Lynn Farley

Strong characters but weak plots. It is the first time I’ve seen Native Americans play normal, everyday people. I liked each of the characters a lot. I didn’t care if the plots were weak or didn’t make sense sometimes because the characters were strong and credible.

John Ford made a mess of Mari Sandoz’s book on the Plains Indians. She died 2 years after this film was made, probably of shame that her work was mangled. The Western personalities of Doc Holiday and Wyatt Earp are made to look ridiculous, and were inserted as add-ins, with no relevance to the story. A long, wasted movie, that trashed the American Indians, even by 1964. New young directors were coming up who were trying to tell the truth about the experience.

This is Vienna, 1906. It looks authentic, with the historic economic class structure, the subtle tense relations between the elites and the Jewish professional class. I’m watching Freud’s Vienna in the background of this Sherlock-themed story. I’m hooked.