![]() (I kept wondering: why are they, dragging in a dance? Could it be to squeeze that white hypocrisy speech into the remains of a script previously taken up with removing the normal skin tone, stealth, dignity, and clothes sense from Indians?) Sometimes, it takes more courage to live than to die.” Facetiously delivering this speech, Stewart is operating here in a feeble, tensionless mock-up of an officers’ cotillion at the local fort. Not because she was a coward, but because her religion forbade her. “No! She didn’t kill herself, ladies and gentlemen. Throughout, these actors barely listen to each other, and, affecting a curious, dragged out, folksy dialect, they take up great amounts of space with words that are from Dimwit’s Land. In general, it is Widmark and Stewart, like two Pinter characters, separated out from a stiff (despite the yelling and flouncing), corny, TV-styled production going on behind them. There is a wild non sequitur quality about the courtship, frontier dialogue, and spitting, thin-skinned, stupidly stubborn Indians taking place in a free-for-all atmosphere in which not one detail or scene goes with another. The movie is a curious blend of modern blat and a senile impression of frontier culture that derives from the cheapest and oldest movies about pre-railroad days in Indian territory. His tomboy sweetheart, a fräulein out of the Student Prince with two thick long yellow braids and enough makeup to equal Widmark’s, has a fixation on a music box and runs to it at every chance. The movie wobbles most with Widmark, embarrassed but strangely submitting to courting scenes with Shirley Jones that are filled with temerity and wide-eyed hopefulness. The Indians include an overdeveloped weight lifter, a sad Pagliacci trying hard not to let his flabby stomach show, plus the above Leo Gorcey tough with his histrionic impression of a monkey on hot coals. Each woman and Indian is from a different age in operetta and a different part of the globe. The movie’s mentally-retarded quality comes from the discordancy and quality of the parts: it’s not only that they don’t go together, they’re crazy to start with. ![]() Two wrangling friends, a money-grubbing marshall (Jimmy Stewart) and a cavalry captain (Richard Widmark, who has the look of a ham that has been smoked, cured, and then coated with honey-colored shellac), seek out a Comanche named Parker and trade him a stunningly new arsenal of guns and knives for a screaming little Bowery Boy with braids who’s only bearable in the last shot when the camera just shows his legs hanging limply from a lynching tree. Two Rode Together, a 1961 cavalry film that has been holed up this winter at a campsite in the Museum of Modern Art, has the discombobulated effect of a Western that was dreamt by a kid snoozing in an Esso station in Linden, New Jersey. ![]()
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