Capital Celluloid 2025 — Day 241: Sun Aug 31

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Ford, 1949): ICA Cinema, 4.30pm

This film is part of the Serge Daney season at the ICA. Details here.

ICA introduction:

‘Rapid contemplation is the Ford paradox. It’s impossible to watch his films with a lazy eye, for if we do, we no longer see anything (except stories of romantic soldiers). The eye must be sharp because, in any image of a Ford film, there is likely to be a few tenths of a second of pure contemplation before the action starts. Someone emerges from a wooden shack or leaves the frame, and there are red clouds over a cemetery, a horse abandoned in the bottom right corner of the image, the blue swarming of the cavalry, the distraught faces of two women: things to be seen at the very beginning of a shot, for there won’t be a ‘second time’ (too bad for the sluggish eyes).’ (Serge Daney, ‘John Ford, For Ever,’ 1988)

John Ford’s films always brought out the best in Serge Daney; from a stellar essay on Ford’s oeuvre when he was just 19, to a brief capsule about She Wore a Yellow Ribbon written two and a half decades later for the film’s television broadcast in 1988. This text not only reflects one of Daney’s frequently revisited auteurist subjects, but it also serves as an example of his late-career coverage of television for the newspaper Libération, where he contemplated the implications of cinema when transmitted through television. 

Chicago Reader review:
Of all John Ford's lyrical films, this 1949 feature is the one that most nearly leaves narrative behind; it is pure theme and variation, centered on the figure of a retiring cavalry officer (John Wayne, playing with strength and conviction a man well beyond his actual age). The screenplay (by Frank Nugent and Laurence Stallings) is entirely episodic, and it ends in a magnificently sustained series of anticlimaxes, suggesting it could spin out forever. In Ford's superbly creative hands, it becomes perhaps the only avant-garde film ever made about the importance of tradition. With Joanne Dru, John Agar, Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Victor McLaglen, Mildred Natwick, and George O'Brien.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.