Product: Fort Apache (Color Enhanced) [VHS] (1948)
Rating: 5.0
Best of the Cavalry Trilogy?
The first, and in my opinion, the best of John Ford's so-called Cavarly Trilogy. "Fort Apache" is Ford's thinly veiled re-telling of the Custer-Little Bighorn legend. A subject that fascinated Ford, but he didn't want to be hemmed in by the history so he completely changed the names and locations so he could tell the story the way he wanted to tell it.Henry Fonda plays a Custer-like Colonel who has seen his career's meteoric rise during the Civil War end with peacetime and an assignment to a frontier outpost. He resents this, and looks for an opportunity to earn fame and glory. He finds this opportunity at the expense of the Apaches who have left their reservation for good reasons. If he can defeat the Apaches then his career will certainly be boosted. Fonda's Colonel Thursday is a brave and competent officer, who does recognize some of the injustice and indignity that the reservation system has imposed upon the Apaches, but his lust for glory blinds him to everything in the end.John Wayne plays the competent, experienced second in command who clashes repeatedly with his superior. The film also features a love interest between a grown-up Shirley Temple and her then real-life husband John Agar. Being a Ford movie there is plenty of comic relief from various Irish NCO's, and romanticized vignettes of frontier cavalry life.