Cinema: Indian Exodus

Cheyenne Autumn has everything it takes to make a great western epic, except greatness. In her book based on a bleak episode of American history, Mari Sandoz re-created the ordeal of 286 Cheyenne Indians, stung by the indignities of exile on a reservation, who in 1878 fought and starved and struggled through a 1,500-mile journey from Oklahoma’s Indian Territory to their homeland in eastern Montana. En route, with U.S. Army units ever at their heels, they were bedeviled by bad weather, bitter dissension, and the white man’s cruelty. In this wayward, 3-hr. movie version, Director John Ford dehydrates history and tosses in some sappy ideas of his own. The worst of them asserts that the Indians were accompanied by a conscientious Quaker lass (Carroll Baker) obviously all done up to join a grand ole opry. “That’s pretty stylish for a Quaker, friend Deborah,” remarks Army Officer Richard Widmark, eying her finery.

Indeed it is. And Director Ford adds stars, subplots and other furbelows that crucially impede the action. Among them is a hilarious cameo performance by James Stewart, who right around intermission time pops up in Dodge City for an irrelevant but clearly intentional spoof of Wyatt Earp. He guzzles, gambles, wisecracks, finally rides his rig out to drive off the Injuns, cheered on by a wagonload of painted ladies.

Autumn’s strongest scenes turn on the senseless murder of a Cheyenne by transient cowpokes, and the tribe’s ritual slaying of a brave (Sal Mineo) who has taken another man’s wife. Here and in the stoic, timeless beauty of Squaw Dolores Del Rio are intimations of the tragedy that might have been. Most of the time, though, Ford scatters his beleaguered redskins listlessly across a 70-mm. Super Panavision landscape, showing twice the width but little of the scope that distinguished such Ford classics as Stagecoach. Perhaps he feels alien to Indians who don’t come over the hill in war paint. The make-believe Cheyennes appear somewhat out of it themselves. When they are not struggling with the white man’s words, they address one another in Navajo.