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List Price: $19.98 | | Label: Warner Home Video
Salesrank: 3623
Released: February 13, 2007 |
| Our Price: $4.85 |
| Used Price: $5.65 |
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
This last Western from director John Ford ranks as one of his most ambitious and moving works. Ford outfits his Trail-of-Tears-like saga with a strong cast, stunning cinematography by long-time collaborator William Clothier and a stirring Alex North score. To play the Cheyenne nation desperately struggling to return to the Yellowstone homeland across 1,500 treacherous miles, Ford recruited hundreds of Navajo tribesmen, many of them veterans of Ford movies dating back to 1939's Stagecoach. The location (which Ford used for the ninth time) is "John Ford Country" - the canyons, buttes and mesas of Monument Valley. And Cheyenne Autumn is compassionate, epic artistry from one of Hollywood's most revered filmmakers.
Description of Cheyenne Autumn:
Cheyenne Autumn is a beautiful title to grace John Ford's final Western, an earnest attempt at long last to "tell the story from the Indians' point of view." The film has moments of grandeur, thanks especially to William H. Clothier's majestic Technicolor compositions--restored to their proper Panavision dimensions on the DVD release--and moments of graceful action thanks to that peerless horseman, Ben Johnson. In other respects, the film falls short of the occasion. Ford is unambiguously supportive of the Cheyennes' resolve to bolt their assigned reservation in the desert Southwest and trek north to their ancestral lands. By emphatic contrast, most of white society, the military, the bureaucracy, and the sensationalist press are portrayed as insensitive, foolish, or downright hateful. Unfortunately, the Cheyenne are nobly wooden and, apart from some Navajo extras, played by non-Indians: Ricardo Montalban, Gilbert Roland, Sal Mineo, Victor Jory (who's pretty magnificent, actually), and Dolores Del Rio (who's breathtakingly beautiful as ever). As for point of view, it's sympathetic cavalry officer Richard Widmark and Quaker missionary Carroll Baker through whose eyes most of the epic narrative unfolds. A scabrous Dodge City interlude in midfilm, featuring James Stewart as a thoroughly disreputable Wyatt Earp (as opposed to the noble figure Henry Fonda played in My Darling Clementine), was chopped in half after the New York roadshow opening in 1964; it's all there on the DVD. Add to the list of sympathetic whites U.S. Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, played by Edward G. Robinson, who replaced an ailing Spencer Tracy. --Richard T. Jameson
Cheyenne Autumn Reviews:
Probably a bit too long... but an apology is always a good thing. 
2009-11-01 - Do not apologize it's a sign of weakness!... If you know your John Ford you know it is a recurrent line in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON...
Well, CHEYENNE AUTUMN can be considered Ford's apology for the way he portrayed the plains Indians all through his filmography... a late film, a bit sour and sarcastic (as TWO RODE TOGETHER) it is mainly remembered by the anthological middle scene on the film where Jimmy Stewart shines as ever...
The cast is OK... great actors... but the script is a bit too long (that is why minus one star).
Ford is still my favorite director western or not.
ADB
Get also TWO RODE TOGETHER and SERGEANT RUTLEDGE... less known films maybe but the work of a solid director.
LAST WESTERN PORTRAIT FROM A MASTER 
2009-06-12 - This was the last Western film done by John Ford, who was considered by many to be the genre's greatest director. Gems like "The Iron Horse", "Stagecoach", "My Darling Clementine", "The Searchers" and "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" would certainly validate that consensus. Perhaps it wasn't the West of Frederick Remington or Charles Russell, but Mr. Ford's results are just as vivid. As is his custom, Mr. Ford rewards with viewer with beautiful visuals and stalwart performances from a star-studded cast. A fine tribute to the West of America ... and of John Ford. Let this one find a place in your DVD collection.
No Problems
2009-03-06 -
Had no problems at all . Very fast service. Will buy from again.
Cheeze and crackers 
2008-11-30 - Well, there's good cheese and there's bad cheese--this was Cheeze Whiz. Sitting through it was an ordeal. The intent may have been good--i.e., John Ford's "apology" to the Indians--but other than that it was one bad Hollywood cliche after another. Richard Widmark, who can't act to save his life, plays a sort of prototype Oskar Schindler who risks his army career to go to bat for the Indians. Karl Malden plays a Prussian authoritarian sociopath, an easy villain. The Cheyenne themselves might have been humanized here if their leaders hadn't been played by stodgy, middle-aged white men with pointy noses and mall bangs. Ricardo Montalban is in mediocre form as usual, and Sal Mineo is, also as usual, an Italian-American version of Elvis. The only Indians with any dignity are the extras, who appear to be real Indians but probably not Cheyenne. And on top of everything else, this had to end as a love story. Pass the barf bag, please.
Profound and hopeful movie
2008-07-08 - The put-downs in another review prompted me to do my own. Cheyenne Autumn tells of the departure of the surviving Cheyennes from "Indian Territory" in Oklahoma (not yet a state at the time) to trek 1,500 miles to their old homeland -- the movie is beautiful visually, profound in its themes [you have to think about them yourself, this is not philosophical discourse -- but it is a MOVIE, after all] One reviewer noted as a negative the "grumpy mad elder cheif who dies passing cheifhood to the bad Indian". If "mad" here means "crazy," it would be totally off the truth, and if "mad" here means "angry" [more likely], the Chief's anger is well-grounded in the official inattention to his people's needs and the promises made -- "inattention" which had cost the lives of more than 2/3rds of his people by starvation and disease. The sub-themes of revenge and of marital brokenness add some depth to the theme of a people restored... The "Dodge City" sequence is a comic interlude, the reviewer who considers it irrelevant and distracting has his own point BUT the episode appears, per historical information, to be valid enough to make it part of this epic American history -- and its inclusion is validated from history, by the decade and a half earlier episode of another "drunken citizens volunteer army" -- the Paiute Indians under war-chief Numaga killed 70% of the Carson City force which attacked them
