Customer Reviews

Two Rode Together [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a lesser version of THE SEARCHERS, which is a masterpiece in just about anybody's canon, but TWO RODE TOGETHER still achieves greatness because every element that plays to the gallery is overcome, or extended, with a surprise. We do not completely know these characters, and they do not completely know themselves, complexities that always make profundity possible in the right hands. It is a simple story that starts out as a comedy and flips over almost suddenly into a drama, and one that becomes increasingly complicated. A marshall kept in fine clothes and money by a madam is recruited by an army officer to go on a mission in which white children taken by the Commanches will be brought back, if found.
The sheer heat, nuance, and humor of James Stewart and Richard Widmark would make any movie great. They are equally at ease when the film calls for them to be funny or meretricious or moral, hard-nosed or disgusted, out only for themselves and some fun or pulled in by the charms of a virgin or woman who has lived as the wife of a Commanche. That second woman is as essential as the acting of Stewart and Widmark because her experience makes obvious Ford's vision of sexual paranoia. That paranoid contempt results in the defining of a woman as a pariah even if she has been forced to live with Indians. She must face this hostility when she returns to her Christian origins, which are too often cold and unforgiving of any frailties, such as the normal human response to overwhelming power, which is almost always submission when the choice is to live or be killed. That is why one of white women who has lived with the Commanches for years refuses to go back. She knows the general rejection will be nearly unbearable. This is Ford's disappointment with how Christianity has been interpreted.The greatness of Christianity is found in its compassion and its forgiveness of human limitations. The worst side of it is found in the ideologues so stuffed with pieties they find it easy to reject the unrelenting facts of humanity.
The film is harsh and simple--no dramatic gunfights or conventional excitement. What excitement Ford chooses to show is the self-righteous glee and rage that attends the lynching of a kidnapped boy who has been with the Commanches for so long that he has become one. Perhaps in his willingness to murder out of ethnic hatred, the boy is expressing as much of his white heritage as he is that of his kidnappers. Ford pushes that blade in and twists it. He knew lynching was also an expression of identity, a ritual in which whiteness declared itself against all real or imagined enemies. It put the world in its proper place. The yokels whom Ford has consistently drawn earlier as buffoon figures or crude stiffs cease to be funny when that very same ignorance and backwardness we have seen made broad fun of transfers itself into the simple-minded form of rough justice that plants the "strange fruit" of a body hanging from a tree.
The boy who is lynched is perhaps as savage as his killers but more savage than the whites imagine ALL the Indians to be. Some of the Commanches are shrewd and know that their historical time has passed and that they must get whatever they can from the white man while the getting is good, since he will change the rules whenever he concludes that changing them will work to his advantage. Those shrewd Commanches are bitterly resigned. They feel the cold metal of modern life closing in on them while others chant into the night, assuming their gods will deflect the bullets of the white man when the inevitable conflicts arrive next. That makes such Commanches simultaneously tragic and dangerous. Their gods have been outdone and they do not know it. Or do not want to know it. Their fate, like that of Stone Calf, is to die in battle believing they are protected by their prayers and their singing. For this reason, there is no drama when Stone Calf steps forward and is easily killed by James Stewart's marshall. His naive beliefs have made him less a great warrior than a pathetic man who has duped himself into such vulnerability that he does not even put up a good fight. He is the only one surprised by what happens when the bullets come his way.
One particularly powerful moment shows how easily one can become something that one did not start out as takes place when the Mexican woman who has been the wife of the warlike Indian Stone Calf automaticallys lifts fistfuls of dirt and chants a death song after he has been slain. When stopped and pulled away, she remembers how much she hated Stone Calf and spits on his corpse. A variaton on this happens when the boy who is about to be lynched cries out when a music box he loved to listen to before he was kidnapped is knocked over and he suddenly, for a moment, remembers who was once upon a time. There again is the Fordian sense of tragedy: the boy has been claimed by a woman settler who convinces herself that he is her lost child. Her fantasy leads to her death once she unties the boy. She dies because of something she wants to believe and he dies because he does not accept his blood heritage, which he has forgotten.
The boy screams as loudly when he is about to be hanged as he did when protesting that he was not white but a Commanche as his captors traded him back to the white men for some repeating rifles. That is one layer of tragedy; the deepest is that, hearing that tune come from the music box, he has the Proustian moment and his entire childhood with his family reappears in his mind, a few minutes before he will join all of the dead, a symbol of murder left to defile a tree and rot. So our fantasies and our memories make and unmake us. Only our compassion humanizes us. There it is.
This is an important film about American identity, true or imposed, nurtured in one situation, transformed in another. No one other John Ford--or since Ford!--has presented or pursued such complex ethnic issues, all the while rising above the predictable narrows of propaganda. The rich and forboding aspects of our miscegenated American lives and our collective history--in style or religion or blood--have remained beyond most of our filmmakers and almost all of our writers of fiction. You have got to watch that John Ford: he'll upset you. Even when he makes a film that is not a total classic, the mind and the passions of a genius are expressing themselves, and some of that combination rubs off on the work at hand, forever gleaming like big, big nuggets in the wet pan of the prospector.

