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So perish all such enemies of the Union, all such foes of the human race
It was too hot last night. I slept badly and had a nightmare of the sticky, clinging kind, where an hour after waking it still feels like something that really, unpleasantly happened. I can't blame it on my bedtime reading, because I loved Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color (1997) and am cheerfully planning to depress myself with Fever Season (1998) when I get a chance. Today the breeze smells like the sea at the end of summer; it's making me homesick. I think today is catch-up movie day. [edit] It is not catch-up movie day because the first attempted sketch ran away into a rant. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel asked me if I had ever panned a film for my Patreon and I allowed that usually I write about things I actually like. I will get around to Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). Sometimes you just have to yell about bad movies on the internet.
Santa Fe Trail (1940) is a bad movie. I am almost tempted to say it's an evil one. How else would you define a retelling of Bleeding Kansas and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry where the abolitionists are the blatant villains of the piece? The heroes are J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan1), here recent graduates of West Point deployed to Fort Leavenworth as peacekeepers for Kansas; since their mission entails repelling Brown's raids, breaking his supply chains, and disrupting his support of the Underground Railroad, the presence of the U.S. Army in the contested territory not so tacitly equals the upholding of slavery. I don't argue with that as a historical truth. I just object to being bludgeoned toward the opinion that I should endorse it.
To a man—and they are all men; I think the only women with speaking roles in this film are Olivia de Havilland and a mammy stereotype—the abolitionists of Santa Fe Trail are passionately misguided at best, violent opportunists at worst. Raymond Massey plays Brown with considerable force and charisma, but the character remains a dangerous fanatic, a Bible-belting domestic terrorist who believes it's God's work he's doing when he murders decent, ordinary folk who just happen to own slaves; our heroes know better and know too that he must be stopped for the good of the nation he's driving into needless, bloody conflict: "To the Devil with the Union! We've got to fight sometime and it might as well be now!" Certainly there's room in Hollywood for a thoughtful exploration of the effectiveness of Brown's methods versus the righteousness of his cause, but it's not this movie. The fact that he opposes the ownership of other human beings is not only not given the moral weight I would expect of the issue, but actively undermined at almost every turn of the story. Outside of Brown's wild-eyed thundering sermons, most of the script's anti-slavery arguments are voiced by Van Heflin's Carl Rader, a disgraced former cadet with a murderous chip on his shoulder for Stuart who got him expelled from West Point for distributing abolitionist literature. Ideologically, he's absolutely in the right. Personally, he's a sneering cynic who first disparages Stuart's slave-holding background when the other cadet calls him on the incompetent roughness with which he was handling his horse. If the coming apocalypse of the Civil War appears as a religious duty to John Brown, to Rader it's an opportunity for settling scores: "You get this from me, Stuart—and all you other Mason-Dixon plutocrats—the time is coming when the rest of us are going to wipe you and your kind off the face of the earth!" Neither Stuart nor Custer is terribly surprised to find their sometime classmate riding with Brown's raiders in Kansas, playing the turncoat with a casual, capable malice that makes him much more interesting to watch than either of the leads, but later dialogue will reveal that he's doing it for money, not morality: "I signed up because you promised to pay me. Trained this rabble gang of yours into a solid, fast-moving unit of fighters. Taught them how to use these new rifles, how to follow orders and take a town Army-fashion. But I haven't received a red cent in three months . . . You hired me as a military expert at a set price and I'm only asking what's rightly due me." Ultimately he will betray Brown as unscrupulously as he did his country and take a bullet for his troubles. Even the tentatively sympathetic statements offered by de Havilland's Kit Holliday as she tends to one of Brown's sons—"His reasons may be right, Jason"—are ferociously repudiated by the disillusioned boy now dying of wounds sustained in a botched attempt to intercept a shipment of Beecher's Bibles. As the action shifts to Brown and his men, a scene-setting caption sums up the script's attitude: "The town of Palmyra, cancer of Kansas and the western end of the underground railroad for slaves." So much for the abolitionists.
