Product: Fort Apache (Color Enhanced) [VHS] (1948)
Rating: 5.0
1st of John Ford's Cavalry Trilogy
FORT APACHE (1948) was John Ford's and John Wayne's first western together since STAGECOACH (1939) they would go on to make six more culminating in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962). This film was also the first of what became known as Ford's Cavalry Trilogy. The others were SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON 1949) and RIO GRANDE (1950) and were Ford's splendid tribute to the U.S. Cavalry and as such deserve to be judged as a body of work that as yet has no equal!Wayne in this film shares top billing with Henry Fonda who a couple of years earlier had starred as the hero Wyatt Earp in John Ford's marvellous MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) this time Ford has him as the unsympathetic martinet Lt Col Owen Thursday against the experienced Captain Kirby York (John Wayne). Incidentally when Wayne reprised this role for the last outing in the trilogy in RIO GRANDE he not only gained promotion but an extra letter to his name by becoming Lt Col Kirby Yorke.The story is basically a study of frontier life against the backdrop of the Indian Wars and the end bears more than a passing resemblance to Custer's Last Stand with the Fonda character leading his men into an Apache massacre from which few return. The final theme when it's all over was "when the legend becomes fact, print the legend" which would be used to such good effect in the aforementioned THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE some fourteen years later.