She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Argosy Pictures, RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 21) my husband Charles and I watched two of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: Gold Diggers of 1933 and the awesome “pre-Code” masterpiece Call Her Savage (see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/gold-diggers-of-1933-warner-bros-1933.html for Gold Diggers of 1933, and for Call Her Savage https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html). Then I ran Charles a DVD of the third film in John Ford’s so-called “Cavalry Trilogy,” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). I like John Ford but I have a peculiar relationship with his work: the Ford films I tend to like best are the outliers in the cinema history consensus, notably the incredible Three Bad Men (1926) – a precursor of the so-called “psychological Westerns” of a quarter-century later which I once named on my list of the 10 most unjustly neglected films by great directors (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html) – along with Pilgrimage (1933), The Lost Patrol (1934), and The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), which despite the clunky title that makes it sound like a horror film is actually a riveting dramatization of the true story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who because he did an emergency setting of John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Booth assassinated President Lincoln was unjustly convicted of being part of the conspiracy to kill him. I’m also quite partial to one of Ford’s last films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), mainly because of its theme of how the historical memory of events is quite different from what “really” happened; it’s the source of the line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!,” which one Ford biographer actually used as the title of his book. But there are a lot of films that are generally considered the major works of Ford’s canon that I’ve never really warmed to, including The Informer (1935) – for which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences inexplicably gave Ford the first of his five Best Director Oscars, given that he let his star, Victor McLaglen, overact relentlessly and abysmally throughout the film. (If anyone deserved the Academy Award for Best Director in 1935, it was James Whale for The Bride of Frankenstein.) McLaglen is in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, too, and he overacts just as shamelessly even though he’s more tolerable this time just because he’s only a supporting character (John Wayne’s second-in-command). I recently caught the much-ballyhooed The Searchers (1956) on TCM and thought it was a major disappointment, especially given the hype surrounding it over the years; that was one film for which the original reviewers, who were generally lukewarm about it, were right and the later hagiographers were wrong.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon takes place in 1876, just as word of Col. George Armstrong Custer’s catastrophic defeat at the Little Big Horn is spreading throughout the U.S. Army. The leading character is Col. Nathan Cutting Brittles (John Wayne), who leads the Second Cavalry and is literally counting off the days until he retires. Alas, the Native commanders who led the battle at the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse (neither of whom appears as a character), have convened the various Native tribes in the Southwest (just where in the Southwest this takes place is unclear in the script by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings based on two short stories, “The Big Hunt” and “War Party,” by James Warner Bellah, but Ford shot it in his familiar stamping grounds of Monument Valley, Utah) and are getting them to settle their old quarrels and join them in a big campaign to get rid of the white settlers once and for all. Brittles, who’s supposed to be in his 60’s (though John Wayne was 41 when he made this film and was given a lot of grey hair dye to make him look older – ironically he’s better looking here than in the films he actually made in his 60’s, when he was far more bloated), also has to deal with two rival commanders who are jockeying to be the one who takes command of the regiment once Brittles retires: Lt. Flint Cohill (John Ireland) and Second Lt. Ross Pennell (Harry Carey, Jr., whose father had also been a favorite of Ford’s). The antagonism between Cohill and Pennell is not only a result of their having fought in the Civil War on opposite sides (Cohill for the Union and Pennell for the Confederacy) but also because they’re rivals for the hand of Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru, who had just become Mrs. John Ireland for real after her previous husband, Dick Haymes, broke up with her), niece of Brittles’s commanding officer, Major Mac Allshard (George O’Brien, who’d played the male lead in Ford’s masterpiece Three Bad Men 23 years earlier). Allshard orders Brittles to use his regiment to escort a wagon containing Olivia and Allshard’s wife Abby (a marvelous tough-edged performance by Mildred Natwick). Olivia insists on riding with the cavalry regiment even though she’s a woman, wearing a blue dress with a jacket that matches the cavalrymen’s uniforms,even though this means she has to ride side-saddle. At one point she complains about the sheer amount of time they have to spend walking their horses instead of actually riding them and says they might as well be in the infantry. (Her point that it seems silly to bring their horses along when they’re doing so little riding was a problem I was having with the film, too.)

Needless to say, this being a John Ford Western, the Natives are presented as total savages who charge the white men in hordes and are out to kill them all – I remember when Charles and I watched The Lord of the Rings cycle I told him that Peter Jackson staged the Orcs’ charges the way Ford had staged the Natives’ ones. It’s long surprised me that as progressive as he was in other respects, including some quite barbed jabs against capitalism, Ford’s depiction of so-called “Indians” was utterly wretched (at least until his second-to-last film, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn, in which he attempted to depict Native Americans sympathetically but sabotaged himself with a leaden script and the idiotic casting of Sal Mineo as one of the braves). There’s a marvelous scene towards the end in which Brittles gets to visit his one Native friend, Pony That Walks (Chief John Big Tree), in which the two old men lament the insistence that the young people on both sides are thirsting for war and will insist on having it even though the two old guys bemoan the meaningless slaughter their younger, testosterone-fueled brethren will insist on. There’s also a bizarre comic-relief “Indian” character (who, blessedly, appears in just one scene) that reminded both Charles and I of the “Indian” character Mel Brooks played as one of his multiple roles in the Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974).

Photographed in full three-strip Technicolor by Ford stalwart Winton Hoch, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is stunning to look at (all those deep-red sunsets just making the Monument Valley exteriors glow!) but it’s an oddly dull film in which we keep waiting for a big action sequence and never get one. The two big battles between whites and Natives (in which the Natives win the first one and the whites win the second) both fizzle out and we’re denied the all-out pitched combat we’ve been expecting all movie. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is one of the most highly regarded Ford films by his cult, but I found it relatively slow and draggy (even though it’s only 108 minutes long), though with some finely honed moments, including the one in which the cavalry column’s doctor, Dr. O’Laughlin (Arthur Shields, the old Irish guy you got when you couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), pleads with Brittles to stop the troop movement long enough for him to operate on Private John Smith, a.k.a. Rome Clay (Rudy Bowman, easily hunkier than either John Ireland or Harry Carey, Jr.!) to remove a bullet he got from a Native attack. It’s clearly a conscientiously made film involving major talents, but it’s also not more than just reasonably entertaining.