Fort Apache

I love John Wayne in Rio Bravo or True Grit.

Then there is that Henry Fonda classic Fort Apache.

I think I've seen that thing 10 times.

Or his classic The Oxbow Incident.

Key Largo, awesome Humphrey Bogart performance in that one.

Uh, Ford Apache, it's a John Ford movie.

Um, and, uh, And it's got my boy Henry Fonda and it's got John Wayne in it.

It's just it's just a cool cavalry kind of Western film.

The dog-faced soldiers, the 50 cents a day professionals riding the outpost of the nation.

From Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stockton.

Men in dirty shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing.

But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.

Yeah.

True Grit or Fort Apache.

Fort Apache is the one with Henry Fonda, who plays the general, the lead general, the John Ford movie.

John Ford made three with Wayne that I always confuse with three.

But this is the one where Henry Fonda plays the sort of peak-headed general.

saw both of them in the paper and they're on at the same time, I'd probably go for Fort

Apache.

Fort Apache or The Shootist?

She also worked on a project distributed by United Artists that was similarly unsuccessful.

During the late 1940s, she did appear in a few films that performed well, such as The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer with Cary Grant and Fort Apache with John Wayne and Henry Fonda.

Her husband at the time, John Agar, also had a role in the latter film.

In 1947, she appeared in That Hagen Girl alongside future president Ronald Reagan.

Mark Armistead, a veteran of the Field Photographic Unit who was with Ford again in Korea, said the famous director was probably more proud of the Admiral's stripe than he was of all his Oscars combined.

From the late 1940s and into the 1960s, John Ford continues to make movies that both critics and the American public love, including Ford Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, Mr. Roberts, and The Searchers.

John Ford dies in 1973.

He is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.

By spring, Temple was back at work.

Fort Apache reunited her with director John Ford, who had directed her 11 years earlier in Wee Willie Winkie, and cast Agar as her young love interest.

The film was another substantial success.

Off screen, however, Temple's marriage was deteriorating.

It is.

The broadcasts we're examining are Stagecoach, Red River, Fort Apache, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

And these aren't just, you know, quaint little radio plays.

They are windows into a completely vanished era of American media.

So we have John Ford watching Red River and having this massive epiphany.

He realizes, "Wait a minute, my guy isn't just a symbol anymore.

He can carry significantly heavier, much more complex thematic weight." And this realization leads directly to their incredible post-war collaborations, specifically the Cavalry Trilogy, starting with our next artifact, Fort Apache.

To really understand Fort Apache and what Wayne is doing with his voice here, we have to pause and provide some crucial, heavily psychoanalyzed biographical context from our sources.

The dog-faced soldiers, the 50-cent-a-day professionals riding the outpost of the nation.

From Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stockton.

Men in dirty shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing.

But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States.