In 1949, John Ford and John Wayne reached a new, easy eloquence with "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," the second of Ford's famous cavalry trilogy (Fort Apache was the first, Rio Grande the last), just released on a gorgeous DVD from Warner Home Video. Wayne plays Captain Nathan Brittles, who must try to halt the spread of a vast, pan-tribal Indian war after Custer's defeat at Little Big Horn, while passing down lessons of command to his lieutenants before his impending retirement.

Wayne had already played an older man in Howard Hawks' Red River, giving a portrait of psychosis in some ways as remarkable as Bogart's in John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. But She Wore a Yellow Ribbon accents the virtues of the leathery sagebrush sage who could handle any job without raising a sweat, and who could make taciturnity seem belligerent.

Every word Brittles says counts. He isn't overly sensitive -- or at least not overtly sensitive -- but he feels the ties of family, community and country. What Wayne does in this movie resembles the reach for raw truth that was spreading from Broadway to Hollywood in the postwar years. But Wayne, of course, was taking his cues from Ford. In this last great phase of his career, Ford reacted to his recent World War II experience by framing profiles in courage, while reaching back artistically to the visual and dramatic spontaneity of his silent westerns.

This movie does have grievous flaws: too much amateurish service comedy with Victor McLaglen as a drunken sergeant, and too much incongruous glamour from Joanne Dru as the non-Army gal who fuels the competition between rich-boy second lieutenant Harry Carey Jr. and stalwart first lieutenant John Agar. But it is one of the most magnificently photographed westerns ever made in color -- thanks to Ford and cinematographer Winton Hoch.

Although the movie hardly questions the role of the cavalry in the Indian Wars, Brittles and an Indian chief agree that they are too old to fight wars -- and that old men should stop wars. Throughout, Wayne is a virtuoso of restraint; no movie actor ever showed a more exquisite control over values and emotions like faith, duty, honor or loyalty than Wayne does in this picture.