She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

The centrepiece of Ford's cavalry trilogy (flanked by Fort Apache and Rio Grande) and a film of both elegiac sentiment and occasionally over-eloquent sentimentality, structured around a series of ritual incidents rather than narrative conflicts. Wayne's captain and McLaglen's sergeant face up to impending retirement from a force whose role and self-awareness is changing in the wake of Custer's defeat; America, however, still has to be willed into existence and unity. Winton Hoch's Technicolor cinematography of Monument Valley (modelled at Ford's insistence on Remington pictorialism) won him an Oscar.