Sergeant Rutledge is a 1960 American TechnicolorWestern film directed by John Ford and starring Jeffrey Hunter, Constance Towers, Woody Strode and Billie Burke.[2] The title was also used for the novelization published in the same year.[3] The film continues to attract attention because it was one of the first mainstream American films to treat racism frankly and feature a Black actor.[4]
The film stars Strode as Sergeant Rutledge, a Black first sergeant in a colored regiment of the United States Cavalry known as the Buffalo Soldiers. At a U.S. Army fort in the early 1880s, he is tried by a court-martial for the rape and murder of a White girl and the murder of the girl's father, who was the commanding officer of the fort. The events are recounted through several flashbacks.
Plot
In 1881, Sergeant Braxton Rutledge of the 9th U.S. Cavalry in 1881, one of four colored regiments in the U.S. Army, is on trial for rape and murder. His defense is handled by Lt. Tom Cantrell, who is also Rutledge's troop officer. Through flashbacks, the trial witnesses describe the events following the murder of Rutledge's commanding officer, Major Custis Dabney, and the rape and murder of Dabney's daughter Lucy. Mary Beecher, a woman in whom Cantrell shows romantic interest, provides evidence in Rutledge's favor, noting that he had saved her life when Apache Indians were attacking.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Rutledge committed the crimes, and his desertion after the killings appears to underscore his guilt. In a flashback, Cantrell finds Rutledge and arrests him, but Rutledge escapes captivity during an Indian raid. Aware of an impending ambush, he returns to warn his fellow cavalrymen and repels the attack alongside them.
A guilty verdict from the all-White military court appears inevitable, and the locals enjoy the spectacle. However, Cantrell extracts a confession while interrogating witness Chandler Hubble, the father of a man who was interested in Lucy, and Rutledge is exonerated. Cantrell and Beecher happily look forward to a life together.
Chuck Roberson as Court-martial board member (uncredited)
Production
Cover art for the paperback novelization of the screenplay for Sergeant Rutledge.
The screenplay for Sergeant Rutledge was written by the film's coproducer Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah. After their screenplay was completed, Goldbeck and Bellah recruited John Ford as the director. Bellah had written the stories on which Ford based his "cavalry trilogy" of films: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950). The screenplay for Sergeant Rutledge was adapted by Bellah for a novel that was published in conjunction with the film's release.[3]
The film's working titles were Captain Buffalo and The Trial of Sergeant Rutledge.[5]
For the 1960 domestic theatrical release of the film, a familiar marketing gimmick was employed in its advertisements: audience members were warned that they could not be seated during the final 10 minutes of the film in order to preserve its suspense. Some newspaper advertisements consisted of a fake classified ad reading: "Anyone with any information about what Sergeant Rutledge did, please contact Mary Beecher at CI.6-1000".[7]
In Spain, the film was shown under the title of El Sargento Negro (The Black Sergeant), in France under the title Le sergent noir (The Black Sergeant) and in Italy under the title I dannati e gli eroi (The Damned and the Heroes).[citation needed]
Reception
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson wrote: "This is a good picture—thoughtful, well-acted, biting, interesting and stimulating—with the steady hand of an old pro like Mr. Ford evident every step of the way. Unfolding in picturesque color at a remote cavalry stockade on the craggy floor of the old Apache country, the drama remains strong. rather than powerful. ... 'Sergeant Rutledge' may not add up to Mr. Ford's finest hour (and a half), but it certainly is Mr. Strode's."[1]
Critic Mildred Martin of The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: "Unfortunately, this historically backgrounded Technicolor 'whodunit' ... has been weakened by a lamentably uneven script and, incredibly, by the tasteless, slipshod direction of multiple Oscar winner John Ford. Someone, certainly, should have reminded Ford that the spectacle of a man fighting for his life against racial prejudice, unjust accusation and a firebrand prosecutor was hardly a situation for comedy, especially the sort of comedy injected by Billie Burke and the officers of the court-martial."[8]
The film fared poorly in American theaters, grossing $784,000 in the U.S. and $1.7 million elsewhere.[9]
Home media
A Region 1 DVD was released in 2006 in the United States as part of a set of films directed by John Ford.[10] In 2016, the DVD was released individually.[11] A VHS version had been released in 1988.[12]
12Bellah, James Warner (1960). Sergeant Rutledge. Bantam Books. OCLC28370899. Novelization of the film's screenplay. Bellah describes the development of the screenplay in the novel's preface.
