“Rio Grande” pits aging serviceman Kirby Yorke (John Wayne) against his 15-year-old son. Freshly failed from West Point (the American Saint-Cyr), the latter enlisted as a simple private in the paternal garrison, weakened by the Indian attacks. The affair thickens when Yorke’s wife joins the fort in the hope of snatching the boy from his destiny… Irish muse of the filmmaker (five films together) and interpreter of Lady Yorke, Maureen O’Hara later told the “New York Times” that the third part of John Ford’s triptych dedicated to the American cavalry (after “the Massacre of Fort Apache” and “the Heroic Charge”) was initially only an order requested by the producer Herbert J. Yates. Which, unconvinced of the commercial potential of “The Quiet Man”, Ford’s old personal project, agreed to finance it on the condition that the one-eyed master first shoot a western, all-risk insurance for the box office at the time.
Intimate issues and great history
The same artistic team will link the two films, just to amortize the costs. The operation is virtuous: it releases impressive profits, and generates two major successes of cinema. “Rio Grande” has nothing to do with an appendage that would artificially attach itself to Ford’s work. In a concern for subtle continuity with “the Massacre of Fort Apache”, John Wayne resumes his role as a brave but impotent second since rising in rank: previously captain (and single), here he is lieutenant-colonel, cased and father of a family.
As often with Ford, the personal issues of the characters are here coupled with the march of great History, the founding of a nation through war, the vagaries of which sculpt the life of a family as much as they draw its borders along the Rio Grande, the mythical river that separates Mexico from the United States, crossed by the Yankees (illegally) and the Redskins (tactically). As always, everything ends with an epic battle, transcended by these long tracking shots of rides in the desert, where the camera, at the height of the riders, literally devours space.
Tuesday January 3 at 9:20 p.m. on C8. John Ford’s American Western (1950). With John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Victor McLaglen. 1h45.
