There may be no wholly new subjects left for the Western, but there are still a few blank spaces to be filled in on the screen's gigantic map of the West. Ford's latest film, Sergeant Rutledge … stumbles on one of them: the history of the Negro regiment, the 9th Cavalry, formed soon after the Civil War to join in the last frontier battles with the Indians. To the Negroes, in 1881, the White House is still "the place where Mr. Lincoln lives"; slavery is a living memory; loyalty to the regiment, if we are to believe Ford, has become a fierce, fighting expression of racial pride.

It is a theme which carries echoes and reverberations, a subject too intriguing in its own right to be smothered beneath our own modern reactions to questions of race prejudice and so made the material for an up-to-date polemic. What did these men...