Dodge City (1939)

One of my all time favorites.

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"Dodge City" is a real good early 'A' western, at a time when they were usually second feature programmers. In the same year came "Stagecoach", but this one was in color, at a time when color features were just coming to prominence. The director was Michael Curtiz, who was four years away from "Casablanca". And he doesn't disappoint in this effort.A lot of reviewers have already weighed in but I just wanted to add that "Dodge City" recalls an earlier, more innocent era when you often went to the movies as a family and could watch movies suitable for the occasion. Now, of course, everything is R rated and you have to leave the little ones home.Errol Flynn was the good guy and Olivia DeHavilland was 'the girl'. The bad guys were Bruce Cabot (never trust Bruce Cabot) and Victor Jory. Sprinkled in were several identifiable character actors. Not a lot to think about here, just wait for the bad guys to get their comeuppance and applaud at the end. Hardly any applause anymore at the end of movies, but then most contemporary movies aren't worth the trouble.

I don't recommend this movie to anyone who isn't a rabid Errol Flynn fan. From my point of view, he's too suave and urbane to qualify as a Western hero. I understand he ended up making eight Westerns. I can't say I'm looking forward to watching them, although I'm holding out a little hope for "They Died With Their Boots On". The movie has a good rep and George Custer sounds like a more suitable role for Flynn. We'll see. It's hard to come up with a list of likes and dislikes for this film. It was so bland and cookie cutter, it didn't elicit much reaction either way. I gave it a three out of 10 in my IMDb and it only scored seven points in my ranking system, a bad score. Here's what I liked: There was a very large and well filmed barroom brawl. This is a stock Western cliché that doesn't really interest me much, but this was one of the better ones I can remember. I especially liked it because it took place between Union and Confederate Civil War veterans. I don't know much about the history of color movies, but this must have been an early one. Not very impressive 70 years later , but it must have been a big deal back in its own day. I'm at a loss really to say anything more positive about this film On the negative side: Like I mentioned above, I just didn't buy Flynn as a gunfighter hero. I'm not sure why his character wasn't Wyatt Earp. I'm not an Earp historical expert, but it seemed to me this was the stock "Wyatt Earp cleans up Dodge" narrative, just with a different guy. Don't know why they did that. The written preludes to these 1930's movies crack me up. Was it that audiences were so accustomed to the silent era that they were afraid not to let them read a little bit? As is typical in movies from this time period, the romantic subplot is stiff and corny, the soundtrack is syrupy, the villains are purely melodramatic, there is a general lack of realism.

In the lawless town of Dodge City, Errol Flynn stands up to murderous cattle boss Bruce Cabot and refuses to sell him his livestock. Soon he's the new sheriff and dead set on cleaning up the town, including Cabot and his cronies.One's degree of enjoyment is entirely dependent on how much the viewer buys the casting of Flynn as a rough and tumble western hero. In my opinion, he was certainly handsome and charismatic but not entirely credible. I spent the whole movie trying to figure out what accent he was using! Still, I enjoyed the movie enough to recommend it.Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams were great and stole nearly every scene they were in. The best part of the movie was the much ballyhoo'd saloon scene where Big Boy pretty much incites a riot!

He'd already been a pirate and an outlaw for director Michael Curtiz, but in 1939 Errol Flynn was cast in the rather unexpected role of sheriff Wade Hatton in Dodge City, part of the western boom of 1939.Dodge City is home to practically every western genre cliché in existence – cattle drives, covered wagons, lynch mobs, bar brawls and so on. It's been remarked that at the time these weren't clichés, they were fresh ideas. But that would be to forget pictures such as The Big Trail (1931), The Plainsman (1936), not to mention a host of silent westerns, in which all these typical goings on were well established. This isn't a criticism – after all genres are built on clichés, and there's no shame in that. Dodge City merely appears to have been intended as a kind of rough homage to the western rather than trying to take the genre anywhere new. These Flynn/De Havilland/Curtiz pictures were never meant to be anything more than simple fun. If you're casting Errol Flynn in his first western after audiences have accepted him as Robin Hood and Captain Blood, you're not going to make something like Stagecoach.Having said all that, in spite of its lack of depth, Dodge City truly is a quintessential western in that its underlying theme is the most common idea that unites virtually every western ever made – the friction between the old and the new, and the forging of the American civilization. This is set up in the very first scene, in which a stagecoach and a steam train try to race each other. As the picture progresses, the point is made that the price of progress is lawlessness, and that the taming of the wilderness must be coupled with justice, education and order.Dodge City also represents the high point (or should that be low point?) of Hays Code moralism in the western. At this time Hollywood was desperate to ensure the outlaws remained villains, and that no crime went without punishment, and this is one of the strongest statements of that. In his struggle to clean up the frontier town, Flynn is virtually a puritan, not to mention a strict authoritarian. The lines of good and evil are as stark as in any of his earlier adventures. The trouble is the western genre lacks the right feel that makes such fairytale ethics enjoyable. You can accept the hissable villain and dashing, perfect hero in an over-the-top swashbuckler movie, but in the old west setting they don't seem to work so well.Errol Flynn would later play some great roles in westerns (for example, They Died with Their Boots On), but here he is really just playing Robin Hood in a Stetson, and only the vaguest attempt at an American accent (although, like Captain Blood, he's supposed to be an Irishman here, making his plummy English tones even more bizarre). Dodge City also features one of the weaker Alan Hale sidekick roles. He's a bit too much of a bumbling oaf for the majority of the picture, then suddenly becomes incredibly competent and authoritative out of the blue for action scenes. There are no real standout performances, and even great character actors like Henry Travers and Victor Jory are underused here.Still, the Michael Curtiz mark of quality is definitely here. The big crowd shots are perfectly constructed as always. However the most breathtaking landscape shots appear to come from matt paintings, and Curtiz doesn't handle the wide open spaces of the west particularly well. For me the only real standout moment is a massive barroom brawl, with dozens of participants. Curtiz was great at handling these large scale action scenes, but none of the smaller stand-offs really get off the ground.Dodge City is a certainly watchable film, but there are far better westerns from this period, not to mention far better Errol Flynn films.