Santa Fe Trail (1940)

So much average

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

. . . and J.E.B. Stuart emerges victorious against his Real Life nemesis, George Armstrong Custer. Those brave enough to seek the Truth know that the men who died inside the Alamo were Hell-bent on kidnapping the Black Population of Texas Province BACK into Slavery AFTER their lawful government in Mexico City had emancipated ALL victims of Human Slavery nationwide! Similarly, John Brown and his Freedom Fighters, libeled here in SANTA FE TRAIL, are largely responsible for Blacks being Free in America today. Without Brown, Abe Lincoln would NOT have been elected president, and NO Civil War would have been fought. (Robert E. Lee is shown here personally stringing up Brown for killing a few dozen in Freedom's Cause; Lee's henchman John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln before Abe could string up Lee for murdering 300,000-plus in Slavery's Cause!) As Errol Flynn's mealy-mouthed version of Stuart says to Ronald Reagan's Custer, today the Slave Owners of the South would still be debating whether Oprah, LeBron, and Tiger's grandkids might one day be set Free. (Stuart was a firm believer in Millenia of genteel discussion among the lazy Plantation Owners.) SANTA FE TRAIL places Custer in the West Point Class of 1854, and asserts that he hails from the Buckeye State. Even Australian Flynn knew that George was a Michigan cadet from the class of 1862, so he insisted on playing Custer himself the following year in THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON to set the record straight. The latter flick includes Custer's oft-quoted line, "Charge, you Wolverines!" which initiated the defeat of Stuart's cavalry by Custer's horsemen, dooming Pickett's Charge, and the hopes of the South to persist in their evil Racist Slavery System. It's just so tragic that Flynn, by his birth, was ineligible to become U.S. President. If he had been a viable candidate, it's likely he would have taken better care of himself and been around to beat "The Gipper" once again in the 1980 election. The theft of 99% of America's Wealth by the One Per Centers never would have gotten a start under President Errol, and Virtual Slavery would not have been imposed on the American Majority!

A classic Flynn-DeHaviland film no doubt. But as an adequate depiction, or attempt at, historical fiction... well, not hardly. If you love a good western, love triangle, or Errol Flynn action epic, this is definitely the one to catch. As for the facts, well why bother. Being a Civil War buff, the extreme inaccuracies of the story line and fictionalized accounts of the principal characters was, for me, a major distraction. But as a film buff, hey what's not to like? Lots of action, great scenery, a handsome cast, and two zany, Shakespearean sidekicks.The biggest distraction for me was the grouping of West Point graduates. It is simply ludicrous beyond belief. For example, James Longstreet graduated from the Academy in 1842, John Hood and Phil Sheridan in 1853, J.E.B. Stuart in 1854, and George Armstrong Custer in 1861 (prematurely at that). Yet here they are all happy-go-lucky classmates sharing the same graduation class and thus assigned to Fort Leavenworth upon leaving West Point. In actuality, Custer was only 19 and still at West Point when John Brown was captured! This is not to say the depiction of commandant Colonel Robert E. Lee is not wonderful. It is. That of Secretray of War Jeff Davis is actually better! A blind hog finding an acorn, make that two acorns, maybe? In the film, the arsenal at Harpers Ferry is surrounded by mountains (a good thing), even if it is in no way surrounded by a town (not so good). And Brown's raid is staffed by about ten times the actual number that took the arsenal. Probably the saddest misrepresentation, however, is the lack of any black raiders, of which there were a few, including the first raider to have been killed.Yet this is still a very entertaining movie and one not to be missed by Flynn fans, Reagan worshipers, DeHavilland admirers (of which I am one), or John Brown worshipers (of which I am not). Where that train at the end is headed is anyone's guess since the track was probably not yet laid. But that's what Hollywood was about back then. Maybe the train was taking the crew back to L.A.

Errol Flynn is lost and Olivia de Havilland wasted in one of their last films together, an oddball Westerner that straddles the Mason-Dixon line presenting events leading up to the American Civil War.Not a good film, "Santa Fe Trail" is nevertheless fascinating now because of the political and social undercurrents running through it. Sensitive to Southern moviegoers still smarting 75 years after Appomattox, the filmmakers present a convoluted tale where all of the terribleness of the War Between the States can be laid on the doorstep of that terrible scourge: Abolitionism.Anti-slavery terrorist John Brown is on the loose, and it's up to Flynn to stop him, as future Confederate legend J.E.B. Stuart, still a U.S. Army officer as the war looms on the horizon. Stuart is presented as a champion not of slavery but of the status quo it is his duty to protect. Still, it's hard to find merit in his stance. "The South will settle it," Stuart says about slavery, "but in its own time and in its own way." No use rushing into righting an 80-year wrong, right?Director Michael Curtiz and scripter Robert Buckner fall short in terms of story, too. Is this a Western? Or is it a love story? Again, cinematic economics are pretty transparent given how awkwardly Olivia is shoehorned into the film, standing on the sidelines and wringing her hands. She's beautiful and charming, but her scenes with Flynn are overlong compendiums of romantic cliché, made worse by a melodramatic and hyperactive Max Steiner score.Playing the token liberal here is Ronald Reagan as George Armstrong Custer. Read that last sentence back if you want to know why some people really hate this film. "There's a purpose behind that madness," Custer says of Brown, "one that cannot easily be dismissed." But Custer doesn't protest too long, and the implication is clear that whatever Brown is fighting for doesn't outweigh his endangering the Union, for Custer or Stuart.Luckily for the filmmakers, they had Raymond Massey on hand to play Brown, eloquent in word but constantly threatening to go off the deep end. Massey was a florid overactor, but he had in Brown the right part and makes the most of it. Even better is Van Heflin, as a nasty bravo named Rader whom Stuart tangles with at West Point and again later on when Rader inserts himself as one of Brown's deputies. Rader's a great foil, allowed to say some worthy things about the anti-slavery cause, but more compelling in how his anger-choked personality comes to clash with that of the self-righteous Brown. Heflin grabs every scene he's in with those beady eyes and high forehead, and it's probably why he rose to movie prominence soon after.Far less successful is the film's effort to develop a romantic rivalry between Stuart and Custer. We have a pretty good idea de Havilland won't wind up with the Gipper. Alan Hale and Guinn Williams bicker like old maids for the sake of bad comedy, playing a pair of battle-hungry cowhands: "Calling me a rumpot's what hurt me...I haven't had a drink since noon!"Even Curtiz the celebrated action director falters here. Halfway through the film there's a battle where Brown and his men hold up Stuart's troops, then ride off with a cache of weapons, leaving Stuart's force inexplicably still armed. Vastly outnumbered, Stuart chases them anyway. Brown obliges him by not turning around to fight, leaving the cache behind."Hey, wait a minute, they outnumber us three-to-one," protests Custer. With an attitude like that, he'll never make the history books.However factually and dramatically flawed, "Santa Fe Trail" is one for the history books, in a way that shows how imperfectly the United States was coming to terms with its slave-holding past three generations on. It's not a good film even without its moral dubiousness, but that same dubiousness makes it historically worthy, as a reflection of just how hard it was for a nation to face a searing legacy of accepting the treatment of human beings as cattle.

For history buffs this must be more of a Santa Fe trial. Here is John Brown (a real historical figure played by Raymond Massey) demanding money from Boston abolitionists (also real) just before the Civil War. Give me the money, he shouts, and I'll start a slave revolution in the upland South. He knows that country. It's filled with hiding places for guerrilla warriors. So he and his handful devoted followers take over the federal arsenal and settle down in Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The tiny town was, and is, a sinkhole at the confluence of two rivers. If you stand in the main street of Harper's Ferry and look in any direction, all you see are tall wooded hills looming over you. It's about the least defensible place on the planet. There are a few African-Americans in the movie. The script has one of them say something like: "Mistuh Brown, he promised us da freedom. But if dis here Kansis is freedom, I wants to go back to Texas where Ah kin live mah lahf in PEACE." You bet.However, let us skip over the anachronisms -- the absence of muskets, the presence of generic Colt pistols, the fact that Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn), George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan), Bell, Sheridan, Longstreet, Hood, and Pickett didn't graduate from West Point in the same year -- and examine the movie as a Ding an Sich.The errors of time are lost in the headlong pace of this Western. And it IS a Western, though some scenes are set in the East. There is never any doubt who the good guys are. They're the ones who shoot their pistols jauntily, without aiming, and hit their targets. John Brown and his followers are bad guys, yes, but with mitigation, your Honor. His passion to free the slaves was all right, but his violent methods were all wrong. Every Western, though, must have a genuinely evil guy and in this case it's Van Heflin. His character seems lashed together in haste. At West Point, before he's thrown out, he reads treasonous literature to the other cadets and gets into fist fights (with Flynn!) over the issue of slavery. By the end, he's revealed as a craven money-grabber who only joined Brown's movement for the moolah, and when it's denied him he squeals on Brown to the government. That's known as discontinuity. I speak here not of historical inaccuracy but of dramatic clumsiness. God help me, my phraseology has been contaminated by listening to John Brown's dialog.You ought to see this movie if only for Raymond Massey's overblown portrait of John Brown. He never blinks. His eyes bulge -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- his eyes bulge until the dark irises are completely surrounded by white. I just tried it in the mirror and I can't even come close.There is an attempt at comedy. Its instruments are Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. It fails dismally. Nothing they say or do would be funny to anyone with a sensibility quotient higher than that of a head of broccoli. The delightful Olivia de Havilland plays "Kit Carson" Halliday, the girl Flynn marries while rival Reagan stands by, shrugs good-naturedly, and smiles. The real Custer later married a smashing brunette named Libby, almost as attractive as de Havilland.It's a straightforward Warners production with Flynn, Reagan, Michael Curtiz, Max Steiner, Perc Westmore, and Sol Polito all hard at work in the factory, turning out their fast, unpretentious, actioners and dramas in their classic style.