★ 6 / 10
A Cheyenne is a soldier from the first
John Chard
A Cheyenne is a soldier from the first slap on his bottom. Cheyenne Autumn is directed by John Ford and is a "Hollywood" telling of the Northern Cheyenne…
A Cheyenne is a soldier from the first slap on his bottom.
Cheyenne Autumn is directed by John Ford and is a "Hollywood" telling of the Northern Cheyenne Exodus of 1877/9, where the Northern Cheyenne, fed up with lack of food and poor facilities, tried to return to their one time home in the North after having been located in the Southern Reservation by the United States Army. It stars Richard Widmark, Caroll Baker, Dolores del Rio, Karl Malden, Gilbert Roland, Ricardo Montalban, Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy. Music is scored by Alex North and cinematography by William H. Clothier. It is photographed in Super Panavision 70, in various Utah locations, predominantly Monument Valley.
Does it ever matter who fired the first shot?
John "Pappy" Ford's penultimate film, and his last Western, is epic in scope and production and seen as an honest attempt to redress the balance for years of misrepresentation of Native Americans in Hollywood, though not necessarily his own since he, I believe, isn't on record as saying that to be the case? Thematically it's important and doesn't back off from being sympathetic to the Cheyenne's plight, we root for them and rightly so. Yet it always feels like a film shot through the vision of a white man's eyes, you find yourself wanting more from the Cheyenne perspective, for them to dominate the narrative. It would have been nice to know some of the big players involved in the heroic and tragic trek back to Wyoming. It's also annoying that Ford or the studio chose to interrupt the flow of the story with the pointless light relief section at Dodge City. Which comes across as just an excuse for James Stewart and Arthur Kennedy to play Wyatt Earp & Doc Holliday respectively. And sadly, they are not very successful in doing so either.
As has been noted by many critics over the years, the film ultimately rounds out as an honourable misfire from the great John Ford. The cast, away from the loud and brash Dodge City collective, are mostly fine. Widmark proves to be a watchable axis as the reluctant Captain tasked with returning the Cheyenne to the barren reservation. Baker does a nice line in sexy Quaker, Robinson adds a touch of class late in the day, while Montalban & Roland are excellent as Cheyenne chiefs Little Wolf & Dull Knife respectively. But all pale in the shadow of Clothier's magnificent photography, stunning vistas that dominate the screen, the colours so rich and splendid, Monument Valley an iconic character of nature observing the Cheyenne desperately trying to get back to home comforts.
It's unmistakably a John Ford picture, with some inspired filming techniques, but the heart of the story is lost due to a too long run time, a daft mid point sequence and much extraneous nonsense. 6/10
★ 8 / 10
The picture was handsome, shot in Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, but considering its genre it was slow, even tedious
Nazi_Fighter_David
John Ford dealt with one of the long-lasting Indian tragedies in his "Cheyenne Autumn," the wasting away of a tribe in an uncongenial pen called a reservation…
John Ford dealt with one of the long-lasting Indian tragedies in his "Cheyenne Autumn," the wasting away of a tribe in an uncongenial pen called a reservation and its efforts to take matters into its own hands
Indians, to use a modern term, had become redundant; that was their true tragedy
They were unwanted in what the whites wanted to make of the West and so they were 'placed' and disposed of, thereby suffering the usual 'superfluous' maladies of physical and moral debilitation
Here they are portrayed as the victims of insensitive herding
The Cheyennes1,500 miles away in Oklahoma from their Yellowstone homehad seen their numbers depleted from one thousand to less than three hundred in the course of a disease-ridden year
With these sorts of statistics it was as much a matter of simple logic as an act of desperation when they upped and left one night, bound on foot for their old hunting grounds, probably knowing full well that the cavalry would make them hurry, as they did, all the way
An epic in real life. Would the master epic-maker match it? In purely visual terms the answer was 'yes'. Ford vivid1y depicted the starvation and disease plaguing the Cheyenne trek
But somehow Ford never wholly got to the heart of the matter although the intent was there and at times this is a most impressive and moving film
Carroll Baker appears as a Quaker teacher who tries in vain to he1p the unfortunate migrants
Richard Widmark is the army captain who is as sympathetic as uniform allows, and Arthur Kennedy is razor-sharp in his impersonation of Doc Holliday, who, with Stewart's Earp, is drafted into leading a posse against the Indians
Stewart deliberately re-routes them and the Indians get away
Edward G. Robinson plays a humane and kindly Secretary of the Interior who helps bail out the unlucky Cheyenne.
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