Sergeant Rutledge (1960)

Directed by

John Ford

Genre

Western film, trial film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 51m

Rated

NR

Rating

7.0 of 10 from 139 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A Black cavalry sergeant is court-martialed in the 1880s for crimes he says he didn't commit. The story unfolds through flashbacks as witnesses give their accounts.

tenseserioussoberingdramaticfocusedcourtroom-styleretrospective

What happens

Sergeant Rutledge is a 1960 American Technicolor Western film directed by John Ford and starring Jeffrey Hunter, Constance Towers, Woody Strode and Billie Burke. The title was also used for the novelization published in the same year. The film continues to attract attention because it was one of the first mainstream American films to treat racism frankly and feature a Black actor. The film stars Strode as Sergeant Rutledge, a Black first sergeant in a colored regiment of the United States Cavalry known as the Buffalo Soldiers. At a U.S. Army fort in the early 1880s, he is tried by a court-martial for the rape and murder of a White girl and the murder of the girl's father, who was the commanding officer of the fort. The events are recounted through several flashbacks. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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