Product Review

Cheyenne Autumn is a beautiful title to grace John Ford's final Western, but the film falls short of the occasion. The great director's ambition to tell the story, for once, from the Indians' point of view is only partially fulfilled. He's unambiguously sympathetic to the Cheyennes' resolve to bolt the reservation and trek back to their ancestral lands, while most of white society, the military, the bureaucracy, and the sensationalist press come off as insensitive, foolish, or downright hateful. However, the Cheyenne are nobly wooden (and played by non-Indians), and it's sympathetic cavalry officer Richard Widmark and Quaker missionary Carroll Baker through whose eyes most of the epic narrative unfolds. The video release restores the entirety of the caustic Dodge City interlude (featuring James Stewart as a thoroughly disreputable Wyatt Earp)--truncated after the New York roadshow opening--but William H. Clothier's majestic Panavision compositions have yet to be letterboxed. --Richard T. Jameson