By contrast, Flynn's Stuart is a very gentleman of Southern reason, proffering apologias like the equivocating "It isn't our job to decide who's right or wrong about slavery any more than it is John Brown's" and the wholly ahistorical "The people of Virginia have long considered a resolution to abolish slavery . . . All they ask is time." The Northerners and the rabble-rousing activists are importunate, pushing where they should be patient; it is they who endanger the stability of their nation, threatening to fracture an otherwise untroubled whole. If the U.S. government has to send troops to enforce the brutal survival of slavery, it's justified in the name of the national good. The commencement speaker for West Point's Class of 1854 echoes this sentiment in his parting words to the graduating cadets: "We are not yet a wealthy nation, except in spirit, and that unity of spirit is our greatest strength . . . With your unswerving loyalty and the grace of God, our nation shall have no fears for the future, and your lives will have been spent in the noblest of all causes—the defense of the rights of man." This is Jefferson Davis (Erville Anderson), promoting the solidarity of the nation in his capacity as Secretary of War without a hint from the script of his future position as first and only President of the Confederate States of America. When he speaks of "the rights of man," a modern audience may correctly insert an automatic "white" before that last noun. But of course it's only white people we're talking about here. We are a decade and a half ahead of the civil rights movement. Do not get me started on the near-complete absence of black characters from the narrative unless someone is either rescuing or recapturing them. When they do feature as more than silent background bodies, it's only to ventriloquize the worst stereotypes of the happy plantation—the supposedly emancipated black couple who greet the sound of Stuart's voice with an enthusiastic "We's coming, boss!" and lament afterward that "Old John Brown said he was going to give us freedom, but shuckins—if this here Kansas is freedom, then I ain't got no use for it. No, sir!"–"Me, neither! I just want to get back home to Texas and sit till Kingdom Come." Considering some of the jaw-droppingly racist jokes I have seen come out of the '30's and '40's, I suppose this sort of thing is part and parcel of the background radiation of racism at the time, but taken with the rest of Santa Fe Trail's politics it plays even more appallingly. I'm not even sure how to approach the character of the Native woman at Fort Leavenworth who tells the fortunes of Stuart and Custer and their West Point friends only in slant oracular terms of the Civil War.2 By the time the plot had shot Carl Rader, hanged John Brown, and resolved the thoroughly predictable love triangle with Kit Holliday in favor of Stuart—Custer gets the consolation prize of Jefferson Davis' daughter, which thanks to the fact that in real life he was married to Elizabeth Bacon I didn't see coming—I didn't even care anymore.
The movie runs 110 minutes and everything after about minute three is mind-boggling. I am used to Hollywood playing fast and loose with history in order to make a better story, but rarely to Hollywood reversing the course of history entirely. Even Gone with the Wind (1939), generally the poster child for the romanticization of the antebellum South, didn't leave me staring at the screen with the same dissonance as Santa Fe Trail.3 This wasn't some white supremacist fringe production; it was a reasonably budgeted Warner Bros. A-picture directed by Michael Curtiz, who I don't exactly associate with fascist filmmaking. Screenwriter Robert Buckner came from Virginia, but I'd like to think that's not the full explanation. If you were to tell me that the tropes of the U.S. Army Western and the anti-demagoguery rhetoric of America on the brink of World War II converged in a perfect storm of unexamined racism, I'd believe it, but I'd still be sad. I know the United States was hella isolationist in 1940, but Jesus. Whatever the cause, the existence of movies like Santa Fe Trail and the imprint they leave in the popular consciousness are exactly the reasons we need movies like Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation (2016) or television like Misha Green and Joe Pokaski's Underground (2016–). I finished watching this movie and shouted atrushthatspeaks about it until we could have a more or less coherent conversation about Bleeding Kansas and the Missouri Compromise and the Western campaigns of the Civil War. My husband gave me very patient feedback on further shouting over the course of today. This anti-history brought to you by my disapproving backers at Patreon.
1. If his work in Santa Fe Trail is representative of his talents, then I understand the appeal of Reagan as an actor even less than I understand his success as a politician. He's youthful and he's probably good-looking if you like the all-American stereotype and he can say all of his lines in the right order, but so could any number of second-string male leads of his generation. Some of them turned into interesting actors; some of them dropped off the map. I look at Reagan and think that he would have been utterly forgettable if he hadn't gone into politics. I wish he had been forgotten.
2. Look, I understand that outside of a revisionist Western she wasn't going to look into the fire for Reagan's Custer and then laugh her head off, but I would really have appreciated it.
