Sergeant Rutledge

1960 film by John Ford

Sergeant Rutledge is a 1960 American Technicolor Western film directed by John Ford and starring Jeffrey Hunter, Constance Towers, Woody Strode and Billie Burke. The title was also used for the novelization published in the same year. In 2017, film critic Richard Brody observed that "The greatest American political filmmaker, John Ford, relentlessly dramatized, in his Westerns, the mental and historical distortions arising from the country’s violent origins—including its legacy of racism, which he confronted throughout his career, nowhere more radically than in Sergeant Rutledge." The film starred Strode as Sergeant Rutledge, a black first sergeant in a colored regiment of the United States Cavalry. At a U. S. Army fort in the early 1880s, he is being tried by a court martial for the rape and murder of a white girl as well as for the murder of the girl's father, who was the commanding officer of the fort. The story of these events is recounted through several flashbacks.

The film revolves around the fictional court martial of 1st Sgt. Braxton Rutledge (Strode) of the 9th U. S. Cavalry in 1881. At the time, the United States Army maintained four colored regiments, including the 9th Cavalry. His defense is handled by Lt. Tom Cantrell (Hunter), who is also Rutledge's troop officer. The story is told through a series of flashbacks, expanding the testimony of witnesses as they describe the events following the murder of Rutledge's Commanding Officer, Major Custis Dabney, and the rape and murder of Dabney's daughter Lucy, for which Rutledge is the accused. Mary Beecher, a woman in whom Cantrell shows romantic interest, gives evidence in Rutledge's favor, noting that he saved her life when Apaches were attacking. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Rutledge committed the crimes. Worse still, Rutledge deserts after the killings. Lt. Cantrell tracks Rutledge and arrests him. Subsequently, Rutledge escapes from captivity during an Indian raid. Aware of an impending ambush, he returns to warn his fellow cavalrymen and fights off the attack with them. He is then brought back in to face a court martial. A guilty verdict from the all white military court appears inevitable, and the locals appear to enjoy the spectacle. Cantrell ultimately secures a confession when examining Chandler Hubble, the father of a young local man who was interested in Lucy, and Rutledge is exonerated. Cantrell and Beecher happily look forward to a life together.

The screenplay for Sergeant Rutledge was original and was written by the film's co producer, Willis Goldbeck, and by James Warner Bellah. Bellah has written that he and Goldbeck interested John Ford in directing a film after a screenplay was completed. Bellah had previously written the stories on which John Ford based his "cavalry trilogy" of films: Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950). The screenplay for Sergeant Rutledge was adapted by Bellah for a novel that was published in conjunction with the film's release. Parts of the film were shot in Monument Valley and the San Juan River at Mexican Hat in Utah. As illustrated in the poster image above, for the 1960 domestic theatrical release of the film the theater patrons were warned that they could not be seated during the final 10 minutes of the film in order to preserve its suspense. The film did poorly in U. S. theaters. Scott Eyman summarized: "Sergeant Rutledge is a film of considerable formal beauty about the bonds between a black band of brothers. Not surprisingly, it did miserably at the domestic box office, grossing $784,000. It did considerably better overseas, grossing $1.7 million, but was probably still a marginal financial failure."

In Spain, the film was shown under the title of El Sargento Negro (The Black Sergeant), in France under the title Le Sergent Noir (The Black Sergeant) and in Italy under the title I dannati e gli eroi (The Damned and the Heroes).

Black Classic Movies mentions that this is one of the few American films of the 1960s to have a Black man in a leading role and the first mainstream western to do so. Lucia Bozzola at All Movie gave it four out of five stars and mentioned "the expressionistic use of light and color, particularly during Rutledge's encounter with a sympathetic female witness, points to the repressed sexual terror that drives the case against him" and praised Strode's performance. Jonathan Rosenbaum at Chicago Reader considered the film to be "effective", but "slightly long" and mentioned that it is "one of Ford's late efforts to treat minority members with more respect than westerns usually did." Time Out agreed that the film is "often pigeonholed as one of Ford's late trio of guiltily amends making movies" and although it praised it, it concluded that "he can't confront the cultural fear of miscegenation that mechanises [the movie], only its distorted expression." In Mike Grost's anthology presenting Ford's movies, the film was described as being one of his best, but also one of his most underrated. It also mentioned how the film mocked traditional femininity as being an "artificial construct". TV Guide said the film "is a fascinating, detailed look at racism" and mentioned how some characters are directly racist, while others suffer from "repressed racism". Variety said that the movie has an "intriguing screenplay which deals frankly, if not too deeply, with racial prejudice in the post Civil War era."

A region 1 DVD was released in 2006 in the United States as part of a set of movies directed by John Ford. In 2016 the film's DVD was released individually. A VHS tape had been released in 1988.