Colonel Bellah and Admiral Ford

The forgotten man in commentary on John Ford in the 1960s was James Warner Bellah. A new generation of critics, determined to establish the respectability of film as an art form, would outline the themes and visual motifs of a particular Ford film, then treat the work as almost entirely the creation of the director. He was an auteur—an author—an artist whose films reflected the unfolding of a personal vision. The fact that Fort Apache was based on a Saturday Evening Post story by James Warner Bellah may have been mentioned occasionally but that was it.

Partly this was tactics. It was the serious study of film that concerned most of us. If Ford and directors like him were accepted as artists, the much-despised western and other genres had to be taken seriously too. We didn’t ever argue, as discourse theorists do now, that a television soap opera was equivalent to a Shakespearean play—or even a John Ford film. All we were saying was that when the same standards were applied to cinema as critics employed to evaluate so-called high art, you could demonstrate that many mainstream films had the same qualities found in acknowledged masterpieces of drama, poetry and even music.

Consequently writers like James Warner Bellah were overlooked—at least at first. Bellah’s Saturday Evening Post short stories and serials that were the basis for Ford’s famous Cavalry Trilogy were virtually unobtainable. It was only last year that I was able to track down a 1950 Lion Book paperback collection of the stories entitled Massacre. This was a real pulp. It sold for twenty-five cents, with “Hellbent for death” and “60000 pulsating words ripped from the blood-soaked pages of frontier history” emblazoned on the cover. (Now even an extensively repaired copy costs US$50.)

Bellah’s prose may be at times overheated, but it was the origin of the look and atmosphere of the Cavalry Trilogy. Passages like this might have gone straight into any one of the Ford movies:

Flintridge Cohill trudged along, leading, alkali white to mid thigh. His spurs, dust muffled, sounded like silver dollars clinking deep in the pocket of a greatcoat. He could feel the resentment of the men—resentment at the night march. It was a hard and a sullen thing; and it was there in an occasional angry sneeze, in the dust coughing that became general after a while in spite of long intervals, in a deep and throaty curse rolled into the night on dry saliva.

 Not all of Bellah’s descriptions could be easily visualised. This one from the same story describes the senses and emotions that can only be suggested in a film:

Knees were thick now and sanded with fatigue, and there was the clamminess of dank sweat in their shirts that their bodies no longer warmed. Mist tatters were above the prairie, girth high, and in the hollows chilled them with the hand of death.

But what seem to have appealed to Ford most about Bellah’s writing were the taut plot lines and the evocation of the harsh life of duty in the nineteenth-century US Cavalry. Ford had always liked service pictures, and when in 1947 he needed to establish his independence from the major studios the series of Fort Starke stories, as they came to be known, were ideal. As he wrote to Bellah, he had the perfect locations in Monument Valley with its extraordinary rock formations and outcrops, the best features of which were all within five miles of each other. Ford also had his own Indian tribe—Navajos who lived in the area and had been cast as the Apaches for the final chase in Stagecoach (1939) when Ford first came to Monument Valley.

Ford and Bellah understood the services. They had distinguished war records. Ford had commanded a navy photographic unit in the Pacific and Europe, retiring as a rear admiral. Bellah served in the Flying Corps in the Great War and in the Second World War was attached to the Chindits in Burma and later served at Mountbatten’s headquarters, and had been honourably discharged as a colonel. They were, however, very different men. According to his son, James Warner Bellah was a snob, a racist and a bigot. John Ford—the director of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green was My Valley—was nothing of the sort.

This was clear from the outset. The first story of Bellah’s that Ford decided to film was “Massacre” published in the February 1947 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, illustrated, as were all of Bellah’s stories, with a painting by Harold von Schmidt. A detail of the painting is reproduced on the cover of the paperback. It depicts a desperate last stand by cavalry against Indians.