3. I'm not even docking the script points for minor historical inaccuracies like the fact that Stuart and Custer were never classmates at West Point—Stuart graduated in 1854 as depicted, but Custer didn't even matriculate until 1857, where he famously finished dead last in his class with a bad-conduct record that still stands today—or the fact that Cyrus K. Holliday's Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway wasn't chartered until 1859 and the track-laying didn't begin until 1868—which would have made it rather difficult for Stuart and Kit to celebrate their wedding on the maiden run of her father's new train, especially since the historical Jeb Stuart died at the Battle of Yellow Tavern in 1864 and was incidentally married to someone completely different—and, you know, there's not caring about history and then there's lighting it on fire, leaving it on your neighbor's doorstep, ringing the bell, and running away.
derspatchel asked me if I had ever panned a film for my Patreon and I allowed that usually I write about things I actually like. I will get around to Robert Aldrich's The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956). Sometimes you just have to yell about bad movies on the internet.Santa Fe Trail (1940) is a bad movie. I am almost tempted to say it's an evil one. How else would you define a retelling of Bleeding Kansas and John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry where the abolitionists are the blatant villains of the piece? The heroes are J.E.B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan1), here recent graduates of West Point deployed to Fort Leavenworth as peacekeepers for Kansas; since their mission entails repelling Brown's raids, breaking his supply chains, and disrupting his support of the Underground Railroad, the presence of the U.S. Army in the contested territory not so tacitly equals the upholding of slavery. I don't argue with that as a historical truth. I just object to being bludgeoned toward the opinion that I should endorse it.
To a man—and they are all men; I think the only women with speaking roles in this film are Olivia de Havilland and a mammy stereotype—the abolitionists of Santa Fe Trail are passionately misguided at best, violent opportunists at worst. Raymond Massey plays Brown with considerable force and charisma, but the character remains a dangerous fanatic, a Bible-belting domestic terrorist who believes it's God's work he's doing when he murders decent, ordinary folk who just happen to own slaves; our heroes know better and know too that he must be stopped for the good of the nation he's driving into needless, bloody conflict: "To the Devil with the Union! We've got to fight sometime and it might as well be now!" Certainly there's room in Hollywood for a thoughtful exploration of the effectiveness of Brown's methods versus the righteousness of his cause, but it's not this movie. The fact that he opposes the ownership of other human beings is not only not given the moral weight I would expect of the issue, but actively undermined at almost every turn of the story. Outside of Brown's wild-eyed thundering sermons, most of the script's anti-slavery arguments are voiced by Van Heflin's Carl Rader, a disgraced former cadet with a murderous chip on his shoulder for Stuart who got him expelled from West Point for distributing abolitionist literature. Ideologically, he's absolutely in the right. Personally, he's a sneering cynic who first disparages Stuart's slave-holding background when the other cadet calls him on the incompetent roughness with which he was handling his horse. If the coming apocalypse of the Civil War appears as a religious duty to John Brown, to Rader it's an opportunity for settling scores: "You get this from me, Stuart—and all you other Mason-Dixon plutocrats—the time is coming when the rest of us are going to wipe you and your kind off the face of the earth!" Neither Stuart nor Custer is terribly surprised to find their sometime classmate riding with Brown's raiders in Kansas, playing the turncoat with a casual, capable malice that makes him much more interesting to watch than either of the leads, but later dialogue will reveal that he's doing it for money, not morality: "I signed up because you promised to pay me. Trained this rabble gang of yours into a solid, fast-moving unit of fighters. Taught them how to use these new rifles, how to follow orders and take a town Army-fashion. But I haven't received a red cent in three months . . . You hired me as a military expert at a set price and I'm only asking what's rightly due me." Ultimately he will betray Brown as unscrupulously as he did his country and take a bullet for his troubles. Even the tentatively sympathetic statements offered by de Havilland's Kit Holliday as she tends to one of Brown's sons—"His reasons may be right, Jason"—are ferociously repudiated by the disillusioned boy now dying of wounds sustained in a botched attempt to intercept a shipment of Beecher's Bibles. As the action shifts to Brown and his men, a scene-setting caption sums up the script's attitude: "The town of Palmyra, cancer of Kansas and the western end of the underground railroad for slaves." So much for the abolitionists.
