#SQUADGOALS (14)

By: Brian Berger
April 5, 2017

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars during 2017, on the subject of our favorite squads.

Disdainful Henry Fonda, respectful John Wayne and four not real Apache, in FORT APACHE

He was obsessed with communities, and the John Ford Stock Company was his own community: stars and bit players; men and women; white, black, Indian and others. While familiar faces can’t assure a Ford picture’s greatness — as ever in Hollywood, certain films were compromised beyond easy redemption — they are always a virtue, both for their individuality and their general function in the Fordian cosmos.

Most prolific of their number was Jack Pennick, an ex-Marine who, though usually uncredited, appeared in 47 Ford pictures, starting with 1935’s near-Melvillean confidence man disquisition, Steamboat Round The Bend and concluding in the Ford-directed Civil War segment of 1962’s Cerberus-like Cinerama epic How The West Was Won. One picture where Pennick did receive a screen credit, as Sgt. Daniel Shattuck, was Fort Apache (1948), one of Ford’s most disquieting meditations on duty, ritual and otherness. Co-starring John Wayne (27 screen appearances for Ford) and Henry Fonda (9), others in the cast included the brilliant Ward Bond (26); Ford’s older brother Francis (32), as ever the embodiment of crudity; Norwegian-born Harry Tenbrook (26); Victor McLaglen (12) and Anna Lee (8, from How Green is My Valley in 1941 to the valedictory Seven Women in 1966).

Fort Apache is also notable as the second — after the epochal Stagecoach (1939) — of an eventual ten movies Ford would shoot amid the sandstone buttes of Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah on land owned by the Navajo Nation. Here’s where things get tricky. Though a fanatical reader of history, Ford is bound less by historical “facts” than impressions. So, in Fort Apache, Navajo are cast as White Mountain, Mescalero and Chiricahua Apaches, while Chief Cochise is played by a Mexican, Miguel Inclán (2), who speaks through a Mexican-American U.S. Army interpreter, Pedro Armendáriz (3). “We looked to the Great White Father for protection,” says Ford’s Cochise. “He gave us slow death.” Today, the boldness of this statement reminds us that like Ford’s least known masterpiece, The Sun Shines Bright (1953), the justly venerated The Searchers (1957) is a non-didactic critique of American intolerance.

The affection between Ford and the Navajo was real and lasting; they gave him the honorary name Natani Nez, “Tall Leader,” and though their on-screen treatment varied, he was always mindful of their dignity. In the deceptively lyrical Mormon travelogue Wagon Master (1950), the Navajo — complemented by Sac and Fox sports hero turned Hollywood bit player, Jim Thorpe — even play themselves, speak their own language and none of their number die, an event worthy of one of picture’s gloriously exhortatory Jane Darwell (9) horn blasts.

Joanne Dru, Ward Bond, Jane Darwell and a startled horse in WAGON MASTER.

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#SQUADGOALS (14)

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