↑Manchel, Frank (1997). "Losing and finding John Ford's 'Sergeant Rutledge' (1960)". Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. 17 (2): 245–259. doi:10.1080/01439689700260711. Ford's message and his means of delivering it create problems. But his agenda and its relevance to film history are significant. The film itself may not provide the most memorable moments in the director's career, but it is an important contribution to our understanding of race in the 1960s.
↑Scheuer, Philip K. (April 24, 1960). "Ford Clutters His Story, Still Tells It". Los Angeles Times. p.E1.
Brody, Richard (June 26, 2014). "The Direction of Justice: John Ford's cinematic fight for civil rights". The New Yorker. Ford, of course, is most famous for his Westerns, and one of the best of them, "Sergeant Rutledge," from 1960 (July 19), set in Arizona in 1881, stars Woody Strode in the title role.
Gallagher, Tag (1986). John Ford: The Man and His Films. Berkeley: University of California Press. p.373. ISBN9780520063341. Bert Glennon's photography makes it Ford's most expressionistic color film (and possibly his most brilliant - characters set against black, light-streamed fog, trains roaring through the night. ... But suspense is not Ford's forte, and, anyway, Sergeant Rutledge is too much a discombobulation of genres — suspense film, wester, racial melodrama, theoretical expressionism.
Levy, Emanuel (February 19, 2014). "Sergeant Routledge". Cinema 24/7. John Ford's Western of 1960, Sergeant Rutledge, is one of his most underrated films, perhaps because it was misunderstood as just another military courtroom drama. But in actuality, the flashbacks, which show the witnesses' testimonies are far more interesting and dominant in the film.
Miller, Jack (December 9, 2019). "Sergeant Rutledge: Ford's Rashōmon". Indiana University - Establishing Shot. Indiana University. Archived from the original on April 13, 2021. the film finds Ford returning, at various points, to a kind of full-blown expressionism, especially during the stormy, nocturnal sequences that mark the first couple of flashbacks, which are rendered in some of the most layered and striking compositions of Ford's oeuvre.
Schwartz, Dennis (September 21, 2010). "Sergeant Rutledge". Ford's film must be given kudos for bringing up real questions about racial relationships that were mostly ignored previously by Hollywood. Rated "B" on an A-F scale.
Steffen, James (April 22, 2010). "Sergeant Rutledge". Turner Classic Movies. Archived from the original on September 19, 2011. Sergeant Rutledge remains notable as the first major studio Western to cast an African-American actor in the lead. It is also quite perceptive and daring for the way it links racism with fear of black male sexuality.
Thompson, Howard (May 26, 1960). "'Sergeant Rutledge'". The New York Times. Admirably, scenarists James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck (co-producer with Patrick Ford) have explored a little-known chapter in Army history: the solid, brave service of a group of Negro recruits, including former slaves, under white officers during the Indian Wars.
Tracy, Andrew (April 2004). "Sergeant Rutledge". Senses of Cinema (31). With an effortlessness which belies the film's clunky flashback structure, Ford deftly traces the manifestations of racist fear in societal life, from the knee-jerks of the subconscious ('It was as though he'd sprung up from the earth… from a nightmare') to the self-deceiving rhetoric of the political establishment ('Incidentally, I'm glad that none of you gentlemen has mentioned the colour of the man's skin').
Webb, Andy. "Sergeant Rutledge (1960)". The Movie Scene. Retrieved December 8, 2020. "an interesting movie because it is slightly different to what you expect from a John Ford western" ... "not the intelligent courtroom drama of say Anatomy of a Murder" ..."relies on Ford's customary use of the flashback".
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