By 1960 John Ford was near the end of the road. Grousing that standards were slipping, he was upset that many of the best production crew members were snapped up for television and unavailable. He harumphed that “Hollywood today is a market for sex and horror. I don’t want any part of that.”

The director, who tried to avoid explaining himself too much off screen, may have rejected the more sensationalistic aspects of the New Hollywood that was emerging as the old studio system disintegrated, but the lifting of restrictions on subject matter for mainstream movies may have helped to inspire his interest in the story of Sergeant Rutledge.

This coming Sunday, February 1st, marks what would have been the 105th birthday of the iconic director John Ford and the beginning of Black History Month. Coincidentally, after many years, I recently revisited one of Ford’s most intriguing, late career films, Sergeant Rutledge (1960). It is among the least known of his many films. Perhaps it deserves a second look, for despite all its flaws, there is a remarkable presence and an uneasy conscience at the heart of this movie. As Ford pointed out in an interview, it was also one of his favorite movies, telling the story of the African-American “soldier, [who] played a great role in our history, and I wanted to tell that story…[b]ut the picture was not successful, because, I’ve heard, Warners sent a couple of boys on bicycles out to sell it.”

Well, after seeing the movie, I wouldn’t entirely blame Warner Brothers for the movie’s financial failure, though, as you can see by the poster at right, the emphasis of the marketing department on the good-looking, pleasant but lightweight actor Jeffrey Hunter in an action pose might have led moviegoers in 1960 to expect more derring-do on his part than that of the real star, Woody Strode, who looms over the protective Hunter and the virginal Constance Towers in the bottom corner of the broadside. Despite Ford’s many Academy Awards, the younger generation that had to make decisions about movies were, as they still are, wondering “what has he done lately?” Becoming unfashionable meant smaller revenues from a Ford picture, but it did not mean that he had nothing more to say.

After his Homeric The Searchers (1956),  Ford’s narratives became more loose-limbed, and there was a tendency to allow moments of “lepricorny” Irish humor (and sometimes hammy actors) overwhelm the material. However bitter the director may have felt as he felt his powers and clout beginning to wane, he had not lost the urge to explore the larger implications of history in his work nor to try new storytelling techniques.

Ford was working in this movie with his longtime cinematographer Bert Glennon, (who had been with him many times since making The Prisoner of Shark Island in 1936), and editor Jack Murray, (who would eventually edit 15 films with Ford). To prove that the old dog had some still effective tricks in him, the fragmentary narrative was enhanced by a blend of old fashioned but highly effective dramatic theatrical lighting, which helped to draw the viewer into the recalled events as witnesses gave testimony, transitioning into the speaker’s memory. This was complemented by several quick cuts in a modern style between flashbacks and the courtroom.

A constitutionally conservative man in many ways, his rich, contradictory vision of America was still evolving in 1960, reflecting his increasingly ambivalent view of the past, present and future. The story of Sergeant Rutledge, said to have been inspired in part by a painting of a Buffalo Soldier by Frederic Remington , belongs with that group of films that the director made near the end of his career, Two Rode Together, Donovan’s Reef, and Cheyenne Autumn all of which dealt with varying degrees of success with the conundrum of race and the pain. In Sergeant Rutledge, the director took on a surprisingly frank story of our mutual unease with miscegenation and fear while revisiting his familiar landscape of Monument Valley once more.

Sergeant Rutledge might be regarded as a coda to a lifetime spent creating myths on celluloid. Ford’s preoccupation with racial themes may also have reflected an increasingly restless conscience after a career spent exploring the human condition as he perceived it.  Sometimes described as having the instincts of a 19th century liberal, Ford could sometimes seem tone deaf about racial characterizations in his movies. Though earlier in his career, he had portrayed a humane Black doctor (Clarence Brooks) selflessly helping to fight an epidemic in Haiti in his adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith (1931), he cast the hugely popular ’30s player, Stepin’ Fetchit (Lincoln Perry) in Judge Priest (1934),  Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and The Sun Shines Bright (1953), playing a type now regarded as a negative caricature the Stepin’ Fetchit character and his relationship with Judge Priest (Will Rogers in the earlier film, and Charles Winninger in The Sun Shines Bright) is depicted with great warmth and intimacy, despite the disparity between the outward station of the two characters. While we may find much of it hard to swallow, even Stepin’ Fetchit once said of his role in Judge Priest: “When people saw me and Will Rogers like brothers, that said something to them.” Still, as late as 1959, with Ford’s casting of the accomplished Olympic athlete Althea Gibson in a subservient role as a maid to Constance Towers in The Horse Soldiers (1959), the outcry that resulted from this within the civil rights community stung the tough-seeming but surprisingly thin-skinned director.

