Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford by Scott Eyman

Author:Scott Eyman [Eyman, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2012-05-29T00:00:00+00:00

Although there are some similarities between Owen Thursday and George Custer—their ranks are the same, their Civil War records are comparable, and they both achieve the fame they seek by the drastic tactic of being slaughtered in battle—there are also distinct differences. Thursday is a bitter and disappointed man, preoccupied by matters such as proper military dress, while Custer couldn’t have cared less about such things.736 Thursday has no respect for Indians and no experience in Indian warfare.

Fort Apache is one of Ford’s most complex creations. Henry Fonda’s Lieutenant Colonel Thursday is a churlish, brooding injustice collector, a rigid authoritarian—and not much of a soldier. By comparison, John Wayne’s Kirby York is a good-humored man, indicated by his more relaxed body language. Fort Apache beautifully depicts the daily routine of life on a distant cavalry outpost, and the rituals that maintain a sense of order in an otherwise savage wilderness—the small points of military courtesy; dress uniforms worn for the (realistically rendered) post dance; new recruits being shown how to ride; the cavalry songs sung while the men march.

The film turns on the difference between Thursday and York; the latter believes Cochise to be an honorable man and makes promises to him, the former can’t imagine the term being applied to an Indian, any Indian, and violates the promise. Thursday’s vanity and self-righteousness lead him, and most of his company, to destruction.

Thursday is doomed, not so much because he loathes the Apache, but because he doesn’t listen, because he arrogantly attempts to impose his version of reality on an intransigent natural world far removed from his Eastern verities. Ford heroes played by Wayne—the Ringo Kid, Tom Doniphon, Nathan Brittles, even the ferocious Ethan Edwards—are never so vain as to attempt to bend the world to their will, preferring either an easy, mutual understanding or a proud exile—a function of Wayne’s expansive spirit and humor.

But Henry Fonda’s stiff walk sets him against the flow of life around him.737 In Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, or My Darling Clementine, this translates to integrity; in Fort Apache, it translates to the tragic inhumanity of a martinet.

The filmmaker Jean-Marie Straub once called Ford the most Brechtian of filmmakers, because he lays bare the contradictions. He never pushed it further than in Fort Apache, where the final scene sanctions vain glory and senseless death because it serves the need for a uniting myth. A reporter gazes at a portrait painting of Colonel Thursday, calls him a great man and a great soldier. Kirby York pauses and reflects. “No man died more gallantly,” he says, confirming the legend, even though the legend is a lie.

As Stanley Crouch observed, “Duty was something Ford believed in, even though he knew that it might cost almost more than one could bear or demand more than one would survive.”738

“It’s good for the country,” Ford told Peter Bogdanovich.739 “We’ve had a lot of people who were supposed to be great heroes, and you know damn well they weren’t. But it’s good for the country to have heroes to look up to.

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