Hondo

Hondo Lane, a dispatch rider for the cavalry, comes across a woman and her son living alone in the desert. Her husband is nowhere to be seen and the agreement between the Apache and the army is about to break. Hondo chooses to stay. John Farrow adapted Louis L'Amour's story and made it with John Wayne. What is unusual is how the Apache are presented: not as an enemy but as a people standing against the side that broke the agreement, with their chief a figure of dignity. Wayne's character counts himself half Apache too. It was shot in three dimensions and released in the first wave of that technology; it is usually watched flat now. Who it is for: viewers who like classic westerns and John Wayne. Who it is not for: anyone expecting no compromise at all in the period's depiction of Native people.