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Film Fort Apache (1948)

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Philadelphia Thursday. That's Shirley Temple's tremendous name in John Ford's treatise on masculinity on the Western frontier, Fort Apache. Temple's romance with a lieutenant is just a sentimental subplot in the film, though, which generally focuses on her Custer-esque father (Henry Fonda), a disgraced officer dispatched to an austere stronghold. John Wayne plays the courageous counterweight to Fonda's conceited commander, who directs the soldiers toward his own glory-seeking ends. With Monument Valley's serrated beauty as its arresting backdrop, this first installment in Ford's Cavalry Trilogy finds the all-American auteur reining in the comic relief and sprawling action in order to dissect heroism and honor.

– Jason Jude Chan

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