mrsl wrote:Miss Goddess and I usually agree on movies that we like and/or dislike, but we're miles apart on this one. I love Two Rode Together, and have since the first time I watched it... I have to agree that some of the characters could have been more developed, preferably Shirley Jones, and I liked Stewart and never got that feeling of meanness. I just thought of him as a man who had been all around, and finally found a place where he could be a 'big fish in a little pond'.
As I said, though, I recommend this movie all the time. I hope I didn't set anyone off on the wrong path.
Gee, sometimes I think the ability of each of us to interpret the characters and story so differently was one of the aspects of this movie (or any
John Ford movie) that is so intriguing. For example, having seen
Two Rode Together (1961) a couple of times over the years, my primary and most vivid impressions of it are
not of the leads
Stewart and
Widmark at all.
I normally like both these very different actors, but their cantankerous relationship seemed a warm up for "Liberty Valance" and warmed over from "The Searchers". The pair never really connected for me as comrades or friends or "frenemies". From stuff written about this shoot, it might be that the needling of
Ford didn't always bring out the best in all actors and the increasing deafness of both stars and the near blindness of
Ford at the time sure couldn't have helped communication off screen, so maybe that affected the story on the screen too?
Then again,
Ford was getting pretty decrepit by this time physically, less able to have the luxury of script development as he might have wished, and, as Miss G. pointed out, was struggling with reconciling himself to the death of
Ward Bond, his longtime favorite whipping boy and a darned good actor, despite the surface bluster he adopted.
I liked the potential of the
Shirley Jones spunky girl of the prairies character, but, as Anne notes, her character sure wasn't overwritten, was it? Best of all seemed to me to be the dignified and realistically drawn
Linda Cristal, as the fatalistic captive of one other great presence in this movie,
Woody Strode. The scene by the campfire at night waiting for
Strode was very well done, as was the entrance of
Stewart & Cristal at the settler's dance. Perhaps both scenes might have played even better in a silent movie, (as I think Ford would have liked)--though I do think that
Stewart's speech about racism was pretty well done, if a tad forced.
Other touching and vivid moments in the movie belonged to
Mae Marsh, a relatively restrained (for him)
John Qualen and
Regina Carol as a long separated father and daughter and
David Kent as Running Wolf, Jones' long lost brother.
I guess I should see this again to try to see if more of the stars seems a bit less cardboard to me.
. As we know, the World goes 'round because there's no accounting for taste.
) a western on prime time TV every Tuesday. That's how I got acquainted with the genre. I saw countless classics by Ford, Hawks, Daves, King, Brooks, Mann and others....Mind you, the younger generation nowadays is not that familiar anymore with westerns. I can even think that some have never seen one.... 
I