John Ford has avoided cluttering his latest western with any discernible plot. This will please people who enjoy a horse-and-shooting movie for its basic detail, and who hate to see it adulterated with Sex, Skullduggery, or Intrigue. It will bore stiff anyone who is prone to squirm in his seat until something happens.

"She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" makes John Wayne a cavalry captain who has to worry about a group of hostile Indians. Except for a few stray arrows and an occasional ambush, he successfully avoids any major bloodshed through the entire movie, and is accordingly promoted to Colonel at the end. To this reviewer's way of thinking, this lack of a climactic large-scale gun-fight (Ford substituted a middle-scale stampede) is perfectly reasonable; any cavalry captain who would deliberated take on 2000 Arapahoes armed with Winchesters is a foolish man indeed.

And Ford has used what is probably a record amount of experience to fill this movie with fine, familiar technicolor scenes. His cavalry troop, its shiny horses steaming in the cold, jogs out on morning patrol; it moves patiently along a ridge against the jostling clouds of a thunderstorm. It deploys behind its red-and-gold guidon for a charge, plays taps when it buries its dead, and sings a lot of good cavalry songs. Ford's officers sit straight in the saddle, and their gold fore-and-aft shoulder bars gleam in the sun. His two lieutenants (one a wealthy Easterner) are in love with one girl, and she is a spoiled brat who turns out all right in the end. Ford has a big sergeant who drinks Irish whiskey and demolishes a half dozen or so of his comrades in a friendly bar-room test of strength--one of the three interior scenes in the whole picture. These scenes, in the best tradition of the Western, have never been done better. This movie is a very particular kind of classic. If you like that kind, see it.