As Kathryn Kalinak observes in her essay, “How the West Was Sung: Music in the
Westerns of John Ford": “With Sergeant Rutledge, Ford put race on the front burner, and no
one who saw the film could doubt his intentions” (181). Some critics have remarked that
Sergeant Rutledge is a confusing movie, because it is in some ways a suspense movie, a
courtroom drama, and that these are not John Ford's strong suit. However, what Ford renders
in Sergeant Rutledge is an expanded vision of how the West was won, and the creation of a
“legendary” figure, “Captain Buffalo.” The film, then, is not about “realism,” but about myth
making, and it does this by addressing and perhaps even attacking some myths, all the while it
seeks to create new ones. The central myth of the film surrounds the creation of a figure
“Captain Buffalo,” personified by Woody Strode, who is strikingly perfect for this role. During
this time, there were more polished black film stars; Sidney Poitier and James Edwards come
to mind, but neither of them would have been as convincing a figure to personify what Ford is
ultimately getting at in this film, which is a tribute to “the 9th Calvary Regiment, the great Negro
unit that had fought some of the hardest fights of the Indian Wars” (Ford 284). Ford thus
needed a striking, physically imposing figure, someone who could fill the role of “Captain
Buffalo,” in such a manner, as to add to the legacy of the Buffalo Soldiers and thus pay
homage. Following Sergeant Rutledge, a number of films were made which focus upon the
Buffalo Soldiers, but this was the first. Other television and movie views of the Buffalo Soldiers
include the following: a 1968 episode of the TV western, High Chaparral', the 1993 film, Posse,
which actually features Woody Strode in the role of Storyteller; and the 1997 TNT original film,
Buffalo Soldiers, which stars Danny Glover. Within Sergeant Rutledge, Ford is more than
simply responding to the tenor of the times, indeed, he is ac tually leading the way for
Hollywood renderings of the saga of the Buffalo Soldiers, without which the story of the West is
incomplete. As Kalinak notes, “Essentially a courtroom drama, Sergeant Rutledge nonetheless
engages critically with generic expectations of the western, inserting African American soldiers
on the frontier into dominant cultural myths about the West and its settling. The Indian wars in
the latter half of the nineteenth century were fought by ten cavalry units stationed on the Great
Plains, two of which, the Ninth and the Tenth, were made up of segregated African American
units commanded by white officers. Thus, roughly 20 percent of post-Civil War U.S. cavalry
troops were black. This is not a small proportion” (188).
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