Time & Perspective Quote by Richard Widmark

Widmark’s line carries the plainspoken sting of a Hollywood insider admitting that “important” films often arrive with an awkward thud. “Cheyenne Autumn was received not too successfully” is a gentle euphemism for a box-office and critical shrug, but he doesn’t retreat into defensiveness. Instead, he reframes the movie as an act of conscience: “I still think it was a very good movie.” That “still” matters. It’s a veteran actor insisting that craft and cultural repair can be valuable even when the audience isn’t buying.

The sharpest subtext is in his casual, almost offhand diagnosis of auteur guilt: “kinda Ford’s apology.” John Ford helped define the mythic West on screen, and Widmark is pointing at the bill coming due. Ford’s earlier Westerns often used Native people as background threat or scenery; by the early 1960s, that framing was getting harder to defend. Civil rights politics were reshaping American self-image, revisionist Westerns were emerging, and the old frontier hero story was starting to look like propaganda with better lighting.

Widmark’s choice of “treated” is telling: it makes representation sound like conduct, not aesthetics. He’s talking about ethics, not just accuracy. Yet he also undercuts the grandeur with “kinda,” as if to acknowledge how limited an apology can be when it’s filtered through studio demands, star power, and a director who built his legend on the very mythology he’s now trying to soften. The quote lands as a rare moment of candor: Hollywood trying to correct itself, and discovering that remorse doesn’t automatically translate into resonance.