John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy: Fighting the Cold War in the American West (Preview)
by Graham Fuller

Following the painters Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel, John Ford’s Cavalry Trilogy—Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950)—did much to enshrine in the Frontier Myth the role played by the U.S. Army’s cavalry regiments in subduing the Native American tribes and displacing them from their ancestral lands. Beyond profiting RKO and Republic Pictures, the trilogy served another purpose by reinvoking the myth during the Cold War as a historical metaphor for national unity, the dread of communism having intensified after the establishment of the 38th Parallel divided Korea in 1948 and the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

Ford’s place in the directors’ pantheon is attributed more to his mastery of visual storytelling than to his rigor as a social critic or political observer, notwithstanding the incisiveness of non-Westerns like The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and The Sun Shines Bright (1953). His lyrical, storybook vision of the West between the Civil War and the closing of the Frontier, together with his iconizing of John Wayne and Monument Valley, made him the greatest Western genre auteur in most critics’ eyes (though Anthony Mann’s James Stewart Westerns are more thoughtfully metaphysical in their use of harsh landscapes). One reason the Cavalry Trilogy stands out is the way Ford harnessed imagery and style—Fort Apache’s ominous dust clouds, the Remingtonian vividness of mounted troopers and Indians on the move in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the expressionist use of light and shadow in Rio Grande—to relay his evolving views on the Cold War. This essay focuses less on the trilogy’s vaunted pictorialism, however, than its content.

Despite popular acclaim, the trilogy, which elevated Wayne to America’s top box-office star and began his consecration as the nation’s monolithic superpatriot, has polarized critics. Fort Apache alone has been admitted to Ford’s Western canon alongside The Iron Horse (1924), Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Wagon Master (1950), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Ford’s stories of leadership crises in the cavalry suffered from discordant humorous scenes centered on Victor McLaglen’s bibulous Irish sergeants and—in Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon—the tepid star-crossed romances of callow lieutenants and young Eastern women. To dismiss the trilogy for such faults, however, is to dismiss its significance as elaborately freighted propaganda.

Unenlightening on this score is Michael F. Blake’s book The Cavalry Trilogy: John Ford, John Wayne, and the Making of Three Classic Westerns (NY: TwoDot Books, 2024), a guide to the making of the films that focuses on a comparison of the scripts with what Ford actually filmed but which avoids any sociopolitical analysis. A few valuable thoughts on the trilogy were added by Joseph McBride and the late Michael Wilmington to the update of their 1975 critical study John Ford (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 2023). Outside scholarly circles, the cavalry films are considered rousing conventional Westerns, as blithely extolled by Bosley Crowther in his Fort Apache review in The New York Times: “A rootin’, tootin’ Wild West show, full of Indians and United States cavalry, dust and desert scenery and a nice masculine trace of romance.” Yet each of these old warhorses is more intricately caparisoned than that.

Ford never intended to make a trilogy. He shot Rio Grande quickly, in thirty-two days, to secure financing for his Irish romance The Quiet Man (1952)—a passion project it took him nearly twenty years to achieve—starring Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. All three cavalry films grew from the empathy and affinity for American military personnel and their families elicited in Ford during his World War II service. A Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Ford was wounded while filming the Pacific-arena documentary The Battle of Midway (1942). Awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received while filming during that naval battle, he subsequently became Chief of the Field Photographic Branch, Office of Strategic Services. Though reluctant to make combat movies as the war concluded, Ford directed They Were Expendable (1945), which somberly saluted the self-sacrifice of Navy Patrol Torpedo Boat crewmen during the losing battle for the Philippines in 1942. The film’s lauding of the soldierly ideal of putting duty before self greatly influenced the cavalry Westerns.

As the Cold War became a reality, Ford projected onto the trilogy his reverence for the whole of American army life, not simply the bravery of men at arms. He idealized it as a democratic utopia threatened from with-out by the “red” menace embodied by Cochise’s Chiricahua Apaches (even though they are sympathetically presented) in Fort Apache, the rapacious band led by his son Nachez (or Naiche) in Rio Grande, and the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and Arapahos fired up by the symbolically named warmonger Red Shirt (played by veteran Black actor Noble Johnson) in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. Whether the era’s moviegoers recognized the correspondence between Indians and communists is moot, but the anonymous New York Times reviewer of Rio Grande hinted at it when he wrote of Colonel Kirby Yorke (Wayne, who played Kirby York in Fort Apache) routing “the Reds” in the cavalry’s climactic charge.

The trilogy was drawn from five of the James Ward Bellah cavalry stories published by The Saturday Evening Post between 1946 and 1948. Fort Apache was based on “Massacre,” set in 1874 but inspired by the annihilation of George Armstrong Custer’s 7th Cavalry battalion at the Battle of the Little Big Horn two years previously. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, which unfolds during the immediate aftermath of Custer’s defeat, combined strands of “War Party,” “The Big Hunt,” and “Command.” Rio Grande originated in “Mission with No Record.” Bellah’s prose is saturated with lurid dime-novel imagery, but he was the author of brisk, well-researched, and authentic-seeming Indian Wars adventures. He was also, as his son James Jr. admitted to Garry Wills, author of John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997), “a fascist, a racist and a world class bigot.” Bellah loathed Native Americans and all peoples he considered inferior to whites. In “The Devil at Crazy Man,” he distorts history, as McBride notes in Searching for John Ford: A Life (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), by contending that the Indian Wars were “a race war against the white man.”…

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Graham Fuller is a Cineaste Associate and author of several books on film.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 1