I’m just going to get this right out of the way so we can discuss real, important things here: Shirley Temple was a total babe in Fort Apache.
I said it! Can’t take it back. I don’t want to take it back.
Shirley Temple is so closely associated with her squeaky voiced, head full of ringlets, tap dancing whiz-kid image (and the delicious soft drink concoction) that I honestly assumed her studio handlers shipped her off to Area 51 the day she hit puberty, never to sully her ever so precocious image with things like, gulp, brassieres or, worse yet, on-screen romance and mature, tweenage subject matter.
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| Mmm…Shirley Temple… |
But we aren’t hear to talk coulda, woulda shoulda about one of America’s first and most iconic on-screen cutie pies and the blessing-slash-curse of being a child actor.
Fort Apache is part one of the Ford/Wayne Cavalry Trilogy—named such for theme as opposed to any sense of continuity—and switches gears from the sheriffs and bandits Western of Stagecoach to the U.S. Calvalry vs. Indians rivalry.
As such it looks less at the gray area that both lawmen and outlaws occupy and more at the realities of American presence on the frontier as opposed to the idea of the frontier on paper.
Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) gets stuck commanding the remote Fort Apache. As a former general, a West Point grad and an all-around stick in the mud, he sees the appointment as being beneath him. It is in Thursday that we get a lot of the film’s less action packed conflict. He’s by the book to the point of being out of touch with the men in his command. He lacks any practical experience with the Natives and the land. On top of all that, he’s a condescending douche who won’t let Lieutenant O’Rourke (John Agar) put the moves on his hot daughter Philadephia (hot Shirley Temple).
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| Mmm…Shirley Temple… |
Within the guarded walls of Fort Apache wages the constant class warfare between Thursday and pretty much everybody else.
Thursday represents the East Coast upper class that only exists on the frontier when someone brings it with them. Like all outposts on the frontier, Fort Apache is its own self-contained community, a place so isolated that its residents have had to adapt to it, as opposed to reshaping the West in their image. As soldiers, they stick to society’s laws, but society’s rigid separation between the slobs and the snobs was something they left behind years ago.
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| The slobs vs. snobs debate came to a definitive conclusion a few decades later |
O’Rourke, a recent West Point graduate and a commissioned officer, sees no distinction between himself, his father, and his father’s friends outside of their responsibilities to the cavalry. Thursday, on the other hand, won’t even accept an invitation to dine with a non-commissioned man and his family.
While O’Rourke shows us that a man is not defined by his education and rank, John Wayne as Captain Kirby York shows us that a man is not defined by his race, either. York is, by all accounts, the rightful commander-to-be of Fort Apache. Soldiers and civilians alike all adore the guy but even better is that he has the respect of the renegade Apache leader Coshise, a man who has taken his people off of their reservation illegally out of protest to their treatment.
Ever the true-blue American, John Wayne is a man who stands for what’s right, even, in the case of his Captain York, when it’s in direct opposition to his superiors. York understands the importance of treating the natives with respect, especially since he’s stuck dealing with a corrupt government creep selling moonshine and weapons illegally on the Apache reservation. Thursday might agree with York that the government slime ball is a repulsive human being, but he sticks to his guns in defending him as an agent of the U.S. government.
Everything comes to a head when York is asked to talking Cochise into negotiations.
All along, Thursday has been bucking for a promotion off the frontier and uses York’s relationship with the Apaches as a way of setting up a double cross. In the end, Thursday leads his men to a massacre.
York survives because Cochise knows better of him, that it was a situation out of his hands and a fight he had rightfully protested. Thursday died, but at least, for the first time, he seemed to care enough about his men, even if that just meant him wanting to die by their side.
In the end, York looks back from several years down the road on the legacy of Colonel Thursday. When asked about Thursday’s heroic yet failed charge against the Apaches, York gives a clearly conflicted response. He knew the real man, but understands the power of legacy. It’s a powerful moment, and if you really want to read into it, a moment that says a lot about Western fiction.
History shows what really happened, but there is something about the romantic, mythical West that we are drawn to regardless. At least we meet a Captain York every once in a while to remind us that things aren’t always so black and white, even if the world he lives in is.
