Bellah, James Warner (1899 - 1976)
Writer. Bellah's short stories
about the life and times of the horse soldiers at Fort Starke (mostly published
in the Saturday Evening Post) became the basis for John Ford's
cav?alry trilogy. Most of them, including 'Mission With No Record' (Rio Grande) and
'Massacre' (Fort Apache), were reprinted in the collection Reveille (Fawcett,
1962). His responsibility-under-pressure story, 'Rear Guard', became the basis
of the Warners cavalry saga The Command and 'Captain buffalo'
(co-written with Willis Goldbeck, after the latter approached Bellah with an
idea based on a Frederic Remington painting of Negro cavalrymen) became Ford's
Ser?geant Rutledge. One of Bellah's finest non-cavalry collaborations
with Goldbeck, again for Ford, was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,
based on a story by Dorothy M. Johnson. The Western/cavalry world of James
Warner Bellah can be summed up in the closing narration from She Wore a
Yellow Ribbon: 'So here they are. The dogfaced soldiers, the regulars, the
fifty-cents-a-day professionals. Riding the outposts of a nation. From Fort
Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Starke, they were all the same. Men in
dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their
passing. But wherever they rode and what?ever they fought for, that place
became the United States.'
|