“Massacre”, the short story, is told through the eyes of an experienced Indian fighter, Lieutenant Flint Cohill. Newly appointed Major Thursday rides into Fort Starke and turns out two companies of the regiment to make a show of strength to impress Stone Buffalo, who has been “out of hand for months”. Against the advice of more experienced officers he leads his men into a trap and, confronted by the results of his folly, commits suicide. Even though there are suggestions of Custer at Little Big Horn in the painting and Ford’s film, the incident depicted in the short story, with its carefully laid Indian trap, is closer to the Fetterman massacre in Wyoming in 1866. Significantly, although the events adapted from the historical record show the Indians as formidable and cunning adversaries, Bellah can’t bring himself to portray them that way:

Major Thursday saw their impassive Judaic faces, their dignity, their reserve. He felt the quiet impact of their silence, but, being new to the game he had no way of knowing they drew all of it on as they drew on their trades goods blankets—to cover a childish curiosity and the excitability of terriers.

 Bellah is even contemptuous of the Indians’ body odour:

 The smell of an Indian is resinous and salty and rancid. It is the wood smoke of his tepee and the fetidity of his breath that comes from eating body-hot animal entrails. It is animal grease of his hair and old leather and fur, tanned with bird lime and handed down unclean from ancestral bodies long since gathered to the Happy Lands.

 Ford had his in-house screenwriter Frank Nugent exclude this kind of racism from Fort Apache (1948). From the outset the Indians are formidable:

Colonel Thursday: I suggest the Apache has deteriorated since then, judging by the specimens I saw when we were coming in.

Captain Yorke: Well, if you saw them, sir, they weren’t Apache.

In the film Colonel Thursday (Henry Fonda) the newly appointed commander, arrives at Fort Apache accompanied by his daughter Philadelphia (Shirley Temple). As in the original story Thursday was a general in the Civil War and sees this new appointment as demeaning, but—“I’ll find something”.

From incidents in Bellah’s other stories Nugent builds up a complex set of relationships at the fort. There is the sergeant-major and Medal of Honor winner Michael O’Rourke (Ward Bond), whose son Michael Shannon O’Rourke (John Agar) has been able because of his father’s medal to go to West Point on a Presidential Proclamation. Naturally he falls in love with the colonel’s daughter. Interwoven with this is the deftly sketched back story of Captain Collingwood (George O’Brien) whose career was ruined in the Civil War by Thursday when he supposedly “arrived late” for an engagement. Almost certainly Ford got Nugent to write in a group of comical non-commissioned officers sergeants Festus Mulcahy (Victor McLaglen), Beaufort (Pedro Armendariz) and Quincannon (Dick Foran). They are there to drill recruits, get drunk, get busted and thrown in the guard house only to be given their stripes back and “ride to glory”.

Ford portrays the rituals of cavalry life with great affection: the elaborate rides out from the fort, the lines of horsemen against the stunning backgrounds of Monument Valley, and, at the non-commissioned officers’ dance, yet another of the director’s grand marches. All of which intensifies the tragedy of Thursday’s pride and ambition. Even though the colonel’s fall arouses pity if not terror, in an overt rebuke to Bellah’s racism Ford makes the Apache morally superior.

In the film the Flint Cohill character from the short story becomes Captain Kirby Yorke, played by John Wayne. He is sent to persuade Cochise (Miguel Inclan), the chief of the Apaches, to bring his people back to the reservation. Cochise agrees to a parlay; but determined to provoke a clash Thursday proposes to turn out the whole regiment:

Captain Yorke: If you send out the regiment, Cochise will think I tricked him.

Colonel Thursday: Exactly. We have tricked him into returning to American soil and I intend to see he stays there.

Captain Yorke: Colonel Thursday, I gave my word to Cochise. No man is going to make a liar out of me, sir.

Colonel Thursday: Your word to a breech-clouted savage? An illiterate, uncivilised murderer and treaty breaker? There is no question of honor, sir, between an American officer and Cochise.

