Two Rode Together

Marshal Guthrie McCabe has an easy life; things go well in his town and he answers to nobody. A lieutenant arrives from the army with an assignment: bring back the white children taken by the Comanche years ago. Families are waiting for their lost children and the army wants the matter settled somehow. McCabe will be paid per head. The two set out. What they find is not what was expected: the children taken have grown, forgotten the language and do not want to come back. And those who are brought back are not accepted by the families. John Ford directs. James Stewart plays McCabe and Richard Widmark plays Lieutenant Gary; Shirley Jones and Linda Cristal are in the cast. It is one of Ford's late productions and turns over the rescue narrative he had built in his earlier films. The matter it works at is belonging; the question of who belongs to whom is tied to no clean answer on any side. Its hardest section is the return to town; the community's bearing toward those brought back is more merciless than that of the army or the Comanche. The long conversation scene by the river was shot in a single take and the work of the two actors comes forward there. Ford said he did not like the film and regarded it as a job of work; even so it was reassessed in later years. The narrative clears no character and the ending offers no victory. Who it is for: anyone curious about the classical western tradition and late Ford. Who it is not for: the pace is uneven, the comic strands do not settle into the narrative, and some supporting characters are formulaic.