the Indians he has come to fight as "digger Indians," that is until a recognition of Cochise's formidable reputation leads him to perceive in the Indians' revolt a ticket back to the fast lane in the Army. The question is, can an incorrigibly self-contained man be absorbed into a community, and conversely, can the community survive such a man? And that theme has been amply treated by numerous critics.

Yet this personal focus in the film is matched by a larger social focus as well - the question of whether or not two peoples, two cultures, will be able to coexist. In Fort Apache we move at least somewhat beyond the anonymity imposed on the Indians in Stagecoach; here Cochise is a respected enemy to be met face to face and bargained with. These two focal areas of the film are linked by the person and the failure of Thursday, whose influence is countered on the social side by Captain York and by Philadelphia on the personal side. Interestingly, Philadelphia is of little importance to the social side of the film, just as York is of minimal importance to the personal side .

Thursday fails in both areas, of course, but the two failures mirror each other, are related to each other. Thursday cannot understand community because he cannot set aside his own rigid plans for life. And since he cannot understand community, he cannot understand another community either.

Part of what separates the white and Indian cultures in the film is the corruption and greed of Meachum, the agent. Though Meachum represents a quite solvable problem, there can be no forgiveness for him because he lacks the socially redeeming virtues of gallantry and honor. Thursday actually precipitates the crisis in the film, as he had it in his power to remedy Meachum's abuses; yet for him there is a measure of forgiveness because he does finally exhibit gallantry and honor, crucial social values which are, nonetheless, belated and insufficient by themselves.

Thursday's personal failure is paired with his daughter's success. From the opening shots of the two of them in the stagecoach, it is clear that she is as relaxed, open, and accepting of people and circumstances as he is not. Her acceptance of and by the community is exemplified by her relationship to the O'Rourkes and the Collingwoods, and her final incorporation into the community through her marriage to Michael is set in counterpoint to Thursday's failure to accept as a son-in-law the offspring of a noncommissioned officer, even one who holds the medal of honor.

Further, Thursday's failure to recognize and capitalize upon opportunities for the reconciliation of communities is matched by Captain York's extraordinary peacemaking efforts. At the heart of the film is York's pilgrimage of peace to Cochise, a journey that inspires Ford's most eloquent and elegant camera work in the film. Thus the whole weight of the film is pitched toward understanding and acceptance, not toward the use of military force, a quite remarkable and admirably restrained vision to grow out of a film sympathetically portraying the military and following close upon the end of World War II, when Chamberlain, Munich, and appeasement were all words in most quarters that provoked automatic denunciation.

And yet, it is important to recognize that while Philadelphia's personal mission of acceptance and reconciliation is achieved in her marriage, York's social mission ultimately fails because of Thursday's intransigence, arrogance, and ambition. That fact leads us to the disputed end of the film. York's final endorsement of the Thursday myth, part accommodation with necessity, part sensitivity to survivors, part recognition of Thursday's only virtues of courage and honor, accepts the defeat of his own nobler aims, even as it confirms his role in a now more narrowly defined community for which enmity with the Apache is no longer avoidable. His final speech eulogizing the regular soldiers and their gallantry slips into a conventional militaristic patriotism that conspicuously lacks the larger sense of idealism that fired his earlier mission of peace. From seeking to reconcile cultures, he has come merely to defend his own, and no tone of eulogy at the end of the film can conceal that loss.

The soft focus on those larger implications of the plot by critics like McBride and Wilmington leads them to explain away this contradiction with a comparison to the editor's words in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence. They argue that York "covers up a personal injustice for the sake of what he considers a higher necessity, the future of the country."7 But the point clearly should be that the injustice is not merely personal, and that the higher necessity of which they speak, the future of the country, is a much more limited and less noble end than the one York had served earlier.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon opens with a summary of the Custer defeat Ford had invoked by Thursday's debacle in Fort Apache. "Another defeat like that," the narrator intones, "and no more wagons will roll west for 100 years." Thus while Fort Apache had begun with the personal problems of Thursday in the limited confines of a stage rolling west, and moved toward a larger social vision of amelioration that is finally betrayed, the second film in the trilogy opens with a statement of social problems seen from the narrowed nationalistic focus that grew out of the end of Fort Apache, only to move into the related personal concerns of Nathan Brittles.

