JANUARY 30

Film:
Fort Apache (Ford 1948) Blu-Ray 182

Reading (to be done by February 5):

Jim Kitses, “Authorship and Genre: Notes on the Western,” in course reader.

Assignment for the week. Graduates, please email essay to me at elkrugamigos@earthlink.net; undergraduates, please bring a printed copy to class:

The ending of this film is notoriously tricky. Depending upon how one approaches it, it can mean a number of different things. I want you to consider the ending very carefully, in light of the rest of the film. Are we intended to read Wayne’s final speech as bitter irony, or as a statement of fact? Is it both? How can a five minute scene reshape or overturn the two hours and five minutes that preceded it? There is no necessarily right or wrong answer here – this ending is controversial for the very good reason that it is expansive, offering up a number of possibilities. All too often, the fact that it is a Western leads people to take it at face value, assuming that it could mean nothing more than what it directly says. You might agree with that after careful consideration. But I want you to think hard about it and write about what you feel the ending really says.