There may be no wholly new subjects left for the Western, but there are still a few blank spaces to be filled in on the screen's gigantic map of the West. Ford's latest film, Sergeant Rutledge … stumbles on one of them: the history of the Negro regiment, the 9th Cavalry, formed soon after the Civil War to join in the last frontier battles with the Indians. To the Negroes, in 1881, the White House is still "the place where Mr. Lincoln lives"; slavery is a living memory; loyalty to the regiment, if we are to believe Ford, has become a fierce, fighting expression of racial pride.

It is a theme which carries echoes and reverberations, a subject too intriguing in its own right to be smothered beneath our own modern reactions to questions of race prejudice and so made the material for an up-to-date polemic. What did these men think of the cause they were fighting for; of their officers; of those bleak Arizona battlefields where they engaged the Indian war-parties? But these are not the questions Ford raises in his film. His immediate dramatic theme is the court-martial of Sergeant Rutledge….

There is a perfunctoriness about the whole film, in the maddeningly casual, take it as you find it manner of latter-day Ford. The script, by Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah, allows witnesses to give evidence of events at which they were not present; the trial meanders backwards and forwards…. As so often with Ford, the comedy, at the outset entertaining, gets out of hand. At the back of the courtroom's fan-waving audience of station wives are a group of men out for a lynching, brandishing their home-made nooses. But Ford is too genial about the whole business to leave much scope for tension. In the action scenes, the Negro soldiers are easily absorbed into his own passionate loyalty to the cavalryman—any cavalryman—in his blue jacket. He poses them heroically against the skyline; he ensures that they die bravely; he lets them grin and swagger. He seems to like them almost as much as he likes the Irish. But, while Ford's Irish now need no explaining, the casual approach here discloses too little.

Yet, of course, there are moments when everything is working for the director: the opening, with the bustling arrival at the cavalry post and the quick, firm establishment of the scene…. Ford's knowledge of how to place and manoeuvre an action scene seldom deserts him. His escapes into man-to-man sentimentality, his taste for bad jokes, his utterly careless attitude to some of his players (the store scene, introducing the murdered girl, is atrociously played), are inseparable from his qualities as a filmmaker. Ford still writes the poetry of heroes; it is the prose of Sergeant Rutledge that he has neglected.