It has become increasingly fashionable to call She Wore a Yellow Ribbon a dark film, especially since J. A. Place's book in 1974. She sees the film as a lament for lost greatness, a dead or dying heroism now lost in the American past.8 But Brittles, for all his talk of failure, for all his sense of frustration, struggles to get beyond the limited sense of manifest destiny of the opening of the film, and that larger humanness and sensitivity so suffuses the film with warmth and good nature that it is hard for me to see it as anything like so bleak as she paints it.

The personal problem posed in the film is two-fold: for Brittles, the question is whether or not he will be able to let go and believe in the young men, whose foibles are all too obvious to him (and to us, for the film is seen from the perspective of a retiree); and for the others in the group, the question is whether they will be able to retain and make use of the wisdom of an old leader, not merely giving thanks that he is not out of the way and up on the shelf.

Here, as in Fort Apache, the other members of the group are open and accepting, and Brittles, unlike Thursday, is also able to make the requisite adjustments. Brittles is mostly concerned with relinquishing command to Cohill and Pennell, and that relinquishment, painful as it is, is still achieved with considerabale grace and dignity. As Brittles relaxes, Cohill and Pennell give over selfish goals and ambitions (epitomized by their squabbling over Miss Dandridge) and begin to exhibit the responsibility they will need in the future. Again, this side of the film has been amply discussed.

On the larger social level, the accommodation is more equivocal, perhaps, but still importantly evident. Again, the film revolves around a mission of peace to the Apaches, a gesture that grows out of Brittles's understanding of the humanity of his enemies; he seeks to avoid battle if at all possible, to find an honest and workable compromise with Pony That Walks instead of unequivocal victory. In this sense, he represents a more humane and attractive approach to settling the West than either Custer or Thursday, both of whom sought confrontation. Like York, Brittles seeks a world where his culture might share the West with an older, but still viable life and world view. The message that comes across, then, is that the West was to be pacified by accommodation, if at all possible, more than won, and that force was to be used, if at all, out of the failure of diplomacy and not as an instrument of policy.

That brings us to MX and the ironic title of peacekeeper that it carries. The idea that the might exemplified by MX will force the Soviet Union to the bargaining table is, I think, uncomfortably close to the arrogant strategy Thursday follows to his destruction, and quite unlike the gestures toward understanding and coexistence that York offers Cochise, or Brittles offers Pony That Walks. That is to say, then, that in some measure both films wear rather well today for someone with political views like mine.

And yet, I must note a reservation with She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as I did with Fort Apache . The idealism lost in Fort Apache with York's subsidence from visionary peacemaker to patriot is only partially recovered in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. If Brittles marks a return to the enlarged vision of the early York, then circumstances allowing for the success of that vision have now become less propitious, since Pony That Walks, doubly debilitated by white man's whiskey and white man's religion, is a comic figure entirely lacking the force personified by Cochise in the earlier film. Likewise, the camera, in recording Brittles's mission of peace, does so rather laconically here, without the sweep and grace of the large pans that followed York.

Thus in the world of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, white American civilization has a monopoly on larger humane motives; and force, regrettably but inevitably, will follow. In that sense, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, for all its good nature and pleasantness, carries a certain self-congratulatory quality that leads to the increasingly self-satisfied and insular perspective of Rio Grande, a film that confirms the atmosphere of the Cold War as it retreats from the larger social vision Fort Apache initially entertained.

Rio Grande develops a personal conflict that is two-sided and perhaps richer and more complex than any of those in the earlier films. Colonel York is quickly revealed to be an excessively formal and rigid commander (rather as if the York of Fort Apache had internalized a bit too much of Thursday). York, separated from his family by his devotion to duty, has to learn a better balance between the demands of family and his duty to society as a whole.

But York is paired with Kathleen, his wife, who represents the opposite problem, a passionate attachment to home and family altogether too ready to dismiss large social duty, to bend rules to her own ends. At the outset both appear almost as caricatures - York is "ramrod, wreckage and ruin" as Kathleen terms him; Kathleen demands "special privilege to special born" as York points out. But we come to realize that both have settled into their respective roles in reaction to their separation, and the film serves, often with grace and delicacy, to break down their respective positions and bring them together. York learns to use the structure of form and rule to express love rather than deny it, and Kathleen comes to respect form as something more than the enemy of love, as expressive of a larger sort of human attachment. This side of the film, again, has been well discussed.

