Two Rode Together

Dismissed by Ford as a casual favour to Columbia's boss Harry Cohn, this neglected Western repays careful attention. Stewart is the cynical marshal hired to repatriate pioneer children captured by the Comanche, and Widmark the cavalry officer who accompanies him. Gone is the clean frontier as would-be garden of The Searchers and earlier; instead, Ford offers us a nightmare vision, the frontier overrun by hysteria and (Eastern/Yankee) hypocrisy, with even the Indians seen as primitive entrepreneurs.