Sadly Over-hyped

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This film is the first and to my mind the best of John Ford's cavalry trilogy. It is the Custer story in all but name, with Henry Fonda as Colonel Owen Thursday in the Custer role, and John Wayne's Captain York presumably representing Captain Benteen, one of Custer's subordinates at the Little Big Horn, who despised Custer and openly clashed with him several times. This film is notable for its detailed portrayal of life on an army outpost, the like of which I cannot recall seeing to this extent in any other film. The Apaches are treated with sympathy in the film. Captain York respects them, and tries to get Colonel Thursday to, but Colonel Thursday is more interested in winning glory by defeating them. During the film, Colonel Thursday and Captain York clash several times, but at the end, with Thursday's attack on the Apaches a disaster, Captain York tries to rescue him and take him to safety. It is here that Colonel Thursday redeems himself to some extent by insisting on returning to the remains of his command to die with them. All in all, a great film.

This movie is one of Ford's best. Featuring an all-star cast, a great storyline and some wonderful cinematography, it's a home run.Wayne and Fonda are superb, butting heads with each other. Wayne, as the enlightened and honourable Captain York and Fonda as the mulish, stickler Lt. Colonel Thursday, whose desire to dominate the Native Americans leads him to behave without honour or respect.The supporting cast features the wonderful Victor Mclaren, Ward Bond and Pedro Armandariz as the hardbitten NCOs. Shirley Temple provides the romantic interest. Miguel Inclan plays a great Cocis.All in all, they combine to create a wonderful western. One which still looks good to this day.

I'm going to begin with a criticism. The photography is very washed out in this film, which is a shame considering much of the exterior photography was done is some of the most spectacular locations in the American Southwest. Even more the shame that it wasn't photographed in Technicolor.Henry Fonda plays a commanding officer who exemplifies the meaning of pomposity. There's little question within the first 15 minutes of the film that Fonda's character is in for a comeuppance...the only real question is how.There's a good supporting cast here. Ward Bond has one of his better supporting roles with quite a bit of screen time as a sergeant. Shirley Temple does nicely as the daughter of Fonda's character' she does very nicely. This was John Agar's first film, and her he plays the romantic lead opposite Shirley Temple, and son of Ward Bond. Temple and Agar were actually married in real life at the time the film was made. Dick Foran is along, and even gets to sing. Miguel Inclan plays Cochise. Unfortunately, Victor McLaglen plays a sergeant here, and -- as usual -- offers little to the film. George O'Brien has a good role as a captain who seems -- for some reason -- to be on the wrong side of Fonda's character, although it appears they were once friends.The stunt work here is second rate. It is pretty clear that a couple of the Indians in some of the horseback segments must have been injured.This film is interesting because it portrays the Indians as being relatively honorable, and the commanding officer -- Fonda -- as being dishonorable. And, while Wayne is the "good guy" here, Fonda probably has more screen time, and I would class a the true star of the film...despite playing a rather despicable character.I guess my one big criticism of this film is that Henry Fonda's character seems rather one-dimensional. We don't really learn why he became what he was -- a truly unfit officer who led his men into the valley of death. I also didn't like the corn pone handed out by Wayne at the ending of the film.However, while not one of my favorite John Wayne films, it is quite good, and certainly worth a watch...though for me, just once.

Colonel Thursday is an insufferable snob. He is contemptuous of the fact that he is being sent to Fort Apache to be its commanding officer by a war department that not only is ungrateful for all that he had done during the Civil War, but also fails to appreciate that he was clearly meant for better things. He even prefers Europe to this new assignment.He is irked to discover that Second Lieutenant Michael O'Rourke is the son of Sergeant Major O'Rourke at Fort Apache, and rudely interrogates the sergeant, trying to understand how such a thing could happen. He believes in a sharp class distinction between officers and enlisted men, and this combination of both in a single family is repulsive to him. And when he discovers that his daughter Philadelphia has been socializing with this lieutenant and his family, he is aghast.He refuses to shake hands with Captain Collingwood, with whom he is already acquainted, because Thursday believes that Collingwood disgraced his uniform in some way during the war, though we gather that whatever happened was really not Collingwood's fault, but just the result of some unfortunate circumstance over which he had no control.He is utterly mirthless, barely concealing his displeasure at having to perform certain social functions at the noncommissioned officers' dance.He likes to flaunt his knowledge of military history, dropping names like Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon Bonaparte, while refusing to appreciate the tactical cunning of Cochise, because he is an illiterate savage. He repeatedly rejects the advice of Captain York, a seasoned veteran with extensive knowledge of the Apaches, because Thursday is a colonel and York is just a captain.It is at this point that his snobbery makes him not just an extremely unpleasant human being, but an incompetent commanding officer as well. The result is that he ends up getting half the regiment slaughtered.In the final scene, Captain York talks to reporters, who gush about what a great man Thursday was, a hero to every schoolboy, and York encourages them in their delusion. The movie seems to imply that this is for the best, that schoolboys need their heroes, that people need to believe that Thursday was a great man. And yet, as many critics have noted, the movie itself subverts the legend, undermining the whole notion of heroes and great men. And since Thursday is loosely based on the legend of General George Armstrong Custer, the movie is essentially besmirching the legend surround this real life figure.In other words, the movie is flattering us. Other people, the movie is saying, need their illusions, but we know better. Let the masses have their heroes, because they would just fall apart if they did not have something to believe in, but we are too sophisticated to fall for such nonsense.Of course, these same masses, who supposedly need their heroes, are the ones who are sitting in the audience, so this may seem like a contradiction. But it is a contradiction with a purpose. The point is to flatter each of us into thinking we are superior to the others, who in turn have been flattered into thinking they are superior to us. So we all get to feel superior, and that makes us like the movie.