Cheyenne Autumn is often remembered as John Ford’s apology to Native Americans, and that’s an accurate assessment, for 1964. It is about as liberal as any mainstream film of that era on the (mis)treatment of Indians, although seen from a modern perspective, the movie doesn’t go anywhere far enough.
For one thing, the picture follows the time-old Hollywood tradition of having a white protagonist in a film about race relations, which unfortatley continues today. For another, the main Indian characters are played by Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Rowland, neither of whom are Native Americans, a practice that thankfully has mostly stopped (Antonio Banderas as an Arab in The 13th Warrior is a very unfortunate exception).
According to historian Joseph McBride on the DVD’s commentary track, Ford had wanted to cast real Native Americans in the role but the studio wanted name actors. That choice did not work out in the film’s advantage.
Cheyenne Autumn is based on a real incident in American history, when after years of mistreatment on a reservation, a group Cheyenne simply left to return to their homeland, which of course had been taken from them by US government. The movie stars Richard Widmark as Captain Thomas Archer, the head of the expedition sent to stop the Cheyenne. Archer just happens to be in love with Deborah Wright (Caroll Baker), a Quaker schoolteacher who is trying to teach the Indians English, and perhaps by extension, to be white (the movie never really deals with implications of her character). Archer proposes to Wright the night before the Indians leave on their supposedly illegal trek, and she goes with them, so he has more than one reason for catching up to the group.
On the plus side, Cheyenne Autumn is gorgeously photographed at Ford’s favorite Western location- Monument Valley, on the Utah..Arizona border. Some of shots of this movie are jaw-droppingly beautiful, and the art direction and costumes give a strong sense of atmosphere. Unlike many of Ford’s Westerns, at times we really feel like we are back in time in the Old West, the money was well spent here.
Unfortanley, even setting aside some of the above problems with the theme of this well-intentioned movie, the characters are mostly flat (though Widmark does a good job with what he’s given) the Native Americans are mostly interchangeable, and Ford’s attempted at character development is cheesy and lame. There is also a much maligned comedy interlude that appears in the middle of the film, in which Jimmy Stewart appears as Wyatt Earp in Dodge City, Kansas that is completely unrelated to the rest of the picture and sticks out jarringly with sudden change in tone. This might be excusable if the sequence was funny, but it’s not. Ford’s attempts at comic relief were always the weakest part of his movies and this seemingly endless sequence could easily be cut with no detriment to the rest of the film.
Cheyenne Autumn is not the last statement on the Western or White..Indian relations as it wanted to be, but setting aside the Dodge City sequence, it works on the fundamental level of Hollywood epic. It looks great and shows us a time that has past, so it merits a recommendation.
Cheyenne Autumn (1964)