![]() ![]() Captain Thomas Archer (Richard Widmark) pursues them in a journey that takes his troops through multiple seasons and vistas. After their pleas for aid from the United States government are ignored, the Cheyenne rebel by rejecting the United States’ reservation and returning home to their native Dakota on an 1,800-mile trek along with a Quaker teacher, Deborah Wright (Carroll Baker). In 1878, the Cheyenne nation has been whittled away from 1,000 to about 300. ![]() But as history would have it, the production itself was plagued by the same type of studio meddling John Ford fought against his entire career.Īs often the case with Ford, Cheyenne Autumn is very loosely based on historical fact, this time taking from the Mari Sandoz’s book of the same name. I’ve killed more Indians than Custer, Beecher and Chivington put together… Let’s face it, we’ve treated them very badly – it’s a blot on our shield we’ve cheated and robbed, killed, murdered, massacred and everything else, but they kill one white man and, God, out come the troops.” As John Ford was increasingly marginalized in Hollywood, he turned to the Native Americans he loved and respected as his basis for his last western. In a 1966 interview with future filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich, director John Ford admits “I wanted to make it for a long time. The then sixty-nine-year-old filmmaker knew his time was nearing the end and decided to go out with one last western: Cheyenne Autumn.Ĭheyenne Autumn has its roots in the whitewashing of America’s westward expansion that turned into legend by the western genre. Men proudly wear their uniforms without anguish and internal conflict, men and women fit into their classic cinematic gender roles of masculine protectors and maternal figures of innocence, and the Native American was the enemy of the white man. Though his post-war westerns carried the type of dread that former soldiers brought home after the war, ideologically and politically they were increasingly out of date as American movies became increasing radicalized. John Ford’s stately poetry of the American west, a genre he revitalized and reinvented numerous times, now was starting to seem like an antique. But as history goes, a cultural revolution of sorts was to morph and evolve the desires of American audiences. By then, he accumulated six Academy Awards (four for Best Director and two for Best Documentary), produced numerous box office and critical hits, and in Andrew Sarris’ overview of American Directors the year before, he placed John Ford in the list of “pantheon directors” along the likes of Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. 1964 marked John Ford’s forty-seventh year as a director. ![]()
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