Last night, on the big HDTV, with the collaboration of Netflix, and peering through our toes, we watched the John Ford cavalry movie "Rio Grande." I first saw this film in the year of its release (I was eleven years old) at the Leader Theater on Coney Island Avenue.
In days of yore, it was the custom for the neighborhood urchins to take in a double bill on a rainy Saturday afternoon. It was a good way for our harried mothers to dispose of us for four hours – and on the cheap, inasmuch as the price of admission was only fourteen cents.
"Rio Grande" was a perfect kind of urchin movie. Good guys (cavalry) versus bad guys (Indians), lots of action, no overt sex. It offered much too much singing, but the slow periods would have been enlivened by hoots, whistles, popcorn-throwing, banging the head of the kid in the seat in front of you with the heel of your hand, primitive pre-flirting, and chasing in the aisles.
In 1950, Maureen O'Hara (John Wayne's estranged wife), was puzzling if not inexplicable — merely an impediment to the action. Sixty years later, she is beautiful, dignified, even majestic. The poor Apaches, who for me and for my heedless comrades were nothing other than targets for cavalry bullets, are now unutterably tragic. John Wayne was then an immensely heroic figure, but with the passing of years. he has become a rigid incompetent dope.
The West, in those days, was part Monument Valley, part myth; now I live in a West that has nothing to do with Coney Island Avenue, even less with John Ford.
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