As Ford entered the winter of his life, he made a deal with Warner Brothers to make a story about the black enlisted men known as The Buffalo Soldiers , whose legendary presence in the 9th and 10th Cavalry in the 19th Century West helped to give hope for a better future to many Black Americans in their time.  Prof. Rayford Logan of Howard University, after a lifetime studying the bleak race relations in post-Reconstructionist America, commented that “Negroes had little, at the turn of the century, to help sustain our faith in ourselves except the pride that we took in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry…They were our Ralph Bunche, Marian Anderson, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson.”

The story, set in 1881, is a courtroom drama told in somewhat jagged flashbacks as testimony of several witnesses at the military trial of Woody Strode’s character for the murder and rape of his commanding officer and his teenage daughter, a girl who has been friends with the accused since she was a toddler. Not flinching from tapping into his audience’s latent fears, Ford and his scriptwriters James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck have us meet Rutledge for the first time in a stylized flashback when a young woman, returning to Arizona after 12 years in the East, alights from a train at an isolated station where she expects to be met by her father. The audience’s first encounter with Rutledge comes when, in a close up, we see his massive hand covering the mouth of the blonde, white heroine, Mary Beecher (Constance Towers). As Mary recalls during her testimony, “It was as though he’d sprung up from the earth… from a nightmare.” He commands her not to scream, even though she has just stumbled over the body of the station master pierced by an arrow.  Soon realizing that the black soldier will not harm her, she learns that there has been an Apache breakout in the area.  Rutledge himself is mysteriously wounded and reluctant to accept the woman’s help, murmuring repeatedly throughout this movie that he does not want anything to do with “white woman’s business”. Aware of the presence of Apaches in the area, Rutledge and Beecher spend the night in seperate rooms, with Mary cradling a rifle in a rocker to ward off the Indians while Rutledge tries to rest. Strode, regarded by both whites and blacks as  a “top soldier”, is soon under arrest when a party from the fort arrives under the command of Lt. Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter). Asked repeatedly about the circumstances of his flight, he stoically refuses to assert his own innocence, ready to accept what he assumes will be his fate, guilty or innocent. Accompanying the band of soldiers and Mary Beecher as they pursue the Indians, he distinguishes himself while under fire, comforting a dying corporal, and taking an opportunity to ride away from his captors toward freedom.

In a particularly resonant and poetic image, when Cantrell calls to Rutledge, who has ridden forward to assist his fellow trooper after an Indian attack he asks how the now dead man is faring.  Strode signals the man’s fate by using an Indian sign, lifting his arms slightly above his massive shoulders, in a gesture reminiscent of both a bird ascending in flight and a figure on a cross.  Escaping and eluding the attempts of the officer to stop him with a bullet thanks to the his fellow soldiers and Mary’s actions, he is on his way to freedom. Finding that the Indians wait to ambush the Cavalry band near a river, he prevents a massacre by warning them, and returning to fight at their side, allowing himself to be recaptured and made a prisoner by Cantrell.

I should mention that I was prompted to watch this dvd of Sergeant Rutledge in part because I’m a sucker for courtroom dramas. The American Film Institute, which appears addicted to those lists of cinematic stuff and nonsense, names the following as the Top 10 Courtroom Dramas of all time: To Kill a Mockingbird, 12 Angry Men, Kramer vs Kramer, The Verdict, A Few Good Men, Witness for the Prosecution, Anatomy of a Murder, In Cold Blood, A Cry in the Dark and Judgment at Nuremberg.  Some of those choices puzzle me, (A Cry in the Dark…one of the greatest?). Actually, I’m partial to even the more hootworthy examples of this genre.

I find the creaky Coquette (1929), Mary Pickford’s first talkie, fascinating, as America’s Sweetheart loses her reason once her pappy decides that the price of her lost virtue is death, causing everything in their well ordered Southern world to come unhinged. I’ve even been known to watch a few of the many remakes of Madame X (IMDb lists a staggering twelve versions of the tale of thwarted mother love),  though the 1937 outing with the splendid Gladys George is the only one that is surprisingly touching–perhaps because it’s the least glossy. In a sober, more adult mood, I find courtroom dramas such as The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Fury (1936), Inherit the Wind (1960) and even Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) among the best of the breed, using the courtroom setting to examine that series of ethical choices that occur in our everyday lives as a way of unraveling the gnarled threads of our tangled human experience.

