Sergeant Rutledge (1960)

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1. 

   sushantv10

   Really Underrated one.... 13 years ago
2. 

   Siskoid

   Ford brings a lot more style to Sergeant Rutledge than I expected, the first act particularly moody and the romantic shots of the hero rousing, but this is a case of my wanting to like a picture more than I ultimately did. It's To Kill a Mockingbird in the Cavalry, essentially, and it's got Jeffrey Hunter (the original Captain Pike) defending Woody Strode (who should have gotten higher billing, but Hollywood) from a rape and murder he didn't commit. When we're in the story via flashbacks, fine, there's a lot to like. But the courtroom scenes are just so awful they made me grind my teeth. The frame tale just feels so fabricated and manipulative, forcing witnesses to somehow tell the story in sequence, hiding crucial facts until narratively they should be told, and cheating the audience with false tension by not having characters say what they should be saying. Maybe in 1960, audiences weren't too aware of legal procedures (and this IS a court-martial in the Old West), but to these modern eyes, it's a real circus, filled with nonsense and posturing, and I just want to walk into the screen and punch the prosecutor. The nature of the crime being what it is, I recoiled at the attempts at injecting comedy into the proceedings via the judge's silly wife, and ultimately, the crime's solution hinges on someone overacting in the extreme on the stand. I was into Rutledge's story, and intrigued by the page of history the black cavalry men represented, but the focus is on the trial was, hem, ill-judged at best. 3 years 8 months ago

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