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Features:
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Sales Rank: 297; Release Date: 04 June, 2002; Media: VHS Tape; Theatrical Date: 09 March, 1948; MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
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| Customer Reviews |
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Rating:  - The 1st of John Ford's Calvary Trilogy
An all-star cast in a John Ford Classic. Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Shirley Temple, Ward Bond, Victor MacLaglen all give fine performances. The story centers on Fonda's character being assigned to Fort Apache against his will. He takes his anger out on the Indians with a result loosely based on Gen. Custer at Little Big Horn. The rest of the movie has all the elements that have made John Ford famous, action, adventure, humor, romance, and the spectacular scenery of Monument Valley.
Rating: - Best of the Cavalry Trilogy?
The first, and in my opinion, the best of John Ford's so-called Cavarly Trilogy. "Fort Apache" is Ford's thinly veiled re-telling of the Custer-Little Bighorn legend. A subject that fascinated Ford, but he didn't want to be hemmed in by the history so he completely changed the names and locations so he could tell the story the way he wanted to tell it.Henry Fonda plays a Custer-like Colonel who has seen his career's meteoric rise during the Civil War end with peacetime and an assignment to a frontier outpost. He resents this, and looks for an opportunity to earn fame and glory. He finds this opportunity at the expense of the Apaches who have left their reservation for good reasons. If he can defeat the Apaches then his career will certainly be boosted. Fonda's Colonel Thursday is a brave and competent officer, who does recognize some of the injustice and indignity that the reservation system has imposed upon the Apaches, but his lust for glory blinds him to everything in the end. John Wayne plays the competent, experienced second in command who clashes repeatedly with his superior. The film also features a love interest between a grown-up Shirley Temple and her then real-life husband John Agar. Being a Ford movie there is plenty of comic relief from various Irish NCO's, and romanticized vignettes of frontier cavalry life.
Rating:  - Fort Apache: The Custer Massacre Retold
Director John Ford began his trilogy of the bluecoat versus Indian trilogy with FORT APACHE in 1948. The film was such a hit that he quickly followed with a pair of sequels, SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON and RIO GRANDE. John Wayne played basically the same character in each, a grizzled, weary veteran of the Indian wars who is one of the few people in any of the three films who sees the Indians sympathetically. In FORT APACHE, he is Captain Kirby York, who has to adjust to being in second command to a martinet of a commander, Colonel Owen Thursday, played by Henry Fonda in only one of two unsympathetic roles in a very long film career (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST is the other). Captain York wants to bring an end to the Indian wars, so he meets Cochise and Geronimo and gives them his word that they will be treated fairly. Of course, Colonel Thursday decides to attack the Indians in a surprise assault that fools nobody. Colonel Thursday is seen as a clone of General Custer who had much the same idea of surprising 5,000 Indian warriors. It is hard to find any sympathy for Thursday. Every word that he utters is starkly unemotional. He is about as fair with the Indians as he is with his own daughter Philadelphia (Shirley Temple) when he refuses consent to her marriage with a dashing cavalry lieutenant played by the blandly handsome John Agar, who, in real life, married Shirley soon after the film was released. The highlight of the film is a characteristic of John Ford, a smashingly effective use of onrushing troopers led into a cavalry charge with a bugler tooting the way. The battle scene of trooper versus Indian inevitably draws comparison with the real life massacre of the 7th Cavalry under General Custer. The role of the Indian in this and the other two installments is one of the few instances in which the Indian is not seen as the inherently bad guy. In fact, Cochise and Geronimo were both willing to abide by a verbal treaty and Colonel Thursday's verbal harangue of the two proud chiefs clearly invests them with some sympathy. The viewer is left with the distinct impression that if the west had had more Captain Yorks and fewer Colonel Thursdays, then the history of the wild west might have been written in much less blood.
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