She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

A cavalry captain (John Wayne) nearing retirement, leads a final patrol to stop a pending Indian attack.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a beautifully photographed and solidly built western that marks the second part of director John Ford’s informal “Cavalry Trilogy.”

Perhaps inspired by John Wayne’s performance in Howard Hawks’s Red River one year earlier, Ford has the Duke in age makeup, playing an old Cavalry officer on the verge of retirement.

Wayne’s fun in the role, but lacks the gravitas he would acquire with age and use to great effect in later films like The Searchers and Rio Bravo. That said, Wayne still works because the film as a whole is fairly lighthearted. It’s stagey, but in a familiar, comforting way, like a bedtime story that substitutes soldiers for knights and marauding Arapaho Indians for dragons.

The supporting cast is first-rate, with Victor McLaglen providing a lot of comedy relief, and a young Ben Johnson oozing charm.

The real standout here, however, is the cinematography by Winton Hoch. The crisp colors make the film jump off the screen, and the expertly photographed lightning sequence is one of the best committed to film.

While She Wore a Yellow Ribbon may disappoint viewers looking for a more somber western in the vein of Ford’s earlier Fort Apache, those looking for a solid adventure highlighted by some colorful performances will come away more than satisfied.