Flies & Ale

Two Rode Together (Ford; Columbia) is a capricious, unsuccessful but oddly likable western by Director John Ford, who starts off by making it seem clear that the film will be a horselaugh opera. Jimmie Stewart plays a grafting marshal who has a 10% piece of everything in a Panhandle dust hole, including a gorgeous sporting-house proprietress. But when a cavalry lieutenant (Richard Widmark) asks him mysteriously to ride 40 miles to the fort, Stewart scuttles away with him. The sporting lady wears a stiletto, the marshal explains, and favors marriage.

Then Ford unaccountably doubles back on the trail. The marshal, it develops, is no altar vaulter; he is four-fifths of a bastard, going on five. Comanches have taken dozens of white captives, and the commandant wants Stewart to get them back. The request is straight out of the last thousand horse movies, but Stewart's answer is new: hell no. The commandant shudders; he has done westerns before, and this is not the way the scene is supposed to go. But he asks, disbelievingly, would money change Stewart's mind? "Yah." says Stewart, interested for the first time--$500 for each captive.

Stewart plays the heavy convincingly, but Director Ford is not satisfied with the melodrama that falls out of the over turned cliche, and he switches tracks again. For those still willing to string along, there is a fist fight somewhat less solemn than a Laurel and Hardy pie throwing, then a lynching in which no last-minute rescuer shows up. Director Ford's effort might be compared to the pastime of a successful gunfighter who, between important assassinations, lies on his back in a hotel room, drinks dark ale, and obliterates with his six-gun all the flies on the ceiling. The onlooker admires the skill and deplores the pointlessness.

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