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MAKING UP John Ford said that no other director killed more native Americans in westerns than he did. In doing his last one, 1964's Cheyenne Autumn, he would make up for the lack of social conscience by depressing the hell out of us about the insufferable plight this country put the natives through. (And still does.) As sincere as he may have been, he didn't have the depth of script or acting from his cast to measure up to his intentions, so in the end this Super Panavision 70 epic is one final travelogue of his favorite locales. You keep wanting to suppress the bitch, “How many more times must we see the same g.d. stone monuments?” Just when he began to suspect the material was boobytrapped is open to some speculation—during the rushes about midway through production? When he put together a rough cut? He claimed that he didn't want an intermission, ostensibly to keep the mood in place, but of course that runs counter to what he provided in lieu of—a sequence using James Stewart as Wyatt Earp and Arthur Kennedy as Doc Holiday, in effect a brief getaway from the relentless march of gloom. There's not a movie lover or Ford devotee who doesn't ask, WTF? (Of the three laughs in the whole dreary enterprise, Stewart supplies two, Edward G. Robinson the third.) Richard Widmark does his screamer routine; Carroll Baker does her earnest thing; Karl Malden has a drunken madman exit; Robinson gets robbed of the prestige he otherwise brings when jarring, nearly fatal studio process shots are used for his pivotal scene with the Indians. One of the pitfalls for westerns is casting actors as central Indians characters—it almost never works because we usually end up with well-known Hispanics (or sometimes beefy numbers like Rock Hudson and Jeff Chandler) sounding nutsy spieling off the nutsy native lingo. Fully aware of how bigoted that reads but with Gilbert Roland, Delores Del Rio and Ricardo Montalban subbing, it's the awful truth. Peacock Sal Mineo struts sans dialogue, the wisest decision Ford makes throughout. There's another unwanted hangover evident—from How the West Was Won, in the name of James Webb who wrote both severely fact-deficient scripts. Alex North's score is a displacing rehash of Spartacus, with a few feathers and tree log drums thrown in. Originally a roadshow presented through seamless Cinerama, the box office bomb was released at 170 minutes, later to be cut down to 154, then, on wide release and TV, to 144. On DVD, it's the 154 minute version. ROLL OVER IMAGES 
Text COPYRIGHT © 2010 RALPH BENNER All Rights Reserved.
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