It may seem crazy to disagree with a director's own assessment of a film but I like John Ford's "Two Rode Together" a great deal. Ford was in his mid-sixties and slipping when he made this film and some of the plot inconsistencies seem to have escaped him entirely. But the interplay between Stewart and Widmark is wonderful; this was the last great performance of Stewart's career, the best American actor who ever stepped in front of a camera. Francois Truffaut reportedly was influenced by their work when he put together his film "Jules and Jim." I also like the flat-out frankness in dealing with the Indian captive problem on the frontier, which was no little dilema at the time.

Hey! Jimmy at his mumbling, stumbling, cocky best has a GREAT time despite the twists & turns of luck. Going from Messiah to pariah he takes it on the chin and even the surprise ending doesn't even seem to phase him. He's always got an ace in the hole somewhere and you love him every minute for it. Entertaining story of settlers who return to a US army fort in hopes of regaining their stolen loved ones. Oh, but what a dose of reality it gives them and us too. Don't miss it!

First, I want to point out that Stanley Crouch's review of this movie is outstanding. Anybody who is serious about understanding the real west should read his review. In my opinion, John Ford did an excellent job of showing the white vs Indian conflict, better than in 'The Searchers'. To most of us, living comfortably more than a century after the west was won, it is difficult to understand the racist attitudes toward the Indians in the 19th century. Well, how would you feel if you managed to survive being scalped, hide in the bushes, and see your wife raped and murdered, your grandchild burned to death and later consumed by the squaws, and your teenage girls gang raped never to be hear about again. Would you call the ACLU? Invite the 'noble savages' to participate in group therapy? I am sure that there are some lunatic liberals who would do just that. But, the rest of us red blooded Americans its time to look at the real west which was cruel, unforgiven, and ugly. There is no question that John Ford was able to recreate the real west better than anybody else; the agonizing dilema of what to do with whites who lived with barbaric, stone aged, savages and sometimes turned out to be just like them. By the way, many white children who survived Indian captivity and were rescued spent the rest of their lives in lunatic assylems. I wish that Amazon reviews will generate more interest in movies like the present one and make us appreciate the courage of the European immigrants who moved west and carried out Manifest Destiny without which America could not have become the shining example of democracy in human history.

So its not oscar winning material! This movie is great for watching a trio of old Hollywood pros having a good time. Jimmy Stewart plays against type as a down and out lawman who finds a reason to change. Richard Widmark (my all time favorite actor) is great as usual as a soldier who lives his values and John Ford directs the cast with style. Enjoy!

This is not a great movie.It's sort of a smattering of great scenes from various Ford films of the past. On its own, however, it just doesn't quite hold together. I don't think Ford was very interested in making this movie, and it shows. But still you have those flashes of brilliance that shine forth in even the worst Ford movie.[Watch for the scene with Stewart and Widmark sitting on the river banks). Still I wouldn't regard this as evidence of the great man's decline, because the next year he bounced back with "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Ford at his worst was still a lot better than many other directors at their best!

TWO RODE TOGETHER (1961): A band of settlers put pressure on the US Army to repatriate their children caught by the Comanche Indians seven years earlier. In turn cavalry fort commander Major Frazer (James McIntire) puts pressure on a reluctant Marshal Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart) and Lieutenant Jim Gary (Richard Widmark) to saddle up and go in search of the white captives held by the feared Comanche Chief Quanah Parker (Henry Brandon). The two negotiate the return Running Wolf (David Kent) and Elana de la Madriaga (Linda Cristal) with mixed results.

