War Wore a Yellow Ribbon

This bullshit. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a jingoistic, nonsensical film that is beautifully shot but terribly scripted and annoyingly directed. It's a film that pretends to be about wanting peace and making peace, about an old man, about to retire, who has seen that war is not the answer. This sexagenarian is played by John Wayne who, at the time, was barely 41 years old. (Listening him croak about how he's given forty years of his life to the cavalry is very silly.) But worse, it's a young man's movie. It's not a film about regret or wisdom or any such thing. Old men should stop wars, he tells his friend Pony That Walks, but the film doesn't believe that at all, and neither does the main character. 

This movie gives us numerous scenes of the carnage wreaked by the Arapaho and the Cheyenne but very little action. There is almost no fighting in this movie – a couple of great chase sequences – but battle sequences are nowhere to be found. In this way, the film is able to create the Indian alliance as a vicious and terrible enemy (complete with the orphaned children they've left crying and alone), but avoid any question of the violence and greed of the U.S. Even worse, the film seems to love, not the United States, but the Confederate States... it's a film from 1949, but the movie tips its hat to Robert E. Lee, and when one soldier dies the unmistakable sound of "Dixie" blends into the score.

Honestly, though, the worst thing about this movie is that it is mostly unclear what is going on for a majority of its running time. It's almost impossible to figure out why anyone does anything they do, and then in the film's third act, before the big (non-battle) finale, which involves hundreds of horses that appear out of thin air, there is an extended – I'm talking 15-minute – comic sequence involving pratfalls, comic punches, and drunk soldiers that's straight out of vaudeville. One might ask how a sequence like this fits in what is primarily a warmongering melodrama, but of course melodramas all need comic relief, and what this film takes seriously are its dumb sentiments like "bravery" and "trusting your gut" and the love of the military, so the fraternal silliness in act three is really just this same silly masculine posturing in a different key. (Ford movies frequently have dumb comic sequences like this – think of the extended comic bit with Arthur Kennedy and Jimmy Stewart in the middle of Cheyenne Autumn.)

Anyway, fuck this movie. I hated it.