I don't much care for Westerns as a genre and especially not when they're served straight up. But if I'm going to watch one, I want to watch a John Ford Western, since he almost always was interested in more than just standard Western tropes and always used their conventions to explore other things on his mind.
"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" stars a tolerable John Wayne as a U.S. cavalry sergeant who embarks on one last mission before his retirement. The film is steeped in a post-WWII sentiment of regret and loss -- regret that wars have to happen at all, and that younger generations of soldiers won't or can't understand the futility of destruction no matter how much their older and wiser forebears try to tell them so.
This film isn't a great Western along the lines of "Stagecoach" or "The Searchers." It's not especially lengthy but feels it, the film continuing long past the point where I thought things were wrapping up, and there are some unwelcome slapstick comedy scenes featuring Victor McLaglen that overstay their welcome. As a consolation, we get to bask in Winton Hoch's famous and spectacular color photography that captures the natural grandeur of the American West, and at other times uses saturated colors to give scenes a surreal, other worldly quality. Just take a look at the scenes set in a makeshift cemetery that find Wayne communing with his dead wife and children, the best scenes in the movie. Hoch deservedly won an Oscar for his work.
Grade: B+
"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" stars a tolerable John Wayne as a U.S. cavalry sergeant who embarks on one last mission before his retirement. The film is steeped in a post-WWII sentiment of regret and loss -- regret that wars have to happen at all, and that younger generations of soldiers won't or can't understand the futility of destruction no matter how much their older and wiser forebears try to tell them so.
This film isn't a great Western along the lines of "Stagecoach" or "The Searchers." It's not especially lengthy but feels it, the film continuing long past the point where I thought things were wrapping up, and there are some unwelcome slapstick comedy scenes featuring Victor McLaglen that overstay their welcome. As a consolation, we get to bask in Winton Hoch's famous and spectacular color photography that captures the natural grandeur of the American West, and at other times uses saturated colors to give scenes a surreal, other worldly quality. Just take a look at the scenes set in a makeshift cemetery that find Wayne communing with his dead wife and children, the best scenes in the movie. Hoch deservedly won an Oscar for his work.
Grade: B+