Brandon also played the Comanche Chief Scar in THE SEARCHERS (1956) also carried over from that film are Ford favourites mother and son Olive Carey and Harry Carey Jn, Ken Curtis and John Qualen. Also in common with the earlier film was the scriptwriter Frank Nugent. John Ford is said to have made the film as a casual favour to Columbia's boss Harry Cohen. Of the two leads James Stewart plays a (unusually for him) cynical and ruthless character whilst Richard Widmark (who can play good guy or bad with equal aplomb) has the sympathetic sidekick role. Shirley Jones provides the main love interest. Although there are one or two nice touches of the Master at work in my opinion Ford was well-wide of the mark with this one; thankfully he is back on top form next time also with Jimmy Stewart and John Qualen but with the added bonus of John Wayne in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962).

TWO RODE TOGETHER IS A GOOD WESTERN WRAPPED UP IN RACIAL TENSION ALL THE WAY THROUGH THE MOVIE. FROM THE RACIAL VEIWS OF WHITES OVER A BEAUTIFUL HISPANIC WOMAN TO THE DISGUSTING TREATMENT OF INDIANS AND THEIR WAYS,TO HOW THE WHITES THOUGHT ABOUT THE PEOPLE THE INDIANS HAD CAPTURED. EVEN JIMMY STEWARTS PART WAS LOOKED DOWN UPON BECAUSE HE MADE MONEY WHENEVER HE HAD THE CHANCE, NO MATTER WHO HE BROUGHT BACK FROM THE INDIANS. I FEEL IT WAS WELL ACTED AND WELL WRITTEN. I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THIS MOVIE.

TWO RODE TOGETHER(1961)---James Stewart, Richard Widmark, Shirley Jones, John McIntire, Jeanette Nolan, Linda Cristal, Andy Devine, Woody Strode
Directed by John Ford, this film owes more than a little to THE SEARCHERS, although it is not nearly as grim and is certainly not the same calibre of film. It's actually quite full of humor and the interplay between cavalry officer Widmark and town marshall Stewart is the best thing about the movie. A group of homesteaders who were attacked by Comanches 17 years earlier demand that the army attempt to get back several of their number who were carried off by the indians. Against the advice of army major McIntire, who points out that after so much time, their relatives are either dead or thoroughly "Indianized", the settlers insist that the army do it anyway. Quite against his will, Widmark's old friend, Stewart, is pressed into service in the attempt because he has had dealings with Comanche Chief Quanah Parker and speaks passable Comanche. Stewart and Widmark both agree with McIntire that going after the kidnapped individuals is futile, but are coerced into going anyway. Widmark and Stewart find the Comanches and are able to secure the release of two "prisoners"---a Mexican woman(Linda Cristal), who was kidnapped and married to indian warrior Strode, and a "white" teen-aged male who does not want to be "rescued". The "core" of the film centers on the aftermath of the "rescue". Along the way, Widmark falls in love with homesteader Shirley Jones and Stewart falls for the Cristal character. This is a worthy addition to Ford's "western canon"---it is an entertaining, amusing film, with some serious overtones---well-paced and beautifully filmed---worth the time of any fan of westerns.

TWO RODE TOGETHER (1961): A band of settlers put pressure on the US Army to repatriate their children caught by the Comanche Indians seven years earlier. In turn cavalry fort commander Major Frazer (James McIntire) puts pressure on a reluctant Marshal Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart) and Lieutenant Jim Gary (Richard Widmark) to saddle up and go in search of the white captives held by the feared Comanche Chief Quanah Parker (Henry Brandon). The two negotiate the return Running Wolf (David Kent) and Elana de la Madriaga (Linda Cristal) with mixed results.

Brandon also played the Comanche Chief Scar in THE SEARCHERS (1956) also carried over from that film are Ford favourites mother and son Olive Carey and Harry Carey Jn, Ken Curtis and John Qualen. Also in common with the earlier film was the scriptwriter Frank Nugent. John Ford is said to have made the film as a casual favour to Columbia's boss Harry Cohen. Of the two leads James Stewart plays a (unusually for him) cynical and ruthless character whilst Richard Widmark (who can play good guy or bad with equal aplomb) has the sympathetic sidekick role. Shirley Jones provides the main love interest. Although there are one or two nice touches of the Master at work in my opinion Ford was well-wide of the mark with this one; thankfully he is back on top form next time also with Jimmy Stewart and John Qualen but with the added bonus of John Wayne in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE (1962).

A 2005 DVD Columbia film released through SONY Pictures Home Entertainment Optional sub-titles and scene selection, no Theatrical Trailer or other extras, but does it matter?