It is hard to imagine a better, more stirring and heartfelt tribute to the military spirit than John Ford's sublime, lovingly rendered She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. It is a love letter to the uniformed military man, and especially to the frontier men of the U.
Cavalry, from a director who has always been enthralled by the army life. Ford loves the routine and ceremony of the army, he loves the salutes and formal language, he loves the rigidity of the formations and the close, affectionate bonds that form between the men.
Most of all, though, he loves the look of things: the bright blues and golds of the uniforms, which never seem to fade no matter how dirty and dusty they get; the red and white standard flag held high above the ranks; the glint of the sun off the polished silver of a sword or a bugle.
There's real poetry in Ford's representation of these men, an eye for the beauty of the military life that's almost entirely divorced from the facts of military combat and bloodshed. This is an idealized vision of the military, in which nearly nobody suffers so much as a wound; only one cavalryman actually dies on screen in the entire film, and it's a frequent occurrence for the troops to emerge from a fierce, violent battle only to announce, "no casualties.
The most lovingly photographed sequences β and there are many, in a film where virtually every other frame is awe-inspiring β are simple shots of the cavalry riders winding through a valley beneath a towering rock, or scenes where the commanding officers inspect a line of troops in the morning. When the plot turns to the inevitable skirmishes with Indians, they seem almost perfunctory in comparison, though still exciting and dramatic.
