#551: Sergeant Rutledge
Western-slash-courtroom drama is as daring as John Ford ever got in confronting racism
Initial release: May 18, 1960
Director: John Ford
Westerns, as a genre, are no stranger to racism, especially in their treatment of indigenous peoples. John Ford, the father of the Western as we know it and one of the most revered directors in history, made several movies with less than sensitive portrayals of people of color, indigenous or otherwise. But as his career wore on, he would make a few attempts at addressing the racism that was — and remains — baked into American society. From The Searchers with its bitter anti-hero corrupted by his own hate to his fumbling, but seemingly earnest, attempt at bringing the truth of the Trail of Tears to audiences in Cheyenne Autumn, he seemed determined to at least somewhat deflect arguments that he was a reactionary (inspired, no doubt, by his frequent collaborations with famous Western star and utter piece of shit John Wayne, to say nothing of Ford’s appearance as a Klansman in the infamous Birth of a Nation.) But out of all his attempts to interrogate the American relationship with racism, it’s his 1960 film Sergeant Rutledge that arguably is most successful despite its much more modest execution.
While the frame of the film is a courtroom drama, the core of it is pure John Ford Western, immaculately shot and directed, telling through flashbacks the story of a heroic black soldier who, despite being accused of raping a young white girl and murdering her and her father, remains with his unit to lead them in defending against raiding Apaches despite knowing that he’ll be put on trial and likely hanged. While it seems to anticipate later legal dramas like Amistad and Hart’s War, which centered white characters as nobly defending black characters from a racist system, Sergeant Rutledge gives agency to its title character (played by the brilliant Woody Strode) and at least half of the film’s screen time compared to his defense lawyer.
While much of the film is set during the trial — which has frequent, out-of-place comedic moments that are rather par for the course with Ford — there’s little focus on the actual mystery of who actually dunnit. From the very beginning, prosecutor Captain Shattuck (played by Carleton Young) makes his direct racism quite clear, and he preys on the softer diet racism of other characters to encourage them to draw the conclusions he wants. While the panel of officers are generally neutral to slightly antagonistic towards Shattuck’s open racism, it’s still an uphill battle for Lieutenant Cantrell (Jeffrey Hunter) to convince them that his client is innocent. Only in the last few minutes does the real murderer confess.
No, what this film is about is a character study of a man beloved by his fellow troops, deeply respected by his commanding officer (who explicitly calls him a friend,) and indeed treated with respect by other characters as well. Ford frames Rutledge as the true hero of the film, the man others sing about, the embodiment of the Buffalo Soldier, the platonic ideal of the Western hero (cavalry variant.) Strode is iconic in this film; the studio had demanded Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte, but Ford fought hard to get Strode instead, believing that only Strode, a former football player and wrestler, was “tough enough” — and, with his height and physique, threatening enough — for what Ford had in mind. He drives the film, gives it its spirit; in a very real way, he’s a truer embodiment of what John Wayne purported himself to be than Wayne himself, a hateful, combative man, ever could have been. It’s a pity, then, that Strode isn’t here to be a picture of strength for black audiences, but a picture of nobility for white audiences.
Given the film’s age, and given that this is John Ford we’re talking about, it’s not a perfect film by any means. Ford falls back on his usual treatment of Native Americans; the Apache are little more than brownfaced stereotypes, an external threat to spur on the internal drama of Rutledge and the question of whether he’ll run or not. It falls into an old trope of the Buffalo Soldiers helping to visit violence upon Native communities, which ignores the far more complex realities of the relationships between settlers and indigenous people. There’s also the fact that while the film addresses fears of miscegenation — Strode’s character take his shirt off with a white woman in the room, and pointedly insists that she leave the room and leave him to tend to his wounds on his own, for reasons she’s slow to understand — but fails to make much commentary on how that fear is what drives the whole film. After all, this is yet another film in which a heroic black character is accused of raping a white woman. For all the nobility and quiet strength (and screentime) Strode gets to fill his character with, it doesn’t change what the movie is about.
In spite of all this, Sergeant Rutledge seemed to, at the very least, be a white filmmaker’s anticipation of the civil rights movement, with Strode becoming a symbol for it, a heroic black figure in a film industry that rarely had black characters being anything but embarrassing. (Though it’s more likely the catalyst was Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, also 1960, in which Strode, as Ethiopian gladiator slave Draba, defiantly charges a corrupt Roman senator with a trident, his death triggering the slave revolt that nearly toppled the Roman Republic before Julius Caesar could.) While Sergeant Rutledge remains a product of its time, it’s worth seeing for what it is: a landmark on the long road towards a better cinematic understanding of the African-American experience.
