FORT APACHE (1948) **1/2 A John Wayne western, but it's Henry Fonda's movie. His portrayal of a West Point-educated commanding officer, one who has worked hard and lacks no human virtue, is tremendous. Henry's (character's) problem is that he has been afforded the opportunity to issue commands beyond his grasp of the situation…not that everyone isn't, but that like so many others he's too eager to issue them. Ambition? Duty? Idiocy? Fonda suffers the courage of his convictions without complaint, but under the circumstances that's not much by way of rehabilitating or extenuating evidence. That John Ford kind of does the same thing, but more successfully. It's not seamless (the romance between Ward Bond and Shirley Temple is particularly unendearing, though it does go some ways towards defining Henry's character/he must have been so relieved to have Jane as a daughter in real life!), and the lead-in to those Gone With the Wind style face & sky shots is often nonexistent, but the treatment has a lot of character. Ford is particularly effective in refusing to linger where the action is, in scenes of violence and the one of Irish and Southern soldiers attacking a lifetime supply of rotgut whiskey. Good taste vindicates Ford's decision on the earlier counts, and what he cuts into on the latter. I don't know enough about the history of government interaction with the Indians to know how much of this is accurate and how much is surmised (but remember, this stuff wasn't ancient history to Ford, it had happened just before his birth), but it's easy enough to understand that mistakes were made, and those depicted probably representative of the least of them. More acute is the depiction of the U.S. Army in the near-immediate wake of the Civil War, replete with Southerners and Yankees serving side-by-side, even if with a trust and confidence something less than absolute. Compare that with what we imposed on Iraq and you may have a good starting point for a comparison of the comparative brain powers of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and George W. Bush. John Wayne does a good job portraying enlightened engagement, and both he and Ford have to be forgiven for the ludicrously schmaltzy epilogue. It was something that a lot of good people needed to hear in 1948, whether it was true or not.
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