Cheyenne Autumn [VHS]
Cheyenne Autumnis a beautiful title to grace John Ford's final  Western, but the film falls short of the occasion. The great director's ambition  to tell the story, for once, from the Indians' point of view is only partially  fulfilled. He's unambiguously sympathetic to the Cheyennes' resolve to bolt the  reservation and trek back to their ancestral lands, while most of white society,  the military, the bureaucracy, and the sensationalist press come off as  insensitive, foolish, or downright hateful. However, the Cheyenne are nobly  wooden (and played by non-Indians), and it's sympathetic cavalry officer Richard  Widmark and Quaker missionary Carroll Baker through whose eyes most of the epic  narrative unfolds. The video release restores the entirety of the caustic Dodge  City interlude (featuring James Stewart as a thoroughly disreputable Wyatt  Earp)--truncated after the New York roadshow opening--but William H. Clothier's  majestic Panavision compositions have yet to be letterboxed.--Richard T.  Jameson