SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

TheLittleSongbird 'Santa Fe Trail' is not an abomination as a film, although as far as history goes it's rather too generous calling it wild fiction. But considering that it was directed by a director whose best films are some of the best ever made, a very interesting subject matter and a great cast it should have been much better.There are things that work in 'Santa Fe Trail's' favour. It is a magnificently shot film and the scenery and production design are evocative and handsome. Max Steiner's music score is, as to be expected from Steiner, lusciously orchestrated and rousing, providing the excitement that much of the drama sorely needs. The climactic moments are well staged, being exciting and moving and Curtiz excels in playing to his strengths here after spending much of the rest of the film not in control of the script and characterisation and being too subdued.Casting varies, with a very memorable Raymond Massey faring best. Granted it is not a subtle performance and one can understand totally if anybody feels he overplays due to the wildly unbalanced and erratic way the character is written, but Massey is very authoritative and formidable, giving his all to material that didn't deserve that effort. Van Heflin also steals scenes as a more major villain role than his billing suggests and he is sinister enough. Olivia De Havilland shares charming chemistry with Errol Flynn and is radiant and charming and she does try to give the role some meat.However, Flynn, usually a very charismatic and watchable performer even with limitations, clearly didn't look interested, apparently Curtiz was frustrated at Flynn's unreliability and lack of effort and it comes through loud and clear (save his moments with De Havilland). Ronald Reagan is ill at ease as Custer, and Alan Hale and Guinn Williams' comic relief roles could easily have been written out and should have been, the characters are completely pointless, the humour is crass and out of place and both actors (usually funny scene-stealers) overplay ridiculously.On top of that, the script is one-dimensional, very biased, muddled and rambling (some of Brown's dialogue is very long-winded). The story is similarly unfocused, giving a sense that the writers didn't know what they wanted the film to be so threw in as much as they could regardless of execution and relevance, and bogged down by too much filler (including a predictable and thrown in love triangle that ends very patly and the comedy), which really drags the pace and a pedestrian pace.The characters are one-dimensional stereotypes and the film is just too one-sided and biased for the conflicts to really convince, let alone resonate.All in all, could have been very intriguing but despite some good parts it all feels very muddled and misguided. 5/10 Bethany Cox

Goingbegging When Ronald Reagan got into uniform for real in 1942, he was supposedly making a noble sacrifice of his Hollywood career, just as it was poised to win him a lifetime of Oscars. Well, if this film reflects anything of the young Reagan's virtuosity, it seems we didn't miss much. Cast as Errol Flynn's best friend and love-rival, he comes over as the lesser half of the duo, and his limitations show up plainly - a handsome tailor's dummy who can speak clearly, but never with force or conviction.Here he is wearing the uniform of a US Army cadet, one of a troublesome gang who are punished by being sent on their first posting to Kansas, the edge of civilisation in 1855, and the scene of guerrilla fighting between abolitionists and pro-slavery patrols, often viewed as the curtain-raiser for the civil war.The opening is almost comic - a line of cadets being called out by name, all the names belonging to famous future generals who could not possibly have been at West Point in the same year. We could spend all night listing the other inaccuracies, but some details, at least, are historical. Robert E. Lee was indeed head of the military academy, who later arrested John Brown, with cavalry leader Jeb Stuart holding a white flag of truce, while trying to parley with the rebels. And it is also true that the religious maniac Brown was betrayed by his own Judas, for greed of gold.The title 'Santa Fe Trail' does not really signify anything much, except that the planners of the big new railroad are having to suspend work until John Brown's body is firmly in the grave, and the boss's beautiful daughter (Olivia De Havilland), is being competed-for by Stuart (Flynn) and Custer (Reagan) in a style almost reminiscent of Bing and Bob.Star of the show is Raymond Massey as Brown, hugely sinister both in physical presence and in ominous wild talk. Remembering that America must have known by 1940 that it was in for a long war, the political message had to be an appeal for national unity, so most of the characters come out against secession. This has divided modern critics, who are inclined to focus solely on that issue, some dismissing it as a pro-slavery film, others questioning Brown's belief that slavery could be ended only by bloodshed. Neutral observers now agree that slavery would have withered away by about 1880, and even Brown's supporters might accept that "We recognise no law but the law of God" is a bit of a cop-out.A disappointingly weak script by the prolific Robert Buckner. It is not too believable that an elderly Native American clairvoyant would tell the cadets that all of them would become generals, but that they would soon be fighting each other. And the De Havilland character looks odd walking up to an officer and saying "Shall we dance?" I thought they were just meant to wait and yearn.

David Miles It's funny to see the similarities of this movie to a movie Errol Flynn made a year later. 'They Died With Their Boots On' starts out the same way, at West Point. In 'Boots', Errol Flynn plays the part of George Custer and Olivia De Havilland plays his wife. John Litel plays General Sheridan. They both have similar beginnings but tell different stories during the Civil War. Santa Fe deals with the problem of slavery, the abolitionist John Brown and in part shows how the Underground Railway helped some blacks escape slavery. It also shows the harsh reality for those who helped those blacks on the run to freedom. 'Boots' deals with the life of General George Custer, his rise through officer ranks and the dilemma he is faced with that leads to his demise at Little Big Horn. Regardless of any 'liberties' taken by the directors, both movies give an interesting incite into these historical events of the American Civil War.

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.