The third entry in John Ford’s “cavalry trilogy” (following his Fort Apache and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), the 1950 Rio Grande stars John Wayne (as do the other two films), Maureen O’Hara, and several of Ford’s regulars in an unusual family drama. Wayne plays L.t. Col. Kirby Yorke, posted on the Texas frontier with the U.S. 2nd Cavalry Regiment in the summer of 1879.
Away from home since the Civil War, Yorke has seen neither his wife, Kathleen (O’Hara), nor his son, Jeff (Claude Jarman Jr.), in 15 years. There are some good reasons: during the war, Yorke was forced to burn down Kathleen’s plantation home.
Jeff, who has been enrolled at West Point, has flunked out and enrolled as a private in the Army. Now Jeff has come under his father’s command at the Texas fort and has made it clear he wants no favors, intent on proving himself. Meanwhile, Kathleen has arrived at the fort to “buy” Jeff out of his enlistment (an effort the young man rejects) while keeping her distance from Yorke.
Essentially what’s going on here is that reverberations from the war have kept this family apart and threaten to destroy it forever. Ford, who brought the look and feel of chivalry to film, masterfully takes these characters down the long, slow walk back from the brink. There’s great support work in the cast from Ben Johnson, Harry Carey Jr., Chill Wills, and J. Carrol Nash.
More visually spare than the previous cavalry movies, the film is also the most difficult now to watch for its oddly paradoxical treatment of Native Americans. On the one hand, Ford—typically interested in the look and feel of indigenous peoples—gives us glimpses of genuine Native rituals and ceremonies. On the other, Yorke is ordered to slaughter an entire band of Apache warriors during an incursion into Mexico. It becomes impossible to reconcile these things. But as long as the story’s focus is on the trials of the Yorke clan, the film is quite good. Lightly recommended.