The courtroom depicted in Sergeant Rutledge is all too human.

As we are told when this military tribunal begins, “The Manual for Court Martials clearly states that the trial judge advocate shall do his utmost to present the whole truth and to oppose every attempt to suppress the facts or to distort them.” Telling the story of the movie in a series of flashbacks from the perspective of various witnesses, we are presented with many opportunities to distort truths, especially as presented by prosecutor Carleton Young, witnesses such as Billie Burke at her flightiest, (sadly, in her last role) and Ford’s favorite blowhard, Willis Bouchey as president of the court-martial, with the courtroom full of scandalized officers’ wives and hostile civilians carrying handy nooses. I should also mention the watchful presence of a fine actor as the oldest trooper, Juano Hernandez, whose Intruder in the Dust (1949) also kept his own counsel rather than satisfy the mob 12 years earlier in Clarence Brown’s adaptation of Faulkner’s story of racism and justice.  While Hernandez is given too little to do, who gives testimony about his own perception of events surrounding the rape and murder.  The whodunit aspect of the story has little mystery, since we know–as Constance Towers keeps trumpeting–that Sergeant Rutledge couldn’t do anything so dishonorable, especially after he has recently saved the troop from Indian attack, forsaking his last chance to escape in the process. No, the mystery in this film actually concludes in a laughably over the top “Perry Mason” moment, but the plot is not nearly as interesting as the underlying tensions that surround it and the lack of likely justice in and out of the courtroom.

This movie, the first big budget Western to feature an African-American as the central character, stars Woody Strode, a man of ferocious dignity and little formal acting experience.  Ford insisted he be cast in the part after Warners expressed a desire to see the more newly marketable Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte in the role. Ford, not feeling that either actor was tough enough, chose Strode, a former decathlete, a UCLA football player, professional wrestler and one of the first of four African Americans to integrate the NFL in the late ’40s to play a character with a deep sense of his own sense of place in a hostile world. As the top sergeant in his troop, (the highest rank that an African-American soldier was allowed to achieve at that time), he played a man who experiences a fall from grace that threatens the tenuous status of his own comrades and, throughout the course of a sometimes grotesquely condescending trial, that of all the society around him, white and black.
Well over 6′ tall, Woodrow Wilson Woolwine Strode, a native Californian whose racial heritage included Creek, Blackfoot and Cherokee Indian as well as Black ancestry,  had been cast in eye-catching roles in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandants (1956), (in which he played two roles as a litter bearer and a king),  Lewis Milestone’s  Pork Chop Hill and in a memorable turn as a nearly wordless fellow gladiator whose last act sparks the slave rebellion in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, he was increasingly getting noticed by Hollywood just prior to being singled out by Ford to play an unjustly accused man in this film. In this role Strode is accused of raping and murdering the daughter of his commanding officer and her father, a role that taxed the actor’s inner resources.

*Possible Mild Spoilers Below*

Stoically choosing martyrdom rather than defend himself,  Strode’s taciturn mien belies his character’s exceptionally perceptive, spiritually transcendent nature. Born into slavery, Rutledge, who still carries his certificate of manumission issued by his former master in 1861, is able to see beyond himself and his desperate circumstances, even as he is shackled by his brothers in arms. As he roars out to his disheartened men when they question him about the unlikely nature of the charges against him, “The Ninth’s record’s gonna speak for us all some day, and it’s gonna speak clean…You’re not gonna risk any part of this regiment’s record for one man’s good.”

Strode’s finest moment on screen in this film comes as he is goaded relentlessly during his testimony by the prosecutor, who repeatedly asks why he returned to help protect his men from an Indian attack. Finally pushed beyond his own limit, Rutledge blurts out “It’s because the Ninth Cavalry was my home. My real freedom. And my self-respect. And the way I was desertin’ it, I wasn’t nothin’ but a swamp-runnin’ n****.” The searingly painful moment came a day after the manipulative Ford deliberately got Woody Strode drunk. The next morning, aware of his star’s massive hangover, he continued to browbeat his star almost until the moment came to shoot the scene. Reflecting his own awareness of the painful association of the n– word, Ford expressed some last minute consternation about allowing it to be used in the film. Strode himself said “why not? It would be the first time a black man ever called himself by that word…on the screen.”

