Fort Apache (1948)
Directed by John Ford
Owen Thursday sees his new posting to the desolate Fort Apache as a chance to claim the military honour which he believes is rightfully his. Arrogant, obsessed with military form and ultimately self-destructive, he attempts to destroy the Apache chief Cochise after luring him across the border from Mexico, against the advice of his subordinates.
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What critics compared Fort Apache to
These men are soldiers - bomb disposal experts, in fact - but they could be cops or fireman (or the cavalrymen in John Ford's classic "Fort Apache").
From John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948), which honed in on the way white people on the frontier dealt with the horrors of colonialism, to more recent ‘white saviour’ films including Dances with Wolves (Kevin Costner, 1990) which take up specific struggles to exemplify white heroism, this kind of racism has become customary in film.
In fact, you could well draw a line directly from the westerns of Ford to Nomadland — not Ford’s brawling, boastful westerns like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Fort Apache , but his reflective, uncertain works like The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance .
Its Fort Apache scenario of an undermanned police station besieged by an army of faceless invaders remains sharp and compelling, and in the hands of French director Jean-François Richet leaps full-bore into the 21st century.
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Everything else might as well be "Fort Apache."
With a little bit of Zulu here and a smidgeon of Fort Apache there, Lone Survivor is as gripping and lucid as any other recent exercise in dubious, gung-ho imperialism.