Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
On the eve of retirement, Captain Nathan Brittles takes out a last patrol to stop an impending massive Indian attack. Encumbered by women who must be evacuated, Brittles finds his mission imperiled.
John Ford's middle entry in his Cavalry Trilogy is elevated chiefly by Winton Hoch's Oscar-winning Technicolor cinematography in Monument Valley — some of the most painterly images in Hollywood history, including the famous stormy sunset sequence. John Wayne delivers a genuinely mature, against-type performance as the aging Captain Brittles, earning real dramatic weight. The plot is serviceable but episodic and meandering, never quite building to a dramatically satisfying confrontation. Novelty is moderate — Ford perfects the cavalry Western idiom with unmistakable poetic grace, but it doesn't radically depart from the genre's conventions or even from his own earlier work. The ending, while sentimental and warmly handled, is predictable and softens the elegiac themes the film had been building.