Yet Rio Grande, when considered next to the earlier two films, seems in some measure to be a film with a hole in it. Baxter dismisses it as a minor work,9 perhaps partly in response to the apparent lack of larger social resonance that we have seen in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. In some measure, the personal conflict of York and Kathleen broadens into the reconciliation of North and South, a minor theme also in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. But in fact the film raises a set of expectations about the relationship between groups and cultures as well as within one, just as the two films had done before, expectations that are forgotten or ignored as the film rolls on.

The title of the film, Rio Grande, suggests this concern and indeed it is highlighted as the first sequence of troop-meeting at the river that we see under the credits. As the personal side of the film deals with the acceptance of orders and limits, the social side explores national boundaries, and the Rio Grande here represents the limit of legitimate American military authority, a point made quite clear when the undercredit sequence is repeated midway through the film. York's patrol meets a Mexican detachment charged with maintaining the integrity of their northern border. York and his counterpart exchange elaborate formal courtesies, but the Mexican soldier is determined to follow his orders and to insure respect for the boundary.

The final campaign to catch the Apaches and to rescue the children they have stolen involves crossing the Rio Grande and pursuing them to their sanctuary in Mexico, a task made easier for York by the fact that General Sheridan has given him an illegal order to do just that, even before the children were snatched. These three repeated journeys to the river, then, resulting in a crossing the last time, underscore the structural importance of the idea for Ford, as does the title of James Warner Bellah's story from which the film was adapted, "Mission with No Record" - no record, of course, because the mission was illegal and to be disclaimed should it ever come to light.

But by the time the river crossing comes, Ford has so withdrawn our interest from this initially significant point that it is scarcely noticed. Indeed, of Ford's major critics, only Place mentions the issue of the river, and she makes the revealing mistake of asserting that we do not see the troops cross the river.10 (We do indeed.) We do not see the return crossing because in this film, a border once violated for a good cause ceases to be important anymore. The emotional weight of the stolen children and murdered woman leads us to accept the incursion in context here, but the fact remains that the Indians have once again become, as in Stagecoach, an anonymous other whose depredations justify illegal and extreme responses. And the convenient disappearance of the Mexican border guards makes such a justification very easy and a bit cheap - easier and cheaper than Peckinpah would allow it to be in Major Dundee.

Interestingly too, the film was made in mid and late 1950. It was probably begun after Wagonmaster was released in April; Rio Grande was released on November 15. The production period of the film, then, is precisely the period that saw the invasion of South Korea, the counteroffensive mounted by the U.S. (ostensibly U.N.) troops under MacArthur, and the crossing of the 38th parallel. Only ten days after the film's release, the first of MacArthur's troops were reaching the Yalu River, only to be met by waves of Chinese troops crossing their border and sweeping back toward the South.

In finally downplaying the significance of the river crossing and justifying it through the violations of the enemy, Rio Grande becomes more narrowly and unambiguously militaristic than either of its two predecessors. The fact that Ford's next film would be This is Korea underscores this drift back toward a closer identification with national policy and a nationalistic view of human community, a drift first evidenced in the ending of Fort Apache and continued in the comic treatment of Pony That Walks in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

In summing up his reading of the military trilogy, Lindsay Anderson praises them thus:

To make films which are so dedicated to a military tradition as these are, and yet not to make them militaristic, is an extraordinary achievement. Yet none of these stories can be called aggressive. In Fort Apache, Colonel Thursday, who insults the Apache leader as a "recalcitrant swine," is shown to be an arrogant and embittered man, and a bad soldier: the good soldier is one who comes to terms with the Indians and who respects them. In Rio Grande it is the Indians who attack; the cavalry foray is made to rescue the women and children who have been carried off by the marauders. And the whole plot of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (this is a circumstance which seems to have passed generally unremarked) turns generally on the necessity for avoiding war."

Anderson is right in pointing out the "pacific (not pacifist) theme" 1 2 0f the films. only wrong, I think, in suggesting that it is common to all three of them. Fort Apache begins a quite remarkable broadening in Ford's work that was regrettably limited before it could be completed, and by the time of Rio Grande, he had lapsed back into a narrower and more predictable nationalism that substantially cut away the larger resonance of this last film.

Andrew Sarris has contended that the Indian always remains the undifferentiated Other in Ford.'-1 That is true of Stagecoach as it is of Rio Grande. Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon flirted with something more than that, to their lasting credit, but we are left to wish that Ford had not abandoned his search for a larger human community in favor of a simpler and more simplistic nationalism.