One never knows when I’ll dig up an oldie (1949), living in close proximity as I do, to Movie Madness. With expert guidance from elders with past careers in curating, I’ve been getting advice on how best to catch up in certain genres, such as The Western (basically cowboys and Indians, I’d say usually after the Civil War up through when horses got phased out as a common source of horsepower).
I was doing noirs. I’m also still into books. We finished Pluribus (E9 of S1 is as far as it goes at this point).
I wanna circle (on my own, no prompting) the importance of alcohol in this picture. It actually explores alcoholism in various forms in quite a few scenes, more of them comical than not. John Wayne, their leader, is sober but not harshly judgmental of drinkers. On the contrary, in AA jargon we’d have to call him an enabler, but among soldiers in those ranks no enabling was needed, just steering.
The Indians were actually treated with respect, contrary to my expectations, more like an alien feature of this already exotic, Martian-like vista, strangers in a strange land, and so foreign to the world of Victorian gardeners and the horse and buggy types back home in the homeland. So many mysterious tribes on the move, each with their signature chest-piercing arrows.
The movie opens with people mourning about General Custer’s loss at Little Bighorn, all well before my time. I don’t go out of my way to construct an identity based upon what I read in those particular history books. Some might say I should or need to because of my socio-economic demographic (“Caucasian” as in “from the Caucasus” (not)). That’s not how I use my “we” pronoun, more on that elsewhere (remember, this is Portland, weird around pronouns).
This is one of those epics with the booming voice narrator (at key junctures), telling us the story from some higher level management point of view, with a lot of benefits from hindsight.
The trend in filmmaking would be to lose the narrator, although he (usually it’s a he) makes a big comeback in the spoof Idiocracy, helping us remember how much we might miss him.
The Indians weren’t portrayed, like in many films, as slaves to demon alcohol, not nearly to the level of the white men in uniform (I recall no blacks in the ranks, plus a confederate flag featured in one of the few burials). Not to any level at all. The main chief we encounter towards the end, seems more into weed (or whatever goes into that pipe he shares). He was jovial in any case.
That’s a good word for this film: jovial. John Wayne’s character is so resolutely upbeat and an inspiration to those around him. He’s a role model leader, next to which his number two is aberrationally more immature. We know from the start of the film he’s in his arc of retirement, from military to civilian life, where he’ll have no rank (horrors), a fate from which he’s ritually saved, deus ex machina style, at the end.
The horses are splendid and the speed at which they gallop, the terrain over which they navigate is spectacular. John Ford goes out of his way to show some of the difficult situations one faces if bringing along a horse-drawn wagon, which this convoy was, with women in it. That changes the whole character of the expedition, making it more Oregon Trail in flavor. Familial rivalries break out. Who’s gonna marry whom?
The screenplay focuses more on celebrating the gorgeous southwest, the outdoor life, than it does on gunplay and violence, of which there’s some, but without much in the way of blood and gore. There’s no need to traumatize the audience to tell the tale. This isn’t 28 Days Later: the Bone Temple, even if it does have an otherworldly flavor. Not a scary zombie movie. PG if not G.
I wanna add about Westerns that I haven’t avoided them studiously. I think of two chapters in my life, living in Rome, living in Manila, when I was hungry for movies in general and didn’t much care to pick and choose, although I preferred English audio track to subtitles to pure Italian with no subtitles, which I wasn’t so good at following, although in some movies they make following pretty easy.
So like in Italy I took in quite a few so-called Spaghetti Westerns and have dim memories of driving by De Laurentiis Studios somewhere in the outskirts of Rome.
In the Philippines, going to movies was a lot about air conditioning, getting out of the tropical heat and into a more polar bear friendly environment. The lineup in Makati was first run and the theaters world class. TV was pretty good too, for an American living abroad (an expat).
In Italy I was hungry for stuff in English, given that culture is not so Americanized as I would find the Philippines to be. I’d actually make my way by bus (or maybe mom might drive me) to the British Consulate on Piazza del Popolo as I recall, to watch black and white 16 mm Charles Dickens movies. Their library was pretty decent too, with all those Hardy Boys and other British authored books for children.
Those wouldn’t have been westerns though. More like C.S. Lewis and his Screwtape Letters. I’d gone to a British school when I first got there and took advantage of that special relationship.
Yellow Ribbon does portray the US Calvary as multi-ethnic, in the sense of different flavors of white, such as Scots, Irish and German. The US military is certainly a melting pot, but not like it’s going to be in the Vietnam movies to come (another genre, which I’ve already more explored, not that we’re done with those, as I’m sure there are more in the pipeline).
