But there’s no doubt that the haze in the schoolhouse is there because it’s meant to help us sympathize with Wright, to see a man in the kind of spotlight from heaven typically saved for saints and fear for him the way we fear for the ends of those good people. Ford can be corny, and Cheyenne Autumn leans so fully into the corniness in the middle that it risks ruining the movie. His work looks absolutely spectacular-I mean, light coming in that way is almost cheating-but how spectacular it is works in service of genuine feeling rather than service of spectacle for its own sake. This is not literally Ford at his best, but it’s a telling example of why he might be the greatest filmmaker this country has ever produced. It’s why the haze is so meaningful: in a room where the dust and dirt rises into the air with every footstep, the light would necessarily come into the room so heavily that it seems tangible. Ford puts us in that one-room schoolhouse with Wright, and because we’re there with him, we’re there with him. Has the good he and his niece were able to do for the Cheyenne in the face of the government’s apathy and the army’s distrust worth the chance that Deborah might die while traveling with the Cheyenne? Is it wrong to question one’s own devotion to God while facing a personal tragedy? Sitting there, in this janky little schoolhouse where every beam and plank is a testament to the not-quite craftsmen who rigged it together, what were meant to believe in is a sense of place. Ford does not take pleasure in breaking Quakers the way that Wyler or Zinnemann do-at no point will Deborah pick up a gun to fight the soldiers or anything like that-and so we’re allowed to guess that Wright’s contemplation is the kind of push-pull one finds in people of genuine faith. The sand meets the light, and Wright sits in a hazy glow, wondering any number of things. The boards in the walls do not entirely meet one another, and so little cracks of sunshine peek through the walls where they oughtn’t. The sandy floor is only an extension of the sand outside. It’s a building which looks to have been made quickly, cheaply, and by amateurs. Wright walks further into the schoolhouse and sits down at one of the benches. When the Cheyenne leave, Deborah goes with them, refusing a proposal of marriage from the movie’s protagonist, Captain Archer (Widmark) and leaving Wright with a threadbare farewell indeed. Wright (Walter Baldwin), a Quaker ministering to the Cheyenne’s needs on the reservation as best he can, works with his niece, Deborah (Baker). There’s a shot in Cheyenne Autumn that my little heart took note of, either because I am very sensitive to bravado or because I am very partisan. Starring Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, Gilbert Roland
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