Oh my God, that is SO much worse than I even thought from the first time you talked about it. I'm genuinely sorry you had to see that.

It just kept unfolding like some horrendous fractal origami the more I wrote about it—derspatchel can attest that I kept exclaiming, "This movie is so bad!" as though continually surprised anew. I think it hadn't quite registered while I was watching how incredibly stacked the script's deck is. Every time it looks like it's about to gesture toward nuance—nope! Not Santa Fe Trail! Anyone else would have deployed Jefferson Davis as historical irony. As far as I can tell, in this movie he's meant to be taken straight. And this is fucking Warners, all right? I really didn't pay much attention to studios outside of MGM musicals until I started watching a lot of pre-Code movies, at which point I realized that Warner Bros. was basically the social justice studio. I guess that changed.