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Rating:  -
I always liked this film even though the press reviews and its viewer acceptance were mixed. John Ford uses familiar locations to tell his story. The cast is solid even though Richard Widmark does not have the presence or charisma of John Wayne, Ford's usual leading man. This is a well intentioned film just the same.
To the contrary of critical opinion, I enjoyed the Dodge City sequence with Arthur Kennedy as Doc Holliday and James Stewart as Wyatt Earp. Some say it does not fit the serious and solemn tone of the rest of the film. That is true to some extent, but the juxtaposition of cinematic styles acts to bring attention to the Indian's plight. The outrageous and bawdy nature of the Dodge City sequence shows that the imported eastern notions of a superior and sophisticated transplanted European civilization are not sophisticated at all. They bring chaos rather than harmony to the land on their Westward expansion.
In another scene, Karl Malden's performance as Capt. Oskar Wessels is over the top, yet his foreign accent and the fort he commands stand as a metaphor for the Nazi concentration camps of WWII. Sean McClory as Dr. O'Carberry brings stability and compassion to this awkward scene.
It was good to Patrick Wayne on hand and many of Ford's troupe of actors including Ken Curtis, John Carradine, Danny Borzage, Chuck Hayward, Mae Marsh, Ben Johnson and Harry Carey Jr.
Mike Mazurki's soliloquy to Richard Widmark on the insignificance and effectives of his role as Sr. First Sergeant in the infantry is memorable and touching.
William H. Clothier's cinematography is beautiful leaving one with an impressionistic idea of the Indians' eternal tie to the land.
I read where Ford was not pleases with Alex North's score but perhaps North's score ushered in the deathknell of the American Western as CHEYENNE AUTUMN was certainly one of the last great films of the genre.
Rating:  -
Ford goes to the well with all his familiar tools (Monument Valley, U.S. Calvary, Indian Wars, etc.) and comes back dry, to put it nicely.
Great cast- Widmark, Mauldin, Stewart, Robinson, etc labor through an abominable script with the intellectual depth of a deodorant commercial.
At its best, it is flat, contrived and silly and at it worst it is unnecessarily stupid- Latinos and Italians with five o'clock shadow playing Native Americans. Give me a break.
Rating: -
Not being familiar with the historical background, I took Ford at his visual word when he showed the Cheyenne Indians jumping the reservation in Monument Valley.
I've been there a few times and recognized a lot of the geological features.
He fails to mention that they're actually fleeing Oklahoma - which looks nothing like northeastern Arizona - in their trek to their homelands in Wyoming.
So it was particularly jarring when it appeared they were closing in on Dodge City, Kans. Huh? Why would you go to Kansas on a hike from the Four Corners region to Wyoming?
This is compounded by the fact that most of their journey takes place in terrain that looks like (because it is) Arizona and Utah. Month after month these poor raggedy devils are slogging along the dusty trail and never getting out of Monument Valley! It got to be laughable.
The James Stewart/Dodge City interlude had me wondering if I'd somehow switched DVDs and was now watching Blazing Saddles.
By the time we saw the first locomotive, introducing the passage where they cross the presumably heavily guarded railroad, I halfway expected to see the French Underground blow up the train.
Monument Valley is a wonderful setting for a western, but Ford would have us believe the entire American West looks like highway 163 from Kayenta to Goulding. I can't decide whether it's insulting or just laughable.
Bottom line - this is a goofy failed attempt to tell a seriously tragic story. One more example of why you shouldn't get your history from movies.
Rating:  -
John Ford dealt with one of the long-lasting Indian tragedies in his "Cheyenne Autumn," the wasting away of a tribe in an uncongenial pen called a reservation and its efforts to take matters into its own hands...
Indians, to use a modern term, had become redundant; that was their true tragedy... They were unwanted in what the whites wanted to make of the West and so they were 'placed' and disposed of, thereby suffering the usual 'superfluous' maladies of physical and moral debilitation... Here they are portrayed as the victims of insensitive herding...
The Cheyennes--1,500 miles away in Oklahoma from their Yellowstone home--had seen their numbers depleted from one thousand to less than three hundred in the course of a disease-ridden year... With these sorts of statistics it was as much a matter of simple logic as an act of desperation when they upped and left one night, bound on foot for their old hunting grounds, probably knowing full well that the cavalry would make them hurry, as they did, all the way... An epic in real life. Would the master epic-maker match it? In purely visual terms the answer was 'yes'. Ford vivid1y depicted the starvation and disease plaguing the Cheyenne trek... But somehow Ford never wholly got to the heart of the matter although the intent was there and at times this is a most impressive and moving film...
