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Fort Apache is the basis, Ford returns the compliment in The Horse Soldiers, William Holden and all. The Civil War is an Arizona Territory prison camp with Confederate captives in an open stockade, Holden's Union ramrod presides with a hardness that makes him hated even by his own side. ("Write the War Department," he growls to an outraged West Point rookie.) His opposite number is the Southern soldier with poetic bent and yellow streak (John Lupton), esprit de corps extends to the officer planning an escape (John Forsythe), his weakness is the belle from Texas (Eleanor Parker). "He's the kind of fellow who will follow a man right around the Earth. And if he's following a woman, he's liable to walk right off it." The confines of the fort provide John Sturges with a blueprint for the geometry of The Great Escape, though it's in the "space and death" of the surrounding badlands that his terse ingenuity takes off. Riders dotting rocky expanses, a panning camera to turn medium shots into long shots and back, high angles for warring figures on blasted sand. "You've got the wrong army." "But the right cause." "They say that's the one that wins." "Dixie" defiantly whistled at jailers four years ahead of The Bridge on the River Kwai, a nocturnal scene to put MGM's Ansco Color to the test (Parker's reddish hair and lemon gown at bluish dusk, surrounded by roses). All the while, old dog (William Demarest) and callow hothead (William Campbell) bicker on the sidelines with grudging fondness, "why don't you just take a nice nap and I'll wake you when you're dead?" The climax adds Mescalero arrows to Remington's Fight for the Water Hole, Peckinpah takes it from there with Major Dundee. Cinematography by Robert Surtees. With Richard Anderson, Polly Bergen, and Carl Benton Reid.
--- Fernando F. Croce |