Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19529 in VHS
• Released on: 1994-07-22
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Color, HiFi Sound, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 1
• Running time: 154 minutes

Amazon.com
Cheyenne Autumn is a beautiful title to grace John Ford's final Western, but the film falls short of the occasion. The great director's ambition to tell the story, for once, from the Indians' point of view is only partially fulfilled. He's unambiguously sympathetic to the Cheyennes' resolve to bolt the reservation and trek back to their ancestral lands, while most of white society, the military, the bureaucracy, and the sensationalist press come off as insensitive, foolish, or downright hateful. However, the Cheyenne are nobly wooden (and played by non-Indians), and it's sympathetic cavalry officer Richard Widmark and Quaker missionary Carroll Baker through whose eyes most of the epic narrative unfolds. The video release restores the entirety of the caustic Dodge City interlude (featuring James Stewart as a thoroughly disreputable Wyatt Earp)--truncated after the New York roadshow opening--but William H. Clothier's majestic Panavision compositions have yet to be letterboxed. --Richard T. Jameson

Customer Reviews

Northern Cheyenne rates this movie!
I bought this vcr tape a few months ago. Sure the movie is NOT all correct for Cheyenne dress and habits but John Ford did bring the Cheyenne's plight and disgraceful treatment to the big screen. I view the movie at least once a month and never get tired of it. Excellent movie and beautiful scenes in the movie. Wish John Ford was alive to direct another such movie!
This Northern Cheyenne give this movie 5 stars and a thumbs up.

The picture was handsome, shot in Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, but considering its genre it was slow, even tedious...
John Ford dealt with one of the long-lasting Indian tragedies in his "Cheyenne Autumn," the wasting away of a tribe in an uncongenial pen called a reservation and its efforts to take matters into its own hands...

Indians, to use a modern term, had become redundant; that was their true tragedy... They were unwanted in what the whites wanted to make of the West and so they were 'placed' and disposed of, thereby suffering the usual 'superfluous' maladies of physical and moral debilitation... Here they are portrayed as the victims of insensitive herding...

The Cheyennes--1,500 miles away in Oklahoma from their Yellowstone home--had seen their numbers depleted from one thousand to less than three hundred in the course of a disease-ridden year... With these sorts of statistics it was as much a matter of simple logic as an act of desperation when they upped and left one night, bound on foot for their old hunting grounds, probably knowing full well that the cavalry would make them hurry, as they did, all the way... An epic in real life. Would the master epic-maker match it? In purely visual terms the answer was 'yes'. Ford vivid1y depicted the starvation and disease plaguing the Cheyenne trek... But somehow Ford never wholly got to the heart of the matter although the intent was there and at times this is a most impressive and moving film...

Carroll Baker appears as a Quaker teacher who tries in vain to he1p the unfortunate migrants... Richard Widmark is the army captain who is as sympathetic as uniform allows, and Arthur Kennedy is razor-sharp in his impersonation of Doc Holliday, who, with Stewart's Earp, is drafted into leading a posse against the Indians... Stewart deliberately re-routes them and the Indians get away... Edward G. Robinson plays a humane and kindly Secretary of the Interior who helps bail out the unlucky Cheyenne.

Not a classic, but worthy of a look-see!
Legendary director John Ford's last film, while not as good as earlier efforts, does possess some striking photography, a brilliant Alex North score, and good acting. Stalwart Richard Widmark does well as the cavalryman with a conscious; Karl Malden is fine as the duty-bound fort commander; and Edward G. Robinson does his patented perfection as a politician who tries to placate the situation. Even the politically incorrect casting of non-Indians Ricardo Montalban, Delores Del Rio, Sal Mineo, and Gilbert Roland can be excused as a sign of the film making times. Veteran character actor Sean McClory is also quite memorable as the fort doctor who confronts Captain Malden about the mistreatment of the Indian prisoners.