This was the next to last feature film John Ford completed, in 1964, when he was 69 years-old. It doesn't work as a drama, much less a melodrama, or as a character study or as an historical epic . . . but it's one of the most sublime visual poems in the history of movies and a very great work of art.
It tells the once little-known story of a band of Cheyenne who, in 1879, broke out of confinement on a reservation in Indian territory, present-day Oklahoma, and made a 1500-mile trek back to their homeland in Montana. Pursued and harried by a succession of cavalry expeditions, starved and near death, the band made it to its old home where it was allowed to remain.
In his excellent commentary on the wonderful new DVD edition of the film, Ford biographer Joseph McBride says that Ford originally intended to make Cheyenne Autumn as a small, black-and-white film, an intimate study of the Cheyenne pilgrims, but that he was persuaded by the studio to expand it into a big wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza. It was, says McBride, a "Faustian bargain" which led to a film that was neither fish nor fowl, since Ford lost sight of the Cheyenne characters yet failed to create a genuine epic.
This may indeed reflect the development of the project but I think it misses the essence of the film that Ford finally made. All of the characters in the film, both Cheyenne and white, recede into the images, become secondary to the images. Ford doesn't lose sight of them as dramatic personae because he has no real interest in them as dramatic personae. They're just narrative markers that guide us through the landscape of the film.
Landscape was always a character in Ford's Westerns, a kind of Greek chorus commenting on the relative smallness of human intention and desire. It stood in, one might even say, for the regard of Eternity, in which human endeavor held an insignificant place. It transformed the melodrama of his stories into tragic absurdity.
In Cheyenne Autumn, as in Shakespeare's late romances, the author lost interest in the mechanics of plot altogether, in the centrality of individual character, and became enchanted by the mystery of his medium -- the magical poetry of words, in Shakespeare's case, and of images in Ford's. The progress of the Cheyenne through the magnificence of the landscape, the evolutions of mounted cavalry on the march or at the charge, fill Ford's imagination fully -- the characters dissolve into the beauty of movement itself. They are elevated into a transcendent glory not by the specificity of self but by their possession of space. They are dancers, sculptures in motion.
This is not an abstract vision, however, a celebration of technique. In his old age, disillusioned with the legends of the West he did so much to reinforce, Ford lost his faith in man's essential goodness, or at least in that part of it related to his will. Primal values, transcending individual human character, were all he could believe in -- the dumb urge to go home, to preserve community, to do one's duty.
At the center of the film Ford inserted, unaccountably to many critics, a 21-minute sequence set in Dodge City which mercilessly satirizes the myth of the Western hero, of the frontier town. Jimmy Stewart appears as a corrupt and cynical Wyatt Earp leading the hysterical townspeople on an absurd pursuit of the phantom Cheyenne, who in truth are nowhere near Dodge. The familiar narrative of the old West is deconstructed, revealed as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
After this strange interlude, the film switches back to the story of the Cheyenne, doing what they have to do, and the horse soldiers, doing what they have to do. When the Cheyenne are restored to their ancestral Eden, Ford shows us how much they have lost recovering it, just as he shows us how much honor the soldiers have lost in fulfilling a duty that's been applied to a meaningless and inhuman mission.
The triumph on both sides was only in the journey, the movement, the dream -- all of which vanish in the end, as the eternal landscape looks on impassively.
The film has a nominal "upbeat" resolution in its penultimate episode in which Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, wonderfully played by Edward G. Robinson, goes to visit the escaped Cheyenne in Montana and promises to help them stay there. This scene, oddly, is shot against cheesy-looking back-projections -- such a radical violation of the look of the rest of the film that it almost seems deliberately surreal . . . as though Ford was asking us not to take this superficial "climax" too seriously. Perhaps it can be compared to the improbable events that "resolve" the narrative of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, in which the playwright seems to be asking us to laugh with him at the conventions of the stage -- to remind us that the true heart of his work lies elsewhere.