Cheyenne Autumn (Ford, 1964): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 8.10pm
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on April 19th, is part of the 'You Must Remember This presents: The Old Man is Still Alive' season at BFI Southbank. Many great directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age, from the 1930 to ’50s, radically changed course in the later years of their career – a theme that runs through the new season of the podcast You Must Remember This and this BFI season. The men behind undeniable classics like It’s a Wonderful Life, My Fair Lady, Sunset Boulevard, Gigi and Psycho, attempted – or were forced – to engage with massive changes in technology; shifts in attitudes towards race and gender, and a new generation of studio executives and audiences who could be sceptical that an ‘old man’ had anything to offer in a world obsessed with burning down the past and starting fresh. Some railed against the new ‘degenerate’ cinema made by, in Billy Wilder’s phrase, ‘the kids with beards’ and tried to preserve the status quo; others attempted to make films that confronted the generation gap and a transformed society.
Full details of the season can be found here.
Time Out review:
Making amends for his less than sensitive treatment of the Indians in
his earlier movies, John Ford came up with a sprawling epic illustrating the
callous disregard with which the US government treated the Cheyenne in
the 1880s, uprooting them from the Yellowstone and resettling them in
distant Oklahoma without proper provisions for survival. Over-long,
often clichéd and uneven (there are comic interludes complete with cameo
performances), but still imbued with moments of true poetry, thanks
largely to William Clothier's magnificent Panavision landscapes.
Geoff Andrew
Here (and above) is an extract.
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