 With the Indians arriving on his flank Thursday decides to parlay. When Cochise demands the government dismiss the corrupt Indian agent, the colonel orders the Apaches back to the reservation. Thursday ignores Yorke’s advice that the Apaches are in ambush positions among the rocks and charges into the Indian trap, destroying the regiment. Utterly defeated, he joins a remnant of the regiment for their last stand. Cochise, however, spares Yorke and the remaining soldiers with the baggage train.

The following sequence has puzzled Ford scholars ever since. Yorke, now the colonel of the regiment, lies to reporters about Thursday’s heroism. “No man died more gallantly,” he tells them even though we have seen for ourselves Thursday’s recklessness and stupidity. The final passage of the original story explains it best:

there are ways of living that are finer than the men who try to live them and a regiment has honor that no man can usurp as his personal property. Glory is a jade of the streets who can be bought for a price by any man who wants her, but his pockets were empty so Cohill lent him the two dollars for posterity.

And so Cohill covers up the suicide. In the film Yorke is also lending Thursday his two dollars worth of glory and creates a legend of courage for the sake of the regiment and the good of the service. In Bellah’s own words from his script for Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Yorke “prints the legend”.

Captain Nathan Brittles, the hero of James Warner Bellah’s “War Party” which is the basis for John Ford’s She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), features in an earlier Fort Starke story, “Command”:

Nathan Brittles was a grey man no sun could redden for long. His eyes were agate grey and his hair was dust grey and there was a greyness within him that was his own manner of living, which he discussed with no man and no man questioned. Narrow hipped and straight backed. Hard and slender in the leg. Taut, so that when he moved it was almost as if he would twang.

This is very different from the genial, kindly, sometimes irascible figure John Wayne portrays in the Ford film who snaps at anyone who says sorry, “Don’t apologize, it’s a sign of weakness.”

In Bellah’s original this is far more serious. When Lieutenant Cohill, through whose eyes the story is told, explains to his superior how desperately sorry he is for misunderstanding his motives and intentions, Brittles replies:

Mr Cohill, never apologize. It’s a mark of weakness. There is a captain out here who used it to escape a Benzine Board [to examine officer fitness]. He escaped it but he has been a little bit ashamed ever since. He will die a captain in spite of his apology. The man who did for him could have worked with him and made him a soldier, if his humanity had been large enough. Mr Cohill, I’m going to make a soldier of you if you don’t break. You may present my respects to General Cohill when you next write your father.

“Command” is a taut story of a deadly game of wits between cavalry patrols and marauding bands of Indians. Bellah was to come back to these characters and situations under different names in a script for Thunder of Drums (1960). The more austere Brittles character is played splendidly by Richard Boone, but the director, Joseph Newman, is no John Ford.

In She Wore a Yellow Ribbon Ford uses Bellah’s plot line in “War Party” which has Brittles thwarting an Indian attack in the last hours of the day of his retirement. Frank Nugent was again enlisted to expand the narrative, with parts for George O’Brien as Brittles’s commanding officer, Major Allshard, and Mildred Natwick as his wife, “Old Iron Pants”. These characters are lightly sketched in the stories but Nugent gives them greater dimension. A comical Irish sergeant was written in for Victor McLaglen. It’s the same part he played in Fort Apache, only this time he is Top Sergeant Quincannon. John Agar and Harry Carey Jr finally get to play Flint Cohill and Ross Pennell from the short stories. They compete for the hand of Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru). This is not in the original but expands on some incidents in another of the short stories. Reportedly Ford felt he needed to invest the dark material inherited from Bellah with greater humanity so he enlisted the playwright Laurence Stallings, best known as the co-writer of the play What Price Glory. Stallings wrote the famous scenes of Brittles “reporting” at the grave of his dead wife and children.

