by Louis Williams

Created on: July 12, 2009

FORT APACHE

I saw it first when I was eleven or twelve and loved every minute; now, I have some reservations. In fact, I have almost nothing but.

Not being in the mind of the director, of course, means that you may miss some things. Possibly Ford was trying to be Shakespearean - the Shakespeare of the history plays, at least - in his constant shifting from the high drama of the officers to the buffoonery of the sergeants. Led by Victor McLaglen, the sergeants are forever drinking, forever engaged in witless highjinx and the broadest possible verbal and physical humor. Everything they do is exaggerated and overblown and stage-Irish. The sergeants are cliches - their lines are stale, their humor is unfunny and they are on screen entirely too much.

The alternatives, however, aren't much better.

Though John Wayne gets top billing, he is really a supporting player. The star of the show is Henry Fonda who, as colonel, once general, Owen Thursday, is a complete mystery. Judging by his conduct in the film, the viewer is left wondering how such a nitwit could ever have been a general and how, given the opportunities that must have existed during the Civil War for military disaster, Thursday hadn't already exposed his essential incompetence to the whole world.

Granted, Thursday is a broad version of George A. Custer, still, one can't help but wonder that this person was given such a command.

This man is, after all, a professional soldier, whose service has extended at least, one presumes, since 1861 to the unnamed present - call it 1876, though, the year of the Little Big Horn disaster - in what, except for the Civil War years, would have been a small military service. That is, Thursday would have served with many of these men before. Yet he is such a muffin-head that he doesn't know that his sergeant major is a medal of honor winner, that he himself doesn't know anything about Apaches and that military protocol forbids an officer from entering, uninvited, an enlisted man's quarters.

And he never learns. And we never learn what makes Thursday run. All we ever know of him is that he served in Europe, presumably after the Civil War, that during the war he was a general, that his wife is, we infer, dead, and that he sees the assignment to command Fort Apache as a degradation. Custer aside, Thursday acts and sounds more like a political appointee

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