Similar to The Searchers in both its themes and basic plot, Two Rode Together teams James Stewart’s cynical opportunist with Richard Widmark’s idealistic Cavalry officer on a quest to rescue and return now-adult children captured by Indians to their families. Ford uses one of his favorite tropes, the dance sequence, not to show community building and unity, as he did in his earlier films such as My Darling Clementine, but to highlight the hypocrisy of the settlers and their ambivalence about reuniting with their Indian-raised children. The relative morality of this mission is highlighted in Ford’s famous scene of Stewart and Widmark talking along the bank of a river, an extended and reportedly improvised two-shot that directly influenced both Francois Truffaut and Peter Bogdanovich.