By contrast, Flynn's Stuart is a very gentleman of Southern reason, proffering apologias like the equivocating "It isn't our job to decide who's right or wrong about slavery any more than it is John Brown's" and the wholly ahistorical "The people of Virginia have long considered a resolution to abolish slavery . . . All they ask is time." The Northerners and the rabble-rousing activists are importunate, pushing where they should be patient; it is they who endanger the stability of their nation, threatening to fracture an otherwise untroubled whole. If the U.S. government has to send troops to enforce the brutal survival of slavery, it's justified in the name of the national good. The commencement speaker for West Point's Class of 1854 echoes this sentiment in his parting words to the graduating cadets: "We are not yet a wealthy nation, except in spirit, and that unity of spirit is our greatest strength . . . With your unswerving loyalty and the grace of God, our nation shall have no fears for the future, and your lives will have been spent in the noblest of all causes—the defense of the rights of man." This is Jefferson Davis (Erville Anderson), promoting the solidarity of the nation in his capacity as Secretary of War without a hint from the script of his future position as first and only President of the Confederate States of America. When he speaks of "the rights of man," a modern audience may correctly insert an automatic "white" before that last noun. But of course it's only white people we're talking about here. We are a decade and a half ahead of the civil rights movement. Do not get me started on the near-complete absence of black characters from the narrative unless someone is either rescuing or recapturing them. When they do feature as more than silent background bodies, it's only to ventriloquize the worst stereotypes of the happy plantation—the supposedly emancipated black couple who greet the sound of Stuart's voice with an enthusiastic "We's coming, boss!" and lament afterward that "Old John Brown said he was going to give us freedom, but shuckins—if this here Kansas is freedom, then I ain't got no use for it. No, sir!"–"Me, neither! I just want to get back home to Texas and sit till Kingdom Come." Considering some of the jaw-droppingly racist jokes I have seen come out of the '30's and '40's, I suppose this sort of thing is part and parcel of the background radiation of racism at the time, but taken with the rest of Santa Fe Trail's politics it plays even more appallingly. I'm not even sure how to approach the character of the Native woman at Fort Leavenworth who tells the fortunes of Stuart and Custer and their West Point friends only in slant oracular terms of the Civil War.2 By the time the plot had shot Carl Rader, hanged John Brown, and resolved the thoroughly predictable love triangle with Kit Holliday in favor of Stuart—Custer gets the consolation prize of Jefferson Davis' daughter, which thanks to the fact that in real life he was married to Elizabeth Bacon I didn't see coming—I didn't even care anymore.
The movie runs 110 minutes and everything after about minute three is mind-boggling. I am used to Hollywood playing fast and loose with history in order to make a better story, but rarely to Hollywood reversing the course of history entirely. Even Gone with the Wind (1939), generally the poster child for the romanticization of the antebellum South, didn't leave me staring at the screen with the same dissonance as Santa Fe Trail.3 This wasn't some white supremacist fringe production; it was a reasonably budgeted Warner Bros. A-picture directed by Michael Curtiz, who I don't exactly associate with fascist filmmaking. Screenwriter Robert Buckner came from Virginia, but I'd like to think that's not the full explanation. If you were to tell me that the tropes of the U.S. Army Western and the anti-demagoguery rhetoric of America on the brink of World War II converged in a perfect storm of unexamined racism, I'd believe it, but I'd still be sad. I know the United States was hella isolationist in 1940, but Jesus. Whatever the cause, the existence of movies like Santa Fe Trail and the imprint they leave in the popular consciousness are exactly the reasons we need movies like Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave (2013) and Nate Parker's The Birth of a Nation (2016) or television like Misha Green and Joe Pokaski's Underground (2016–). I finished watching this movie and shouted at
rushthatspeaks about it until we could have a more or less coherent conversation about Bleeding Kansas and the Missouri Compromise and the Western campaigns of the Civil War. My husband gave me very patient feedback on further shouting over the course of today. This anti-history brought to you by my disapproving backers at Patreon.1. If his work in Santa Fe Trail is representative of his talents, then I understand the appeal of Reagan as an actor even less than I understand his success as a politician. He's youthful and he's probably good-looking if you like the all-American stereotype and he can say all of his lines in the right order, but so could any number of second-string male leads of his generation. Some of them turned into interesting actors; some of them dropped off the map. I look at Reagan and think that he would have been utterly forgettable if he hadn't gone into politics. I wish he had been forgotten.
