Owen Thursday sees his new posting to the desolate Fort Apache as a chance to claim the military honour which he believes is rightfully his. Arrogant, obsessed with military form and ultimately self-destructive, he attempts to destroy the Apache chief Cochise after luring him across the border from Mexico, against the advice of his subordinates.
John Wayne Henry Fonda Shirley Temple Pedro Armendáriz Ward Bond George O’Brien Victor McLaglen Anna Lee Irene Rich Dick Foran Guy Kibbee Grant Withers Jack Pennick Ray Hyke Movita Miguel Inclán Mary Gordon Philip Kieffer Mae Marsh Hank Worden John Agar Abdullah Abbas Danny Borzage Cliff Clark Jane Crowley Frank Ferguson Francis Ford William Forrest Fred Graham Show All…
Frank Baker Fred Carson John Epper Richard Farnsworth Fred Graham John Hudkins Ben Johnson Walt La Rue Cliff Lyons Ted Mapes Frank McGrath Gil Perkins Bob Rose Danny Sands Barlow Simpson Jack Williams Terry Wilson
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Phoenix, Arizona
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Sweden15
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Germany12
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Brazil
Denmark
France
Germany
Netherlands
South Korea
Sweden
USA
"No Questions." Constant groupings into Ford's "Calvary Trilogy" (which consists of this and two significantly weaker films) often hides the fact that this is one of Ford's most ambitious and complex works. Radical both then and today for its equation of blind submission to authority with suicide. What a fine double bill this would make with Mizoguchi's "The 47 Ronin"! One of the most astonishing things: in the final two minutes Ford demonstrates his understanding that the basics of cinema is not story and character, but composition, sound and montage. After John Wayne "prints the legend," Ford has him wear Fonda's hat, and then repeats shots of the regiment marching off and the women watching them. By itself, this would…
Every time I see this, I think 'Surely this must be Ford's best film.'
But I say the same about a half dozen other films.
Interesting compare/contrast with Raoul Walsh's Custer film They Died with their Boots On. Walsh takes a real figure and makes him heroic, entirely in the face of history, Ford takes a fictional figure and matches him to anti-heroic history.
Thursday doesn't hate Indians, he just sees them as less than human. Barely a step above the Irishmen he finds himself surrounded by on the frontier. He despises the corrupt Indian agent, but treats him with more respect than anyone else he meets because his title gives him a class status the others can't match. Even…
*Was a 67, now an 85*
Struggled with this film initially when I watched it last year. But upon revisit, this is a clear landmark for John Ford, both in its psychological complexity and the examination of the rituals that bind the communities of his films. Not only does Fort Apache observe the elaborate customs of the calvary hierarchy, but the confined and rigid nature of the first-half opens up to the expansive frontier, and along with it, the ignorance, racism, and absurdity of the calvary is viewed as a miniscule counter-point to the vastness of Monument Valley. The second-half offers up some of John Ford's most mythic imagery (that shot of John Wayne slowly walking into the dust cloud…
of the benighted arrogance of the white man, of the desultory vanity of institutionalized hierarchy, of the 'banality of evil' as arendt's thinking adresses it. blind authority leading to suicide, class stratification preventing love to flourish, duty vanquishing social relations.
for the second half of the film, what we have is one of ford's most complex, expansive and multi-layered works. the last scene is also one of his most bitter endings, following a hegelian dialectic of cyclical historic events, that scene of the women in the porch watching their men leave for the second time, still trapped in the vanity of some pretense system of order, is just heartbreaking.
in a mythological dimension, it is as fordian as it gets:…
“Fort Apache” captures the moment that Western expansionism turned into American imperialism.
The first of director John Ford’s ‘cavalry trilogy,’ “Apache” is an amalgamation of historical disasters; all birthed from an excess of hubris. It takes aspects from the Fetterman Fight - an ambush led by Crazy Horse that killed all 81 members of a military detachment - and also the even more infamous Battle of Little Bighorn, aka Custer’s Last Stand.
John Wayne and Henry Fonda as “Apache’s” leads represent the two faces of Manifest Destiny. Wayne is the rugged Captain York; a man who is comfortable to let the rough frontier shape his own edges. Fonda is Lieutenant Colonel Thursday; a man determined to hammer the West into…
an almost unbearable use of visuals-as-suffocation. european class stratification finding root in american imperialism, society degraded into mere formal process and bureaucracy, the ironic affirmation of tyranny is still tyranny. a man is what he's paid for, and both the americans and first nations people are dehumanized and subjugated in varying degrees by this mechanistic ideology. i must say that i found this quite painful to watch; forget the western, this is a political horror film.
- Quando Godard escreveu nos Cahiers (n° 184, novembro de 1966): "Um ano atrás, tentei em vão convencer Tavernier a publicar seu magnífico estudo sobre Ford aqui e não lá, mas ele preferiu a humilhação à ofensa e o terreno baldio à Mademoiselle Âge Tendre. Tristeza por encontrar, mesmo entre os mais puros cinéfilos, o grande defeito de todas as pessoas do cinema, essa recusa doentia de formar uma frente comum contra o inimigo", o que você respondeu?
- Eu lembro muito bem desse episódio. Primeiro, fiquei lisonjeado com o julgamento de Godard. Eu o fiz ler o texto sobre Ford e ele realmente me pediu para publicá-lo nos Cahiers. Isso me tocou porque a revista era muito prestigiosa e,…
The morals of decorum - Ford's 47 Ronin, the anti-Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. "No questions." - the statement itself is a non-sequitur, from here on we have to question the implications of the image. Quite probably the richest and most complex film made in America up to this point.
65%
One of John Ford's most magnificent images.
Being totally honest, Fort Apache has not allowed me to get close to any of its characters. Even though I pick up the messages, I can't see anything but dust on their horses.
Vi muito de Eastwood aqui, sobretudo em sua fase de construção do heroísmo americano. Veja, não se trata de um herói sob posse da mais gloriosa moralidade (ou sim?), mas cheio de problemas que, ao final, o corroem. Na guerra, as vezes é preciso dar um passo atrás. Contudo, Coronel Owen Thursday parece representar muito das pretensões obscuras de um estadismo pretensamente maior que os outros. Coronel Owen Thursday é o mito americano.
Cowgirls and Pakistanis, starring Jane Fonda in drag, John Wayne Gacy before he made it big, and a very young Shirley Temple as a piece of furniture. The best in its genre.
"I can't see him, all I can see are the flags."
Fort Apache is a respectable, traditional western, so anybody that knows me won't be surprised that I didn't quite love it. Henry Fonda and John Wayne turn in performances that are consistently captivating, and John Ford shoots the heck out of his Monument Valley rocky desert landscapes and horse-bound action scenes (these still hold up almost 70 years later), but the film itself is so conservative in its glorification of war and manifest destiny and ideological nationalism that I had a hard time really getting into it.
Fort Apache lives and dies in the interplay between Henry Fonda and John Wayne. Fonda is the new officer sent to the…
