Ford has told an ugly story in direct, uncompromising fashion.Linda Cristal has moments of pathos as a Mexican señorita who survived captivity as a chieftan's squaw, only to be ostracized by her would-be saviors for her failure to commit a suicide her religion forbids. Pausing occasionally for a jest at the broad expanse of Andy Devine, but seldom relaxing for the kind of panoramic directorial effects that customarily distinguished his work, Mr. When he murders the mentally defective woman who tries to tame him, the deluded citizens revert to their own barely suppressed primitive instincts and lynch him with cries of righteous outrage.This note of ironic, tragedy is enforced by Mr. The weaklings adopted by the Stone Age tribe soon lost their war against the elements, and the hardy survivors reverted, of necessity, to primitive barbarity.The harsh validity of this vision of the pioneer spirit is powerfully demonstrated in an ironic climax, when the sheriff returns with an unrecognizable captive, a savage boy who screams that he is not white but a Comanche. Stewart, brutally shatters their illusions by declaring that the curly-haired children they nostalgically remember no longer exist. His film-an extension of the Indian prejudice theme of his earlier "The Searchers"-has rough edges, but it also has a point.When a pathetic band of families, vainly hoping their children will be rescued after years of captivity during the Indian wars, greet the unsentimental gun-slinger with the joyful adulation reserved for a Messiah, the director wastes no sympathy on their childish optimism. His peace-keeping job is paid by a 10 per cent commission from the local businesses, and a plea to his lofty sentiments to aid a group of bereaved parents is received with a scornful "what's in it for me?" It is a memorable characterization, steeped in authenticity.Credit for this realistic approach to frontier existence must go in large measure to the no-nonsense direction of Mr.
Stewart is far removed from the western heroes served nightly on television channels.Grizzled and laconic, whitling on the porch, this middle-aged sheriff is cynical, temperamental and frankly mercenary. The task is conventionally heroic in the pioneer tradition, but the character created by Mr. ONLY rarely in his long career has James Stewart matched the performance now adorning neighborhood screens in "Two Rode Together."Working for the first time in a John Ford western, the actor is cast as a hard-drinking frontier sheriff charged with ransoming captives from the Indians.
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