Click on the title for a link to the New York Times review of the new blu-ray release of John Ford's "Fort Apache"(1948)
A few quotes from this fine review by Dave Kehr:
Fort Apache” is one of the great achievements of classical American cinema, a film of immense complexity that never fails to reveal new shadings with each viewing....
Ford treats his Apache warriors with sympathy and respect,.....
But watching the magnificent new Blu-ray edition of “Fort Apache” from Warner Home Video I was struck this time by the film’s reflective, inward quality, by its emotional climate of loss and uncertainty.....
A sense of stagnation and emptiness has settled in at Fort Apache, which the residents have attempted to fill with social ritual (the film contains two wonderfully filmed formal dance sequences) and domestic warmth.....
But Ford, who was 54 when he filmed “Fort Apache,” is no less sensitive to the pull of tradition and the weight of the past. To look at the faces of “Fort Apache” is to see his life and already long career (over 100 features and shorts by this point, with some 30 more to go) passing by. Mortality lies in every frame....
As in his late masterpiece “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962) Ford acknowledges a need for heroes while undermining the notion of heroism...
Click on the title for the complete review.
John Ford was just a few years from his service in World War II, which he felt was the defining point in his life and gave it more meaning than any of his movies, must have personally felt the "loss", "uncertainty", "stagnation", "emptiness" and "mortality" described above. Most of the characters in Fort Apache are veterans of the the American Civil War where they had, for the most part, held higher rank, and so Ford identified with them.
After the war Ford bought some land and built a "club house" with pool & tennis court, parade ground, chapel, baseball diamond for his old unit, the Navy's (OSS) Photo Field Division, as a place for the former unit members to get together for reunions, birthdays,holidays and just good old plain drinking and cards. He wanted to keep the "social rituals" he learned in the Navy and which is shown in Fort Apache."
