A few weeks ago, I watched John Ford’s Fort Apache, and I still don’t know how I feel about it. Not only a movie about another era, it has become a movie from another era. It feels dated, though not always in a bad way. Fort Apache measures up to all I’ve heard about Ford’s signature style, and the appeal of his narrative is obvious. It’s easy to see how his work became the American myth, for good and ill. At times, the movie seems to remain quite relevant, on issues and as art. At other times, it feels merely quaint, an improvement on what came before but superseded in turn by what would come later. And sometimes, it’s a seductive package for dangerous ideas—including ideas Ford fought against.
The cinematography alone is a mixed bag. Ford’s genius splashes mesas and canyons beautifully across the screen, even in black and white. Styrofoam rocks and stage cacti were no longer acceptable after Ford blew into Hollywood, and with good reason. Those vistas aren’t just good filming for the ’40s and ’50s; they’re good filming period, establishing mood and setting and pacing in a fashion well worth the budget and seconds of film spent on them. The jubilant military music that accompanies them, however, often seems out of place: good to announce a change of scene to a battle, or even a brush with adventure, but entirely inappropriate to announce efforts at homemaking. The gala ball seems flat wrong: anachronistic, yes, but more to the point a kind of worship of aristocratic values (and, to a lesser extent, military values) common to the western yet inappropriate to American mythology.
The artistic message carries far more ambivalence than the artistic technique, however. Fort Apache‘s framing conflict is one of settler versus native: the Apaches are on the warpath, and Lt. Col. Thursday (Henry Fonda) has arrived to drive them back to the reservation or kill them. Thursday is something of a villain in the piece, however, a dutiful but incompassionate man who refuses to accept that the Apache are willing to cooperate with the white man as long as it doesn’t mean starving. As veteran Captain York (John Wayne) explains, they had to cross the Mexican border for food after a bad growing season, and a profiteer with a license from the federal government proves to be gouging the Apache as well. Thursday also gets his unit shot up when he dismisses York’s warnings that Apache are skilled fighters, considering them nothing more than breach-clothed savages, and dies in the process. But eventually the cavalry fights its way out of ambush and brings the Apache to heel under York’s firm direction.
Race fuels a parallel conflict within the fort’s walls. Thursday doesn’t want his daughter marrying newly minted 2nd Lt. Michael O’Rourke because he’s an Irishman, never mind how shiny a young gentleman he might appear. In the end, O’Rourke gets young Miss Thursday over her father’s dead body, the Apache demonstrate that they are peaceful by nature though they fight like demons when forced, and Thursday becomes a posthumous hero in the press, to York’s repressed silence. Whether he holds his tongue out of respect for the national fiction, or simply to avoid speaking ill of the dead, is unclear.
The Irish, like Italians, were still borderline American citizens in many eyes as late as 1948; even such celebrities as John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra had to prove themselves worthy to a Protestant, Anglo-German-Dutch hegemony. Ford offers O’Rourke’s success in breaking through racial barriers as something to celebrate, and Fort Apache earns full marks for treating natives as more than a menace on the horizon. Yet, even as it tells us everyone has worth regardless of ancestry and that we should all get along, the movie also portrays the rest of the Irishmen in the fort (which is most of the enlisted men and almost all the NCOs) as drunkards and brawlers—two steps forward for race relations, two steps back. The two Mexicans—a scout sergeant and a domestic servant, take the role of blacks in many other movies of the era: cheerful, faithful servants, well treated but safely remaining in their place, beneath white gentlemen and ladies. Brief mention of the Civil war is made, some soldiers having served the Union, some the Confederacy, but tension over the issue is conspicuously absent. A rider is respected for his service with Nathan Bedford Forrest; the dark reputation of Forrest himself, his riders, their cause, and the KKK are ignored. In a Ford production, whatever differences western settlers may have had are in the past, and, really, what the heck were we fighting over, anyway?
Well, slavery is what we were fighting over, and the question of whether it is okay to treat some people as mere things. But Fort Apache tries to rivet our focus on amicable relations, and away from divisive issues like what to do about negroes and how Washington treated the Indians, even as it preaches racial tolerance. A very mixed message, and a confusing one from the perspective of 2010, after the civil rights movement and two generations of Sesame Street‘s appeals to the best of our natures.
The message must have seemed simpler in 1948. The idea that guilt for genocide and slavery will go away if we just pretend they never happened must have been terribly appealing to a culture sensitive to what racism had meant for German Jews and gearing up for another round of reconsidering what racism meant for its own minorities—African-Americans prominently in the foreground, but also the Japanese internment, our own Jewish minority, the personal but widely experienced exposure of different nationalities to one another in military service, the first stirrings of awareness of migrants from Mexico and further south, and questions of whether we wanted the empire we could easily take in the wake of WWII. It was appealing enough to become our new national mythology. In this mythology, the warrior hero of the frontier, grabbing all he could for himself and for his country, was replaced by a gentleman hero, frontier survival by the chivalric ideal. The gentleman hero treats all with respect and dignity, and fights only when compelled, not for personal enrichment.
But this mythology has a dark side, incompatible with American values. The mark of a gentleman is kindness to his inferiors, and, though the mythology never uses that distasteful word, the gentleman has inferiors in the common but decent working stiffs. In return, says the mythology, the working stiffs hold the gentleman in adulation and work just as hard as they can to ensure his success and comfort. And ever-so-slightly beneath them, just enough for everyone to notice but not enough to prove anything in specific cases, are the brown-skinned working stiffs. A gentleman can rise from common roots, as O’Rourke does here, but once he’s made his fortune, become an officer, or achieved public office, he enters the aristocracy and never belongs among the riff-raff again. He never did.
Naturally, all this works so long as the inferiors don’t agitate too often for a chance to join their betters, and there’s the rub.
Ford’s depiction of the American frontier makes these dangerous ideas palatable, even attractive. It’s hard to reconcile the dangers of Ford’s vision with the vision itself. Ford explicitly promotes unity, tolerance, industry, and meritocracy, and presumably his heart was in it. But lurking thick in the subtext are messages of privilege, subservience, martial virtue, and above all a whitewashing of history, in a way that may have been harder to detect in 1948. Wayne took roles in which he delivers wooden lectures on compassion, but he’s celebrated for roles in which he swaggers, loses his temper, and kills Japs or Gooks or Injuns. Conservatives who harken back to an idyllic (and imaginary) American past believe hard in Ford’s America, where everyone was happy and everyone knew his place. And if John Wayne had to thrash some uppity minorities, well, they must have deserved it for some reason.
Ford’s approach to race no longer seems relevant in itself, although it deserves considerable attention as a historical artifact, a major stepping stone on our path from the nation’s founding to where we are now. His approach to class seems increasingly relevant as income (and other privileges’) disparity accelerates, but relevant as the wrong side of the half-spoken debate, something to be avoided rather than embraced. His approach to film, while occasionally dipping into the corny, still deserves its reputation as good cinema. A complex reaction to a work with a reputation for oversimplification.
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