Seeing Stewart play against type as an out-and-out impetuous bastard is truly the film’s greatest asset. McCabe on the other hand seems to be the only man moved by experience, falling in love with the rescued girl, abandoning his lawful post and riding off into the sunset atop a carriage with his lover in tow. Blinded by grief, a mother and father accepts the man as their long missing son, but within Ford’s pessimistic frontier, compassion is awarded nothing but fear and violence, resulting in the mother’s blatant murder and the man’s subsequent hanging. Desperate to come out ahead on the expedition, the Marshal trades for the lives of a wild young man and a woman whom he can’t shake an attraction from. They scarcely resemble the people they once were, now more skittish and savage than the Comanche that hold them captive. The pair set off into the contested wilderness after interviewing the mourning locals, McCabe with a financial agenda in mind rather than genuine sympathy for those allegedly abducted by the natives, while Gary remains on guard to McCabe’s known deceptions, ready to oust the man from power at a moment’s notice.īullheaded in his ambitions but clear-minded in his assumptions, McCabe accurately predicts that most of those taken by the natives that they do find still alive are but a shell of their former beings. Jim Gary, played by a strikingly wholesome Richard Widmark. Sent to chaperon McCabe on his official assignment is First Lt. Paid pennies on the dollar for his official duties as local lawman, he rides high on a rising tide of extortion of the local businesses, that is, until he’s summoned by the military to infiltrate the local Comanche community in search of missing women and children taken years before. Though certainly not as piercing as some of his work with his male muse John Wayne, the film remains a solid entry into the nihilistic anti-heroic take on the western.Īs his most selfishly styled self, Stewart plays Marshal Guthrie McCabe, a public figure perfectly tailored for the slimy dealings of gun-toting frontier politics. Nugent ( The Searchers, The Quiet Man, Mister Roberts) to make something of the screenplay. The picture was based on Will Cook’s novel “Comanche Captives”, material Ford apparently thought was less than intriguing western revisionism, even after bringing on his frequent collaborator Frank S. Ford took on the project strictly for cash shortly after the death of his friend and colleague Ward Bond passed away, sending the film into much darker territory than the director had ever or would ever normally work within. Born of the famously turbulent, yet ultimately fruitful collaboration between John Ford and James Stewart, Two Rode Together stands as compromised material.
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