If you were to approach an average cinephile and ask them about that one John Ford movie where two cowboys go searching for children kidnapped by Native Americans, they would probably think of The Searchers (1956). But as it turns out, Ford made another film with this central plot device in 1961 entitled Two Rode Together. And though they were made by the same director and were only released about 5 years apart, the two films are almost completely different. Whereas The Searchers plays like a more traditional Western that just happens to sport incredibly cynical and tragic undertones, Two Rode Together is perhaps the most overtly nihilistic film Ford ever made. When Marshal Guthrie McCabe (James Stewart) is shanghaied by the US Military into negotiating the release of several kidnapped white settlers from a local group of Comanche Indians, he leaves for their camp along with his old friend Lieutenant Jim Gary (Richard Widmark). What they find in the Comanche camp is that the white settlers, many of which have been living with the Indians for almost a decade, have acclimated to their new lifestyle and are unwilling to return. However, McCabe and Gary force their return into a world which receives them with hostility, racial hatred, and contempt. One young boy who had been with the Comanche since he was a toddler kills his "mother" when she tries to cut his hair and is swiftly lynched (an especially shocking turn of events considering the fact that several of Ford's previous films had revolved around the prevention of a lynching). A young Mexican woman who had been forced to marry a Comanche man is treated with revulsion by the settlers because she didn't have the decency to kill herself when she was first captured. And then there is McCabe: a cynical, mean-spirited drunk who is repeatedly taken advantage of and abused by members of the US military and the settlers he was supposed to be helping. Not even several injections of warm-hearted Fordian humor can mask the film's undercurrent of resigned misanthropy.
8/10
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