2. Look, I understand that outside of a revisionist Western she wasn't going to look into the fire for Reagan's Custer and then laugh her head off, but I would really have appreciated it.
3. I'm not even docking the script points for minor historical inaccuracies like the fact that Stuart and Custer were never classmates at West Point—Stuart graduated in 1854 as depicted, but Custer didn't even matriculate until 1857, where he famously finished dead last in his class with a bad-conduct record that still stands today—or the fact that Cyrus K. Holliday's Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway wasn't chartered until 1859 and the track-laying didn't begin until 1868—which would have made it rather difficult for Stuart and Kit to celebrate their wedding on the maiden run of her father's new train, especially since the historical Jeb Stuart died at the Battle of Yellow Tavern in 1864 and was incidentally married to someone completely different—and, you know, there's not caring about history and then there's lighting it on fire, leaving it on your neighbor's doorstep, ringing the bell, and running away.
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Mind you my eyebrows had already hit the ceiling at the idea of Reagan playing Custer.
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It only got worse the more I thought about it. I mean, I had recognized while watching it that it wasn't any good, but as the patterns started to line up in my head, it plummeted to a depth of historical disingenuousness I honestly thought Hollywood had left unplumbed since D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). It didn't heroize the Klan and nobody got lynched, but that's really not an endorsement of a film's racial politics, you know?
Mind you my eyebrows had already hit the ceiling at the idea of Reagan playing Custer.
Well, they were both terrible!
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It just kept unfolding like some horrendous fractal origami the more I wrote about it—
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This review has also succeeded in earworming me with Tom Burleigh's Dead by Eddie From Ohio, who are after all, from Virginia (even Eddie). I think the song is about an actual historical person, unlike the film's depictions. It also sounds a bit cheerier.
The whole depiction makes me wonder about the screenwriter's motives, and whether it was a politically charged script at the time.
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It certainly provided me with a lot to think and write about, also intermittently shout at my computer.
This review has also succeeded in earworming me with Tom Burleigh's Dead by Eddie From Ohio, who are after all, from Virginia (even Eddie). I think the song is about an actual historical person, unlike the film's depictions. It also sounds a bit cheerier.
. . . That's amazing. Thank you. I don't think I'd even heard of the song, much less heard it. "So let's raise a glass to the luck of the Irish / And to Tom who is dead 'cause he forgot to duck."
The whole depiction makes me wonder about the screenwriter's motives, and whether it was a politically charged script at the time.
My instinctive answer is that I can't see how it wouldn't have been, but maybe I am overestimating the historical awareness and/or caring of the production team. I'd have to look into it. I cannot imagine that I am the first person to trip across the film and then need to take it apart.
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The mind-boggling thing there is that the scriptwriter didn't want to make Custer *or* the Natives the villains, so all the racism gets displaced onto some other guy who tries to start a gold rush, and the movie ends with Custer and his troops *deliberately* walking into the Little Bighorn because...... their getting killed will help the Natives somehow?
I don't know what was up with Warner Bros. for a year or two there.
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What the hell was in the zeitgeist?
the scriptwriter didn't want to make Custer or the Natives the villains, so all the racism gets displaced onto some other guy who tries to start a gold rush, and the movie ends with Custer and his troops deliberately walking into the Little Bighorn because...... their getting killed will help the Natives somehow?
I'm starting to remember why I don't watch so many Westerns.
I don't know what was up with Warner Bros. for a year or two there.
Memo to Jack Warner, care of Anachronism: FOR THE LOVE OF HISTORICITY, LEAVE THE WEST ALONE.
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John Brown's granddaughter sued the studio over the portrayal of her grandfather. She didn't win, but the fact that she felt compelled to try says a mouthful.
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...well, that doesn't sound like Reagan at all. Plus ça change, etc.
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States' rights!
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You're very welcome. I'm not quite sure I can call it the single weirdest viewing experience of this project so far, because the Impressionist-animated cat musical set a pretty high bar, but it gave me even more historical WTF than Mr. Skeffington (1944) and that involved surprise Holocaust. There may be some kind of lesson here about watching public domain movies because they contain favorite actors. Fortunately, the previous movie in which I saw Van Heflin—Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951)—was incredible, so I don't have to feel too bad for him.