If you're expecting a film about the Santa Fe Trail...which would be logical based on the title, you're going to be very disappointed. The Santa Fe Trail is almost irrelevant to the film, other than that the railroad couldn't really be built until John Brown was driven out of Bloody Kansas. That's what this film is really about -- John Brown.My other criticism here is the comedy relief by Guinn Williams and Alan Hale. I'm not sure much comedy relief was needed here...or appropriate. SO I felt it was a negative to the telling of the story.Aside from those 2 issues, this is a great film! It brings together "Jeb" Stuart, George Armstrong Custer, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis at a time when all were still together in the nation. And, while I won't give the film an A+ in history, enough of it is basically true that it is quite fascinating. Even the depiction of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, although filmed in California is somewhat passable, albeit way to arid..Errol Flynn was at his peak here as eventual Confederate leader "Jeb" Stuart. What a handsome and suave actor he was, yet he had the ability to be rough and tumble. He's nigh on perfect here.Olivia de Havilland, as his love interest, is very good here, although her role is decidedly secondary to the story.The real standout here is third-billed Raymond Massey, here playing John Brown. It is a stunning performance! Perhaps his best. Odd when you think of it that he also played Lincoln in "Abe Lincoln In Illinois" in the same year! Ronald Reagan is decent here as an actor...but nothing like we have come to know George Armstrong Custer. But, that's Hollywood.Van Heflin is more the bad guy here than John Brown. He plays another of the West Point graduates, but one who is a traitor of sorts for money, and later turns his back on John Brown because of money. Of course, he pays a high price for his chicanery. It's a good performance, although I have never been a particular fan of Heflin.Moroni Olsen plays a younger Robert E. Lee than we're used to, so it doesn't seem quite like our picture of him. Erville Alderson plays Jefferson Davis, and with makeup it's a pretty good portrayal.Another highlight of this film are a couple of military shoot-outs. They go all out; it's really quite spectacular.Unfortunately, the print I saw on TCM wasn't in particularly good shape. Not bad enough to avoid watching it, but not sharp at all. I understand that the film is in the public domain, but you would think that Warner Brothers would have a good original print to work from in a restoration. After all, this was one of the biggest films for them in 1940.Again, bait and switch, but it's a rather enthralling film. I give it a very strong "7".

It's 1854. West Point is run by respected commandant Col. Robert E. Lee. Cadet Carl Rader brings in pamphlets from abolitionist John Brown leading to a fight among the cadets. Rader is dishonorably discharged by Lee after a fight with Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn). Stuart and others are happy to be stationed in the toughest outpost. Stuart and Custer (Ronald Reagan) are sent to Fort Leavenworth in the Kansas Territory. On the train there, they're taken with 'Kit Carson' Holliday (Olivia de Havilland). Oliver Brown tries to smuggle Negroes out and is confronted. He escapes by shooting one of the bounty hunters. Everyone agrees that bloody Kansas needs to rid itself of the villainous abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey), father of Oliver.This is a Bizarro world of yore where slavery is no big deal, abolitionists are villains, and people should simply let things be. The movie is definitely made in another era and serves as a time capsule for 1940 as much as for 1854. The rooting interest is against John Brown and the abolitionist, and for everybody especially slave-owing Stuart and flamboyant Custer in fighting against the revolutionaries. It's well made with plenty of action. The rooting interest is horribly tone-deaf in the modern sense. It is fascinating to see the old popular culture that is so different.

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.

This is an odd film for several reasons. First, the title has nothing to do with the story. Second, the politics are extremely murky, to the point of being deliberately obscure but still unmistakable and, to the modern eye, eyebrow-raising. Third, it features a strange meeting between two future US Presidents. It is perhaps the weirdest Western Hollywood ever made, but, unlike, say, 1970s Westerns that strove mightily to be revisionist and different, this one is unintentionally strange.Errol Flynn stars as JEB Stuart, part of a cadre of West Point graduates who (supposedly) were great friends but who later formed the military leaders of both sides of the Civil War. They politely spar over women, but not so politely against a messianic wild-eyed fanatic who is determined to upset everybody's comfortable life because of his obsession. That madman is one John Brown, who ultimately takes his fight from the wilds of Kansas to the neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The story ultimately devolves into a quite accurate depiction of the John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry and its resolution (Brown's hanging).Anyway, the only reason this film is titled "Santa Fe Trail" is because some of the events in the film take place near that trail's beginning. But that's not the oddest thing about it, not by far. This film takes the extremely politically incorrect position of making abolitionist Brown into the Osama bin Laden of his day and a group of (later Confederate) officers who captured him (Robert E. Lee, JEB Stuart) into the heroes. It doesn't come straight out in the open and say that the Civil War was a bad thing, but it comes darn close. One of the odder scenes is when a former slave tells Stuart, "If this is freedom, I don't want it." Now, try putting THAT into a modern film. Well, you could try, I suppose....The strange sympathy shown for the South and its leaders and its cause isn't the end of the oddities, though. There is a bizarre scene where future General Custer, played by Ronald Reagan (one of Flynn's signature roles was Custer in "They Died with their Boots On," adding to the confusion), dances with a pretty young lady and then is taken to meet her dad - future President Abraham Lincoln! They have a polite exchange, then Ron goes off to fight the evil guy who wants to free the slaves. So one actor playing a future President (this is set two years before Lincoln took office) has a strange and completely unnecessary scene with another actor who actually became President (forty years after this film was made). And the actor who played the strangely shaven Lincoln is completely uncredited anywhere, along with the daughter. Of course, Lincoln didn't even HAVE a daughter! It's all a bit odd and makes my head hurt. One of those strange moments in film history that nobody even noticed but is full of resonance now.Strange politics aside and oddities forgotten for the moment, this is a rousing war drama about some crucial events that otherwise are completely overlooked by Hollywood, probably because of the weird politics involved. The good guys later became the bad guys, and then revered figures in the history books, while the bad guy's cause was completely redeemed by history, so was he really a bad guy at all? Raymond Massey completely steals the film as Brown, playing the character as a complete and utter fanatic with delusions of Godhood and the air of a latter-day Moses freeing the slaves. One of the most mesmerizing performances I've ever seen. It just happens also to be completely confusing as any kind of political statement or interpretation of the man himself and what he stood for.So, OK, it's impossible to put the weirdness aside if you know the history at all. But well worth catching in any event.