The film is dominated by a sense of loss and danger. It is not just tribes of Indians threatening Fort Starke, as in the original story. They are emboldened by having wiped out the 7th Cavalry at Little Big Horn. In a superbly shot scene Brittles and Allshard read over the casualty lists from Little Big Horn. Through the window is a blood-red sunset, while the men are in shadow, the white smoke from Brittles’s pipe curling upwards. It was all created in the studio by cinematographer Winton Hoch. (Ford admired the effect so much he asked Hoch to employ the same lighting in The Searchers for the scene in the homestead before the Comanche attack.)

Ford and his writers make Brittles’s triumph far more humane than does Bellah. In “War Party” the patrol shoots the Indians’ ponies:

 The bones of the stampeded ponies are still there along Yellow Creek, whitened and bleached—nine hundred Comanche and Kiowa and Arapahoe ponies. So that Broken Wrist and his dismounted braves walked with squaws in the dust on foot with dogs and children at their ragged heels.

 It is fine descriptive writing and could have been easily transposed into film. I suspect Ford could not have brought himself to ask his Navajo friends to play such a sequence, nor would he have relished an Indian defeat the way Bellah does. In the film Brittles is much more compassionate. He first tries to make peace by going to the Indian camp to meet with his old friend Chief Pony That Walks, played superbly by Chief John Big Tree. The encounter is full of humour and mutual respect. Pony That Walks has given up on his tribe, who only want to go on the warpath. “Nathan, let’s get drunk and shoot buffalo.” Brittles politely declines and orders his old troop to stampede the tribe’s horses. When they are certain they can’t be recaptured he orders his men to follow the Indians back to the reservation, but at a distance, as “walking hurts their pride”. Still essentially the same story but more civilised.

Rio Grande (1950) is famously the film Ford made so he could shoot The Quiet Man. Ironically, Rio Grande is probably the better movie. It was based on Bellah’s “Mission with No Record”, another of his tautly written narratives, this time of a raid over the Mexican border against tribes of hostile Indians. As before, Ford got his writer James Kevin McGuinness to flesh out the narrative by writing parts for his stock company. Harry Carey Jr plays new recruit Trooper Daniel “Sandy” Boone. Ben Johnson is Tyree again, having played the part of Sergeant Tyree in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon. In the earlier film he is a former southern officer who when asked for advice repeatedly says, “That’s not my department,” then gives an accurate analysis. This time his Tyree is a wanted man hiding out in the cavalry. And of course Victor McLaglen is Sergeant Major Quincannon.

Ford and McGuinness transform the brutal encounter between Colonel Massarene and the son who fails West Point and joins the cavalry as a private into a reconciliation between father and son and a gentle romance between John Wayne’s very different Kirby Yorke and his estranged wife Kathleen (Maureen O’Hara). They had been parted by events in the Civil War, and when she comes to Fort Starke to buy out her son (Claude Jarman Jr), husband and wife are reconciled. In Rio Grande the Indians are the villains but Ford drew the line at portraying Colonel Yorke’s raid as anything like this:

Gentlemen, I’m burning out everything in my path—everything Kickapoo, Lipan and Apache and anything else that darkness fails to distinguish. I’m going through like scourge—in column at the gallop, so that the next five hours will be remembered for twenty years to come.

Yorke is rescuing children kidnapped by the Apaches and defending his country from “murdering savages”. Ford and Bellah are sanitising the historical raid that kidnapped Indian families to force them back onto the reservation. But this is, after all, an idealised portrait dramatising the reconciliation of North and South.

Clearly John Ford owed a great deal to James Warner Bellah. But there is nothing in Ford’s life or work that compares with the brutality and racism in some of Bellah’s writing. In the 1950s, on location in the South for The Horse Soldiers, Ford insisted on paying proper union rates to his black extras. He did the same with the Navajos in Monument Valley. As we have seen, Ford systematically removed the excesses he found in the original stories.

Certainly Bellah was a fine story-teller but his work was enriched by Ford and his screenwriters’ improvements. I have found nothing in this research that diminishes John Ford’s stature as a man or an artist; if anything it has been enhanced. As for James Warner Bellah, his contributions to some of the greatest films of the last century deserve to be acknowledged.