TWO RODE TOGETHER (1961) ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
D: John Ford
James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Shirley Jones,
Linda Cristal, Andy Devine, John McIntire,
Willis Boucher, Henry Brandon, Olive Carey,
John Qualen, Ken Curtis, Harry Carey Jr.,
Jeanette Nolan, Woody Strode, Mae Marsh
In a story that has some distinct parallels to "The Searchers", Marshall Jimmy Stewart and Army Captain Richard Widmark ride out into Comanche territory to try to secure the release of some white captives living with the Indians. They find what they're looking for, but the captives, who were kidnapped years before as children, don't want to go back, or they've gone insane. Ford wasn't happy working on the picture - he called it "a piece of crap" - and it has a misanthropic edge. When Widmark identifies one of the captives in the Comanche camp, damaged beyond recovery, he refuses to take her back, and then notifies her distraught family that he didn't see her. Stewart's character shifts from crusty but sympathetic to a total bastard and back again in a way that doesn't quite make sense. When vigilantes seize one of the returned captives, determined to hang him, they do. Nobody's there to prevent the lynching. And the racism exhibited by both the settlers and the soldiers is ugly. (It'a interesting to note how many of Ford's later movies - "The Searchers", "Sergeant Rutledge", "Cheyenne Autumn" and this - are obsessed with race.) At the same time, the movie coasts along, especially at the beginning, on the easy chemistry between Widmark and Stewart. (The scene with the two of them talking on the riverbank, much of it improvised, is famous.) Which makes the whole thing kind of uneven. And a movie no Ford fan should miss.
