Fort Apache

A colonel posted from the east to a frontier post ignores the warnings of officers who know the country and closes off any settlement with the Apache. What follows becomes unavoidable. The film does not build the commander as a hero; the narrative shows his stubbornness plainly as an error and, at the close, shows how that error is turned into legend. That last passage is the most striking thing in it. John Ford directed, with John Wayne and Henry Fonda. It is the first of Ford's cavalry trilogy. Before watching: the film draws Native people more sympathetically than most of its period, and it is still a 1948 production and some of the portrayal is a problem now.