Kirandeep Yoder The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Kinley This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Leftbanker Beautifully shot on location, somewhere in the vast American west. The scenes with hundreds, perhaps thousands of horses were quite impressive and owe nothing to CGI technology.On the other hand the music in older movies doesn't age well and the soundtrack in this film is pretty dreadfully intrusive and often rather annoying.As far as the story we get more of the myth of the noble rebel cause. The righteous southern plantation owner (Rock Hudson) is immediately besieged by carpetbaggers out for his slave holdings in some unnamed southern toilet. As in the myth of Gone with the Wind his slaves see him as some sort of father figure instead of someone they'd like to draw and quarter…like he probably did to many of their family.And, of course, the Mexicans are portrayed as thieving scoundrels after gold and the white biznitches. And of course the Native Americans are pretty much a bad parody of those proud people but this was a western, after all, and that's what they mostly did. Thank god they don't make many these days.Let's be honest, many old movies are pretty terrible and age horribly. I think it was only in the 1970s when films began to take on a simulacrum of reality.

SanteeFats John Wayne plays a Union Colonel who takes his remaining troopers, after the war ends, on a search for wild horses to sell to the U.S. Army. The Army buyers are scum and the horses are then on their way to the French forces in Mexico fighting for Maximilian. On the way they run into a southern wagon train lead by Rock Hudson. Wayne's cowboys rescue the wagon train when it comes under attack by Mexican outlaws. The Rebel wagon train is finally in Mexico where they are suppose to join the French forces. It turns out they are captured by the Mexican rebels. The rebels threaten to kill the rebel's including women and children unless Wayne gives them the horses. Mexican ethics are still showing up today. Wayne leaves it up to his men about the horses and they decide to give the horses up. The only thing I did not like about this movie was the fact that the Mexicans get away with it. Most John Wayne movies end with the good guys at least coming out ahead.

WandrinStar (6/10) John Wayne's other movie from 1969. Often incorrectly labeled as one of Duke's weakest Westerns, I found this to be a clever and fun albeit unspectacular western. I liked how the film bordered on the friendly hostility edge between Wayne's Union troops and Hudson's Confederates. The conflict was always in flux, never turning too animistic or friendly which all comes together in the entertaining fourth of July brawl scene which was undoubtedly the film's best moment. First Rock Hudson film I ever saw, I was extremely impressed by his acting ability. Seeing one of the most famous openly homosexual actors work alongside the conservative Duke is entertaining for nostalgia's sake. The ending was too anti-climatic for me and the film was uneven at times, but it was a good watch with some good historical background.

James Hitchcock The title of "The Undefeated" refers to those Confederates who refused to accept defeat in the American Civil War and migrated to Mexico rather than live under the Union. The film is loosely based on a true story, although the details are very much fictionalised. A group of Confederate soldiers, led by Colonel James Langdon, make their way with their families across Texas, hoping to cross the Rio Grande and to join Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, who has offered them land where they can make a new life. Langdon was once a wealthy plantation owner, but has been ruined financially by the war, and before leaving sets fire to his mansion rather than see it fall into the hands of Northerners.On the journey, Langdon meets an old Civil War antagonist, Colonel John Henry Thomas, who is leading a group of his former soldiers on an expedition to capture a herd of wild horses, which he is hoping to sell to the US government. Upon learning, however, that the Mexican government are willing to pay a better price, Thomas and his men also turn south with their captive herd. The film tells the story of what happens when the two groups of Americans, former enemies, are forced to work together to fight off attacks from bandits and from the Juaristas, republican opponents of Maximilian's government.A number of Westerns from this period had a Mexican-related theme and generally involve Americans becoming embroiled in either the Mexican civil war of the 1860s or the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s; others include "The Wild Bunch", "Two Mules for Sister Sara" and "The Professionals", with "Veracruz" being an earlier example from the fifties. The makers of "The Undefeated", however, were less concerned with the intricacies of Mexican politics than they were with putting across a message of American patriotism. Although the Confederates and Unionists have recently been fighting one another, they learn to respect one another and to unite against a common foe. Thomas and his men not only help the Confederates fight the bandits, they also give up their horses to ransom them when they are being held hostage by a Juarista general.The old divisions- North versus South, blue versus grey, abolitionists versus advocates of slavery- no longer matter; the reconciliation between the two groups takes place, very symbolically, at a Fourth of July party. What matters is that former Confederates and former Unionists are all now Americans, united against the world. Even non-whites are included; a romance develops between Thomas's adopted Indian son Blue Boy and Langdon's daughter. The implied message for the Americans of 1969 is that they must learn to overcome their own divisions- conservative versus liberal, young versus old, black versus white, pro-Vietnam war versus pacifists- in a similar way.This message of inclusive patriotism would have been dear to the heart of one of the film's two big stars, John Wayne, who plays Thomas. The following year Wayne was to make another Western, "Rio Lobo", about Northerners and Southerners learning to live together after the Civil War. It is a potentially interesting theme, but not one which this film makes the most of. Rock Hudson's performance as a Southern gentleman has been criticised, but for me he was not the problem with the film. I will leave comment on his accent to those who are more familiar with the dialects of the Deep South than I am, but I found his portrayal of a proud and honourable aristocrat a convincing one. John Wayne, however, had already shown in "The Green Berets" the year before that he was really too old to go on playing a front-line soldier, and he is no more credible here. The film also contains a few other implausible elements. There may have been men in the 1860s who would have had no objection to their daughter entering into a racially mixed marriage, but I doubt if a die-hard Confederate aristocrat like Langdon would have been one of them. The film ends with both Langdon and Thomas on surprisingly good terms with the Juarista General Rojas, even though he has shown himself to be both ruthless and treacherous and has threatened to shoot the Confederates in cold blood if his ransom demands are not met. The film is also overlong and its pace, particularly during the second half, tends to flag.The late sixties and early seventies saw the last great hurrah of the Western before its decline in the late seventies and eighties, but "The Undefeated" cannot compare in quality with some of the other offerings from the period, such as "The Wild Bunch", or Wayne's other film from 1969, "True Grit", or even with "Chisum", another collaboration between Wayne and director Andrew V. McLaglen from the following year. It is marginally better than the non-Western "The Green Berets", but to say that about a film is no very great praise. 5/10