She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

 Year:  1949

Director:  John Ford

Screenplay:  Frank Nugent and Laurence Stalling, based on the stories The Big Hunt and War Party by James Warner Bellah

Starring:  John Wayne, Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr.

Running Time:  103 minutes

Genre:  Western

1876: At Fort Starke, a remote US Cavalry post, Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne), six days away from retirement, is heading out for his last patrol: to prevent a new war between the Cheyenne and Arapaho  and the white colonists following the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  However, Brittles' task is complicated by a second order: to deliver his commanding officer's wife, Abbey Allshard (Mildred Natwick), and niece, Olivia Dandridge (Dru), to an eastbound stagecoach.  To make matters worse, two of the soldiers in the patrol are vying for Olivia's affections, causing tensions among the patrol.

Named for a popular US Army marching song,  She Wore a Yellow Ribbon was the second film in director John Ford's "Cavalry Trilogy" following Fort Apache (1948) and concluding with Rio Grande (1950).  Ford originally didn't want John Wayne for the lead, partly due to the fact that Wayne would be playing a character about twenty years older than he was at the time, and partly because he didn't think that Wayne had the acting skill to play the role.  However, Ford changed his mind after seeing Wayne in the film Red River (1948), which caused Ford to exclaim "I didn't know the big son of a bitch could act!"  Wayne himself considered She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as one of his best performances.  While the film has plenty of broad humour (Victor McLaglen as the stereotypical drunk Irish soldier), it has surprisingly little of the action you might expect from a film like this, although there are a few battles between the cavalrymen and the Native American braves, they are brief and far between. The film has aged pretty badly with it's attitude towards the Native Americans (although there is a sympathetic and layered Native American character, Pony-That-Walks played by Chief John Big Tree), it's sympathetic attitude towards the Confederacy, Victor McLaglen's comic relief Irish character, and also the blood-and-thunder militarism.  The film also gets bogged down in the love triangle subplot between the two soldiers (John Agar and Harry Carey Jr.) , who are pretty much indistinguishable except one has dark hair and one is blonde, and Olivia.  However, the film has a strongly elegiac tone, as Brittles, a lifelong soldier and widower, contemplates a life away from his beloved Army.  John Wayne is at his best here, delivering an unusually thoughtful performance, and Joanne Dru is good, although she really isn't given much to do.  As always in John Ford Westerns, the locations in Monument Valley look spectacular.  

John Wayne and John Agar in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon