utgard14 Abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey) is on the warpath to end slavery by any means necessary. Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan) lead the effort to capture him. There's also a romantic triangle subplot involving Flynn, Reagan, and pretty Olivia de Havilland. Historically inaccurate but enjoyable western that can't seem to make to up its mind about what it wants to say. Flynn, de Havilland, and Reagan are all fine but it's Massey who steals every scene he's in. Van Heflin is good in a villainous role. Wonderful WB supporting cast includes Alan Hale, Guinn Williams, Henry O'Neill, and John Litel. Good direction from Michael Curtiz. If you read the rest of the reviews here, you'll see a lot of righteous indignation and bluster from certain types. Some of it's pretty funny. The movie is more balanced and measured than these people are letting on but it does play fast and loose with history as most movies based on historical events and people tend to do.

secondtake Santa Fe Trail (1940)Here's one of the great and not so rare mysteries of the movies. How in the world can the same people who put together some of the great classics be responsible for the near-clunkers just a year before or after? "Santa Fe Trail has great themes--slavery, John Brown, and the coming Civil War--and it's not a bad film, surely, but it has some awkward moments, some filler, and is not half the movie it could have been. It seems almost to want to follow along the success of the great Civil War themes of two other recent successes, "Jezebel" (1938) and "Gone with the Wind" (1939), but it gets distracted by little bits of nonsense and some awful writing."Santa Fe Trail" has the same director (Michael Curtiz) who would make "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Casablanca" two years later, the same leading actress (Olivia de Havilland) who had just finished an important role in "Gone with the Wind" and would win an Oscar for "The Heiress" later in the decade. There's music by the best in the business, Max Steiner, and photography by one of the best, Sol Polito. In fact, in the best scenes, like the night fighting halfway through, the photography is excellent and the music charges it up with good Steineresque excess.So what goes wrong? You might start what is called chemistry. The director is definitely to blame for not making the parts fit together in the first half, using lots of intertitles and chopping up the progress between fairly dull scenes (Curtiz had a famously up and down career). But other things must be at work that we can't see. The cast and crew and worked together, in parts ore in entirely, many times as part of the famous Warner Bros. family. Polito and Curtiz had just made other Westerns together, some with de Havilland. And the leading man Errol Flynn worked often with all three, including one of Curtiz's most famous films, "The Adventures of Robin Hood." Of course, that one had Bette Davis, too.And this one has Ronald Reagan. (If you wonder if he can act this is bad place to start because he's an awkward, handsome dud.)The key problem here is something Curtiz should have controlled--the script. As a two sentence pitch to the producer it sounds great--the wild-eyed John Brown is on a violent anti-slavery crusade in Kansas and a group of young West Point graduates are sent there to bring order. The story is loaded with unnatural foresight about the coming war against slavery, and even the war against the Indians (because General Custer is one of these young military men). It's the story of John Brown, mostly, and yet this story gets watered down by a silly rivalry over de Havilland (Flynn vs. Reagan), and with a somewhat caricatured mercenary Northerner (played well by Van Heflin) who joins Brown on his rampage.At one point de Havilland, translating a fortune-telling Indian to all these men, says, "Two of us are going to kill him, but none of us can stop him." And this is the best writing in the movie, bringing the themes to the front. It's about morality at the deepest level. It's about how wrong John Brown was, and how right. Turning it into a partly-joking, partly bitter and violent series of escapades doesn't do any of it justice. Including the movie itself.The last scenes are sort of epic and characteristic Curtiz, who could handle complicated movie-making like few others. His use of dramatic light, lots of foreground and background action at once, and moving camera are all put to use here. The terror of the God-crazed and "righteous" John Brown becomes central to the plot, and the famous battle at Harper's Ferry is depicted with a fury. The year is 1859 at this point, and what Harper's Ferry meant most of all was the inevitability of the Civil War, which started two years later. Some people give John Brown respect for being willing to cut through the pacifist chit-chat by politicians and get the things rolling. This is a small attempt to make it come alive on the screen.

oldblackandwhite Santa Fe Trail, an epic western from Warner Brothers' golden era, is high-powered, fast paced, action-packed entertainment. Not the standard western story line or time setting, it takes place in the years immediately preceding the War Between the States. The action is not the usual cavalry versus Inidians or law versus outlaws, but the Army fighting against John Brown's depredations in "bleeding Kansas". This first class "A" production put first-rate director Micheal Curtiz in charge of a cast topped by Errol Flynn, Ronald Regan, Olivia De Havilland, Raymond Massey (as John Brown), and Van Hefflin in a villainous role, along with Warner's terrific stable of supporting players, and hundreds of extras. Flynn is at his best here as gallant Army officer Jeb Stuart, and the trim Mexican War era uniform compliments his dashing image. Massey is overpowering and absolutely riveting as half-mad, fanatical abolitionist leader Brown. Miss De Havilland doesn't have one of her better parts as the love interest of both Flynn and Regan, but she makes the best of it and comes off both fetching and engaging. Regan is solid and likable in a second banana role. Flynn's two favorite sidekicks (and real-life drinking buddies), those crude but lovable buffoons Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams lead the supporting cast, which also includes Moroni Olsen (as Robert E. Lee), Henry O'Neill, and the ever-reliable John Litel. Acting is first rate from top to bottom.Santa Fe Trail is almost non-stop action from beginning to end, all of it well staged, well filmed, and driven along by a rousing Max Steiner score. This movie has so much kinetic energy, it reminded me of a silent picture at times. The night gunfight in and around the burning barn at Palmyra, which eventually turns into a full-scale pitched battle between the cavalry and the Brownites, is one of the most spectacular and exciting action sequences ever staged in a movie. Yet the script by Robert Buckner is intelligent with sharp and engaging dialog. The final battle with Brown's forces at the Harpers Ferry Arsenal is staged on an epic scale. In both this scene and the one at Palmyra it seems more like a war movie than a western.Santa Fe Trail is top-notch entertainment in every way. Unfortunately the picture has come under a barrage of unfair criticism from two of the most irritating creatures who lurk about IMDb -- the self-appointed history professor and the politically correct gestapo enforcer. The professors of course are right in saying the movie plays fast and loose with history. But who cares! This is a work of fiction, **based** on actual events but not bound to portray them with circumspect accuracy. When the facts get in the way of the story, the story comes first. Only the most naive and uneducated expect a movie to give accurate history. You have to go to one of those old artifacts of the pre-electronic age, a book, to get the facts. Santa Fe Trail does, however, give an excellent impressionistic view of the events and attitudes leading up to the Civil War. It should set off a looking-up binge for the curious. I recall when first seeing the picture about fifty years ago, I did a lot of looking up. I didn't expect to find Jeb Stuart and Custer in the same West Point class. I already knew enough to know that Custer was much younger. But I was pleasantly surprised to find Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart were in fact at the siege at Harpers Ferry. By the way some of the professors erred in complaining that lever action rifles were used -- meaning repeating rifles, which would be incorrect for the time period. The rifles used in Santa Fe Trail were Sharps single shot breech loaders, which employed an under lever to open and close the breech for reloading -- in wide use during the 1850's. Not everything was inaccurate!The politically correct thought-control police have labeled Santa Fe Trail "racist" simply because it tries to show both sides of the issue and because it portrays Brown as an unbalanced murderer, which no serious history denies, rather than the hero they horrifyingly think he was. They have been joined by the rabidly Southerner-hating Yankees who come out of the woodwork to comment on any Civil War era movie. In fact this movie takes no side. The movie studios of the Golden Era had no agenda, except entertaining people and making stacks of money doing it, which Santa Fe Trail delivered on both accounts. It wasn't taking the Southern side to have Jeb Stuart say the South would eventually take care of the slavery problem itself. That was a common Southern attitude. Because he said it doesn't mean it was true or the movie makers approved it. And on and on. What Santa Fe Trail failed to show about the era leading up the the War Between the States was the real cause of the war. It wasn't slavery, or saving the Union, or state's rights or Southern independence. Those were just excuses for fighting. The War happened because the people of the North and the people of the South hated each other's guts. Did then, did from the very beginning of the Republic, and still do! No, the movie Santa Fe Trail didn't show that, but the IMDb reviews and message board posts demonstrate it all too well.

Bill Slocum 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.