(Note: This one has spoilers, be careful if you want to learn the movie's story on your own)
It says quite a bit about Hollywood's courage that, as late as 1960, a studio would give an actor in a movie's title role fourth billing, simply because he was black. Even though John Ford's Seargeant Rutledge turns on the fate and actions of Woody Strode's Braxton Rutledge, Strode shows up under the title in the "featured player" kind of spot. He's below Jeffrey Hunter (the officer defending him in his court-martial), Constance Towers (the lovely woman traveler with whom Hunter falls in love) and Billie Burke (the flighty and somewhat addled wife of the court-martial's presiding officer).
Whether director Ford could have affected the studio's decision or not, there was no secondary status for Strode and his work in the movie itself. He is its centerpiece and some of the get-the-mainstream-audience touches the story includes ring very hollow in comparison with his.
Rutledge is the top non-comissioned officer in the 9th Cavalry Unit during the 1880s, accused of assaulting and killing a young girl and murdering her father, the base commander. Wounded, he flees the base and saves Mary Beecher (Towers) when a band of Apaches attack the train station where she awaits her father. Resting at the station, he is captured by Lt. Tom Cantrell (Hunter) the next day, to be brought back for trial.
The story is told in flashback form as different witnesses testify about the events the night of the murder and during the ride back to the cavalry base. The prosecuting officer (Carleton Young) deviously tries to inflame racial tension against Rutledge by at first insinuating that he assaulted Beecher, playing on the fears of black male sexuality often used by bigots to justify hatred and prejudice. Rutledge himself, sure that no one will believe his story, refuses to accept help from his friends because he is worried their efforts to help him will only damage them.
But Rutledge's good character, dignity and honor continue to show through as witness after witness relates the events leading up to the trial. Each bit of testimony scrapes away the low-character stereotype the prosecutor wants the court to believe, until the truth comes out and Cantrell finally deduces what actually happened.
Sergeant Rutledge is not one of Ford's best movies -- as mentioned, too much of Hunter and Towers' roles seem to be there to get the idea of a black title character past a 1960s movie audience. Both are good enough, but neither is equipped to bring more to their lackluster plotline than they're given.
On the other hand, Sergeant Rutledge is probably one of the best Ford-directed performances in his long career. A 6'4" former football player, decathlete and WWII Army veteran, Strode brought size, strength and dignity to the screen on his own. Ford brought the directing skill to emphasize and focus on those characteristics. When Cantrell and Rutledge first confront each other at the train station, Ford alternates closeups as Cantrell questions and Rutledge responds. Jeffrey Hunter is shot at eye level as he speaks, Woody Strode from slightly below. The contrasting views give Strode the look of dignified bearing that keeps before us the honor and high character Rutledge possesses.
When we first meet Rutledge, he marches into the courtroom, crisp in a uniform and carriage. Ford's alternating shots between the stoic Rutledge and the grizzled, dirty mob that wants to lynch him on the spot do the latter no favors and tell us plainly who our hero is. Billie Burke's proper society grand dame may have more respect in society than freed slave Braxton Rutledge, but in Sergeant Rutledge she's an addle-pated airhead who can remember the names on the social register more easily than that of the advocate questioning her. Ford gives Strode every advantage a director can give a performer -- he even gets the racing-down-the-mountain-on-horseback John Wayne glory shot -- and it's a sign of Strode's talent that he picks those up and runs with them.
Nor does Ford pretend that the Cavalry gave black soldiers a completely fair shake in the 1880s. A wounded black private -- a new recruit -- is reassured he will be all right and did a good job when Lt. Cantrell tells him he'll probably make corporal in "8 or 10 years." I couldn't find information on how much time in grade it took to make corporal in the U.S. Cavalry in the 1880s, but in the modern U.S. Army it can be done in as little as 18 months.
In the press buzz surround the release of Quentin Tarantino's ahistorical revenge western Django Unchained, the director for some reason found it good to take a slam at Ford's racism. Tarantino cited Ford's role as an uncredited extra Klansman in D.W. Griffith's racially repugnant 1915 film Birth of a Nation, saying he wrote a scene in which the Klansmen of his movie have to lift their hoods to see where they're going based on Ford's scene in that movie. Tarantino then riffs for a bit on how he hates Ford and his movies because of that role.
No one who watches a Ford movie could believe he had a modern sensibility and understanding of race. And neither Sergeant Rutledge nor any other Ford movie can "prove" Ford was not prejudiced in racial matters as we understand them today, or even as they were understood during his lifetime. But Ford's storytelling style played not only on racial and ethnic types but also cultural and social ones. His method almost always used the shorthand of stereo- and archetyping as a way to get us into the story to see what the conflicts between those types and their values would bring about. It's difficult to see how Tarantino, who uses almost exactly that method with his characters and his movies, could miss the similarity.
Strode himself credited Ford with helping him as an actor and throughout his career saw Sergeant Rutledge as one of his best roles. It seems difficult to believe that anyone with two eyes and half a brain could watch Sergeant Rutledge, hear Strode's ringing declaration on the stand, see the way the movie is directed to emphasize every heroic line of the character and come away with the idea that Ford's entire career could be defined not by his work directing, but by his role as an extra in a movie at the age of 21. Such an idea hews as close to reality as does Django Unchained to the pre-Civil War south and Inglourious Basterds to World War II.
It's as fair as judging Tarantino's catalog by his role as a less-than-convincing Elvis imitator in a 1988 episode of The Golden Girls. Just as Ford's bit as a Klansman in Birth of a Nation signaled and signified his lifelong racial prejudice, Tarantino's bit as a cheesy imitator of a cultural-force-turned-punchline signals and signifies his inability to create anything new, but only synthesize, re-mix and warp cultural clichés into a mashup that owes whatever appeal it has to a fondness for the originals rather than the atristry of the end result.
I don't really believe that, of course. Except for everything QT's done since Jackie Brown.
