Two Rode Together, directed by John Ford, 1961
For some reason, Two Rode Together is the only post-1939 Ford Western I had not seen before, and it turns out it’s one of his most pessimistic and cynical ones, albeit darkly funny. Shot in Mexico and Texas in the fall of 1960, it tells of two men in an uneasy partnership, Marshal Guthrie McCabe and Lieutenant Jim Gary, played by James Stewart and Richard Widmark respectively, who have to embark on a mission into Indian territory to retrieve white settlers captured by Comanche war leader Quanah Parker many years ago. Getting the captives out is one thing, getting them back into white society proves to be something very different and far more difficult.
Lagniappe (spoilers)
Stagecoach to California
Ford populates his Wild West with a crowd of not very likeable characters, nobody here is sympathetic, least of all Stewart’s McCabe, who considers it legitimate to “get ten percent of everything in Tascosa,” the sleepy Texan town whose marshal he is. In his excellent study The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western, Michael Coyne describes him as a lawman “deromanticized as corrupt.” McCabe’s mistress, busty Belle Aragon (Annelle Hayes), a hard-boiled working woman whose resolute pragmatism equals his soft-spoken cynicism, runs the local entertainment establishment with an iron hand and a dagger in her garter. Like men with an extra need for safety who secure their pants with a belt and a pair of suspenders – Sergio Leone, for example, and his brutto Tuco – Belle wears a garter belt and garters to keep her anachronistic nylon stockings taut. When she starts to call McCabe “Guth” and on top of that proposes matrimony – fifty percent instead of ten for the marshal, but, holy smoke, matrimony! – no further efforts are needed on the part of cavalry officer Jim Gary to persuade McCabe to accompany him to Fort Grant, forty miles away, after all.
Marshal McCabe leaves his official duties to Deputy Ward (Chet Douglas), a man who could stand on the banks of the Rio Grande and not find his way to Mexico. (Bo Hopkins’s Crazy Lee, in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch some years later, is slightly reminiscent of that deputed dumbbell.) Tascosa’s justice of the peace, another hardly uplifting character, seems to be mostly drunk, incapable of holding either his liquor or a trial. When McCabe finally reaches Fort Grant, he is greeted like the Messiah himself by a gathering of settlers who expect him to bring back their Indian-abducted kin. Very soon they will find out that the Gospel According to Guth has to offer only one message of salvation: the Holy Dollar. Ford does not portray these settlers as model Americans imbued with the spirit of liberté, égalité, fraternité but as a narrow-minded bunch of religiously deluded fanatics, bigoted hypocrites, shrewd businessmen, Southern bullies and various types of nincompoops. What unites them – and, for that matter, all white characters in this Western – is their intense aversion to Native Americans. The only settler depicted in a reasonably sympathetic way is Marty (Shirley Jones), a young woman looking for her lost brother and a prospective husband (i.e. Jim Gary, disillusioned Yankee soldier, well into his forties, eighty dollars a month, nice hairpiece).
McCabe leaves for the village of Quanah Parker, accompanied by Gary, playing gooseberry. With the possible exception of his last Western, Cheyenne Autumn (1964), Ford generally did not portray his Indians in a very friendly light, but his representation of the two major Native American characters in Two Rode Together is beyond the pale. Quanah, played by Berlin-born white actor Heinrich von Kleinbach, better known by his stage name Henry Brandon, is shown as a hardened, sly and distrustful trader who surely has learned his lessons dealing with whites. Brandon makes Parker as unlikable a character as Scar in The Searchers a few years earlier, blending the charms of a used-car dealer with those of a PE coach. The other one, Stone Calf, played by black actor Woody Strode, is a textbook savage, wild, aggressive and hostile but stupid and superstitious and therefore easily killed. “He still says words over buffalo shield to turn away bullets,” Quanah Parker condescendingly derides his tribal rival. In his indispensable study Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America, cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin observes “a recrudescence of more traditional ‘savage war’ renditions of White/Indian conflicts […] between 1952 and 1964.” According to Slotkin, these were “movies that emphasized Indian savagery and the inevitability of wars of extermination. Among the most vivid of these films were two sensational versions of the ‘captivity myth’: Huston’s The Unforgiven (1960) and Ford’s Two Rode Together (1961).”
Of the captives McCabe and Gary intended to ransom, they only get one, now named Running Wolf (David Kent, black-wigged and over the top), who absolutely refuses to return to white life. But no matter what he wants, kicking and screaming he is taken back to so-called civilization, because a wealthy businessman, Mr. Wringle (Willis Bouchey), has agreed with McCabe to pay him a thousand dollars for any white young man of the right age, with the intention of passing him off to his wife as her missing son from a previous marriage. Oh, the turpitude! And on top of that, Quanah Parker cunningly sells them Stone Calf’s Mexican wife, Elena de la Madriaga, played by Linda Cristal. The wicked idea behind this is of course that Stone Calf will try to get his spouse back, and that he or McCabe or both will be killed as a result. Major Frazer (John McIntire), Fort Grant’s commander, is hoping for the same, by the way. Neither Frazer nor Quanah will be disappointed.
McCabe takes his two ex-captives back to Fort Grant where Running Wolf is exhibited like a wild animal at a zoo and Elena is treated with suspicion and disgust by the fort’s dignitaries, because she has lived with a Comanche brave and has therefore become “impure.” In his essay on The Searchers in Renegade Westerns: Movies That Shot Down Frontier Myths, Kevin Grant writes that “the sour Two Rode Together […] dramatises and decries the social rejection of returned captives – of both sexes, in that case.”
Now even McCabe is beginning to get tired of all that nonsense. “You don’t even store honest whiskey,” he flings at Major Frazer, tossing a coin into an empty glass, a gesture referenced in C’era una volta il West, as Christopher Frayling has pointed out in his comprehensive study Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece and in his essay “The Quiet Man Gets Noisy: Sergio Leone, the Italian Western and Ireland” in Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation. After Running Wolf kills the settler woman who mistook him for her son, he gets lynched by an angry mob. In truth, he was Marty’s brother. Elena has had it up to here, and so has McCabe, who initially appeared to be an unsavory character – lazy, cynical, corrupt, misogynistic, racist, greedy – but ultimately doesn’t come off so badly compared to his fellow citizens. The only right thing for Elena and Guthrie to do is board the stagecoach to California.
Ford paints a thoroughly pessimistic picture of American society, which was adopted by Sergio Leone a few years later, as Martin Scorsese aptly remarks in Christopher Frayling’s Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece. “In a funny way, Leone’s pessimism is the pessimism one finds in the late pictures of John Ford – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Two Rode Together and pictures like that …” The wide panoramas of Monument Valley, as seen in his previous Westerns, have disappeared. Everything in Two Rode Together feels narrow and petty-minded and oppressive. Ford doesn’t show much sympathy for his civilian characters; as usual, his cavalrymen fare better, Lieutenant Gary and also Andy Devine’s Sergeant Posey, frequently mocked by Gary and Marshal McCabe:
— Well, there goes another man with simple wants.
— Eight beers.