Ford often seemed to be consciously trying to make his central character an icon. In a few scenes, I felt that Ford went too far in making Rutledge a heroic, even mythic figure, robbing him of some of his humanity while trying his best to present a black man as an admirable heroic figure. Rutledge, who had entered the commander’s residence to alert him of the Apache breakout, found the young girl naked and dead on the floor of the house. When his commander enters the room and sees Rutledge trying to cover her with a serape, he automatically assumes that the man is the perpetrator, and tries to shoot the black soldier, forcing Rutledge to kill the man in self-defense. As we are repeatedly reminded, Rutledge has no interest in “white woman’s business” and is, for all intents and purposes in this movie, apparently living like a monk.

In one elaborately staged scene while Rutledge waits to return to what is assumed to be perfunctory trial and execution, the camera lingers on his silhouetted monumental form standing watch as smoke swirls around his backlit figure. While this pose is maintained, his men sing “Captain Buffalo”, a little ditty (perhaps with some hoped for cross over appeal as a potential hit song?) about the ideal Buffalo soldier with lines like “John Henry was a weakling next to Captain Buffalo”. Despite his embodiment as the beau ideal of soldierly honor, there is, along with Ford’s idealization of this character, a nagging sense that Rutledge is in the white world but not necessarily of the society.  Ford apparently wants to believe he and his fellow black soldiers are becoming assimilated into mainstream society via military service, (and, in a sense, imposing white values on another minority, the Indians, whose presence here is barely acknowledged, except as another stereotype). Like his Irish Cavalry men in his memorable trilogy, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache and Rio Grande, their sacrifice is meant to make them members of the larger society…”some day.” That “some day” is a repeated mantra of Sergeant Rutledge when encouraging his men to persevere in their lonely service, though, by the time the film comes briskly to an end that feels too rushed, Rutledge is restored to his proper position as top soldier, it seems a bit hollow.

Still, the way that the dignified, smoldering Strode readily and aggressively identifies himself  “1st Sgt Braxton Rutledge, C Troop, Ninth United States Cavalry” repeatedly, there are moments when one feels a sense that this man regards himself as a kind of “prisoner of war” giving his captors the requisite name rank and, if he had one, serial number, even while trying to convince himself inwardly that he does belong. This undercurrent in Woody Strode’s performance, whether conscious or not, gives his character a poignancy that is lacking in the rest of the drama. His “true freedom”, which the film seems to want us to believe is in the 9th Cavalry, seems within himself and his own indomitable soul.

Working closely with John Ford in preparation for this film, Strode experienced a baptism of fire as the newest member of the “Ford Stock Company”. In coaching that sounds ghastly on paper, the actor later looked back on the experience in his autobiography with clear appreciated for the doors that this role opened up for him in his career on a worldwide stage. Even though at one point, Ford even administered a whack to his rump when he didn’t perform as directed,  Woody even seemed to love the man, faults and all. He endured the kind of brusque treatment that the notoriously gruff “Pappy” administered to his actors, but I suspect that years of football training with some professionally tough coaches must also have helped Strode. While rehearsing, Ford even acted out scenes for him, yelling at him if he didn’t think that he was paying sufficient attention to his miming of the role. As Strode recalled, “In one scene he really upset me. I was supposed to be spying on the Indians. I was sneaking through the bushes, he hollered, ‘Woody you son of a bitch, quit n*****ing up my God-damned scene!’…I had been tiptoeing, like I was scared. He wanted me to move with intelligence and cunning. Sergeant Rutledge wasn’t a tiptoer; he was proud and dignified. And John Ford knew how to pull that out of me and put it up on the screen.”

Despite this sometimes despicable treatment, Strode did not, as he remembered being sorely tempted, “hurt that old man.”  Instead the relationship between Ford and Strode deepened, leading to a strong friendship, and appearances in supporting roles for the actor in three other Ford movies, Two Rode Together (1961), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and 7 Women (1966). Off-screen, Strode went from being the aging director’s protégé to his friend and caretaker, even living in Ford’s house for a time as the older man’s health deteriorated.

Ford’s flagging energy may be evident on screen in this awkward movie, as are his artistic tics, but, the story, focused on the trial of  “1st Sgt Braxton Rutledge, C Troop, Ninth United States Cavalry” is still a powerful one, attempting to address black and white relations just before the cresting of the Civil Rights movement in the United states in the ’60s. 

Sources:
Bogle, Donald, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films,
Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002
Eyman, Scott, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Ford, John, Peary, Gerald, Lefcourt, Jenny, John Ford: Interviews, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2001
McBride, Joseph, Wilmington, Michael, John Ford, Da Capo Press, 1975.
Strode, Woody and Young, Sam, Goal Dust, Madison Books, 1990.