Carroll Baker appears as a Quaker teacher who tries in vain to he1p the unfortunate migrants... Richard Widmark is the army captain who is as sympathetic as uniform allows, and Arthur Kennedy is razor-sharp in his impersonation of Doc Holliday, who, with Stewart's Earp, is drafted into leading a posse against the Indians... Stewart deliberately re-routes them and the Indians get away... Edward G. Robinson plays a humane and kindly Secretary of the Interior who helps bail out the unlucky Cheyenne.
Rating: -
Report card for CHEYENNE AUTUMN, John Ford's epic retelling of the Cheyenne Trail of Tears, an 1878 exodus of over 300 men, women, and children off their barren Oklahoma reservation 1,500 miles north to the Black Hills of Dakota.
Acting. *** (3 stars out of five.) It's hard to know exactly who to point the finger at, but a finger has to be pointed at someone. Richard Widmark stars as the cavalry officer who spends most of the movie chasing the fleeing Cheyenne, and he's very good as the hard driving, ambivalent army officer. Even Carroll Baker as a Quaker schoolteacher and Mike Mazurki as the troop's top sergeant are given some nice scenes. The problem lies with the casting of the Cheyennes. Ricardo Montalban and Gilbert Roland play Little Wolf and Dull Knife, two real life characters who led the Cheyenne in their dangerous flight. Sal Mineo, of all people, plays Little Wolf's son Red Shirt. Montalban and Roland are both proven commodities - good actors, too - but they weren't Native Americans (in fact, both were from Mexico - Mineo was an Italian-American who hailed from Brooklyn.) They aren't the first actors covered in greasepaint to play characters of another race, and that isn't the biggest problem, anyway, although casting a non-Native American in those roles probably wouldn't even be attempted today. The problem lies with Ford's approach to the Cheyenne, which can probably best be characterized as solemn and dignified. The intention is laudable, but the execution leaves a huge hole in their movie. Montalban and Roland come off as stiff and wooden and lacquered, and the movie is crippled by it. Even when they're in scenes alone with each other they're forced to say stuff like `My brother! We have always thought as one. Not even a straw has come between us!' If Ford had drawn up just one scene that allowed Little Wolf and Dull Knife to let the starch out of their spine long enough to say something like`I don't know if we're gonna make `er, Little Wolf,' -in other words, be identifiably human for a couple hundred feet of celluloid - they would have locked us in with them. But he didn't, and they don't.
Pacing. **. Ye gods preserve me from movies that are so long they need an `Intermission Entr `Acte' in the middle of them. CHEYENNE AUTUMN clocks in at a morbidly obese 154-minutes, 2-1/2 hours, and like most marathon epics it tends to flow unevenly. The likeliest candidate for liposuction is the Dodge City scene that occurs right before the intermission. Jimmy Stewart and Arthur Kennedy play Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, two participants in a hastily formed posse/citizen army created to intercept the Cheyenne in their flight. It's a fairly long, almost slapstick interlude that would only make sense if we were emotionally engaged with the Cheyenne and needed comedy to relieve the gloom. But Ford doesn't come close to getting under the skin of either Little Wolf or Dull Knife, and of the Cheyenne we remain distant, detached observers. For what it's worth, Stewart made no less convincing a Wyatt Earp than Mineo a Red Shirt.
Photography. *****. Breathtaking and stunning are the first words that come to mind, followed by beautiful and sublime. Ford was a visual artist of the highest caliber, and CHEYENNE AUTUMN doesn't disappoint on that score. You can freeze the image at just about any point in the movie and you'll get a beautifully composed still picture. It helps that this, Ford's last western, was shot in his beloved Monument Valley. It doesn't hurt that his Cheyenne take three-quarters of the movie getting out of that small patch of territory, either.
CHEYENNE AUTUMN is a mixed bag, worth a recommendation with reservations. If you're a fan of John Ford movies it's probably essential viewing, if for no other reason than it's the only film of his in which Native Americans were treated as wholly sympathetic characters.
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