She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949)

	Also Known As: -
	Year of first release: 1949
	Director: John Ford (Rio Grande, The Searchers)
	Actors: John Wayne (True Grit), Joanne Dru, John Agar
	Country: USA
	Genre: Western
	Conditions of visioning: 22.06.2014, DVD, Home cinema
Synopsis: Less than a week before he retires, Captain Nathan Brittles (Wayne) of the US Cavalry goes on a last mission to keep the Indians away from the border.
Review: Although it was shot during the golden age of the American Western, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon starts to show something different, particularly in the fact that it displays a retiring John Wayne. I think to remember this is what I read about it in the Mad Movies magazine that motivated me to purchase the DVD. The story is also different than usual, within the Western genre it is not a Cowboys movie but more an Indians and Cavalry one, and the Cavalry is not somewhere defending a fort but on patrol, escorting two ladies. The rhythm of the action is a bit odd, and gets worse after one hour into the movie, which is what displeased me the most about it. The acting is otherwise regular for a movie of that time (i.e. a bit overdone) and the heroic music too present to my taste. Also the romance story seems a bit out of place. The movie won an academy award for its cinematography, but unfortunately the quality of the DVD is quite poor (colors, resolution, contrast...) and the Blu-ray edition is yet to come, so I couldn't enjoy that side of it. I could see that the landscapes of Monument Valley were beautiful, I know them, I've been there, but it seems easy to make a good-looking movie by shooting in that area, like Ford already did in The Searchers. The last sentence of the movie "[...] they were all the same: men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode - and whatever they fought for - that place became the United States"omits to mention that what they were mainly fighting against were the Indians, a people who were there in the first place. Fortunately the Westerns of the 70's-80's will give a fairer view of the Native Americans. So in conclusion, I enjoyed watching a classic Western, but I didn't like it particularly.
Rating: 5 /10