The Narrative Structure of "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon"

Abstract

The uncertainty of auteurist critics about the narrative structure of John Ford's She Wore a Yellow Ribbon illustrates the difficulty this mode of criticism has in moving from the perception of the generally recurrent themes and stylistic features revealed over the course of a director's films to the analysis of the specific organization of a single film within that group. Traditional genre criticism, of course, often reveals the same difficulty. Like auteurist criticism, its orientation toward generalized statements about a relatively large group of films united only by theme or subject does not provide a methodology capable of distinguishing individual differences. Indeed, such differences are not valued since they tend to blur the distilled truths offered by the generalizations. Thus while both auteurist and genre criticism provide important generalizations about cinematic art, the elucidation of narrative structure requires a finer methodology than either of these approaches can offer. As part of Ford's unofficial cavalry trilogy-along with Fort Apache and Rio Grande-She Wore a Yellow Ribbon poses a special instance in which the deficiencies of both critical approaches is particularly glaring. Andrew Sarris's sensitive admission about the artistic status of the film clearly illustrates the issues involved. Sarris begins by insisting on the wholeness of the trilogy because all three films are signed by Ford, and together seem more coherent than each does by itself. Though Sarris cites She Wore a Yellow Ribbon as one of the six films which represent Ford's most profound achievements in his late period (he also cites Rio Grande, though with similar uncertainty), he is at a loss to explain the reasons for his judgement: