Two Rode Together
By Geoffrey O'Brien

One of John Ford's favorite tricks was getting actors to run through scenes and then printing the rehearsal as a final take. In Two Rode Together (1961), a Western that Ford himself had little good to say about, he used this method to let a completely immobile camera film Richard Widmark and James Stewart hunkered down on a log by a river, variously washing their faces, lighting cigars, or trying out head movements and hand gestures as they carry on a desultory conversation about money, corruption, marriage, and the stiletto that Stewart's would-be fiancée carries in her garter belt.

Two Rode Together is a busily plotted movie, crowded with characters and their respective back stories, so condensed that there is room for little beyond the most rapid exposition; it demonstrates how casually Ford could at this late stage of his career pack a scene's worth of plotting into a single shot. To summarize the film as a whole would involve talking about Indian-white relations, murder, lynching, sexual hypocrisy; but the little scene in which Widmark and Stewart pause a moment by the riverbank makes the rest of the movie simply that — a movie — as if in this scene we were privileged to share a moment of actual reality with actors who don't know they're acting.

There is absolutely nothing major about the scene except for Ford's obsessive desire to capture such moments. Here he realizes almost perfectly — with a camera setup worthy of the earliest cinema — a relaxation of tension that makes the actors part of a space we share with them, going nowhere in particular but totally alive. Then Andy Devine pipes up and we're back in the movie.

Originally published in Defining Moments in Movies (Chris Fujiwara, editor, Cassell Illustrated, 2007)

Geoffrey O'Brien
© FIPRESCI 2009

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