states, “Hollywood has put what is left of the Black presence on the screen in the protective
custody, so to speak, of a White lead or co-star, and therefore in conformity with dominant,
White sensibilities and expectations of what Blacks should be like” (239). In the film, Braxton
Rutledge is in the protective custody of Tom Cantrell, played by Jeffrey Hunter, who as
counsel for the defense, must convince an all-white court that a black man, a former slave, is
not guilty of raping and killing a white young man and then also killing a white man, her father.
The opening scenes of the film show a lynch mob, ready to spill black blood. The mob is ready
to spill black blood— to lynch Rutledge— precisely because of the prevalent racial stereotypes.
The mob has been blinded by the blackness of Rutledge, so much so that early on, they
cannot “see” or fathom anyone other than the heroic Rutledge as the suspect. As Regester
notes, “Strode is shown in the film as being desirable as his body becomes the object of the
camera’s gaze, but at the same time he is the embodiment of danger because he is fleeing
from a murder accusation” (279). The nature of the “danger” is that of the black man as wouldbe rapist (of white womanhood), as symbol of defiance and athletic and sexual prowess, and
an unknown and unbridled virility. Clearly, this film seems to suggest that the black male is to
be feared; is not to be trusted, all the while he is to be admired for his physical presence.
Perhaps this is what Regester and others mean by “problematized image” (270). One could
clearly view the film as saying that not only is this lone black man, Braxton Rutledge on trial,
but so too, is the entire race. This is a particularly intriguing notion, because, as Kalinak notes:
“The crusading journalist, editor and publisher Oswald Garrison Villard, who in 1903 wrote one
of the first chronicles of the buffalo soldiers, described African Americans in the military as ’on
trial,’ producing a soldier 'who must worry incessantly about his relations to his white
comrades’” (189). Braxton Rutledge is the personification of blackne ss on trial, and the nature
of “blackness” as shown in the film is that it is surrounded, or bounded, by fear. Not only is
there fear of Rutledge’s blackness, but Rutledge has been shown to have a fear of whiteness,
particularly in terms of his dealings with white women. In one particular scene, Braxton
Rutledge is alone in a deserted railway station, and is attempting to protect a lone white
woman, Mary Beecher, played by Constance Towers, from marauding Apache. Beecher also
serves as the love interest of Lt. Cantrell. Within this scene, Ford addresses a number of
stereotypes, including the stereotype or myth is of the big black male as rapist, an image
straight of out of Griffith’s The Birth o f a Nation. Ford’s film counters this image with a powerful
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