Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

edwagreen Outstanding pre-civil war drama. I guess that Raymond Massey was destined to freeing the slaves. Not only is he John Brown in this terrific film, the same year he was Abe Lincoln in "Abe Lincoln in Illinois."There is so much irony here with the characters of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee playing union officers in hot pursuit of anarchist Brown, the latter's violent anti-slavery position would lead him and his family to ultimate doom.Olivia De Havilland vies for the affection of Ronald Reagan and Errol Flynn, the latter a southerner in the Union Army.We see the divisions of the ultimate catastrophe in West Point and with the John Brown fiasco.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . and J.E.B. Stuart emerges victorious against his Real Life nemesis, George Armstrong Custer. Those brave enough to seek the Truth know that the men who died inside the Alamo were Hell-bent on kidnapping the Black Population of Texas Province BACK into Slavery AFTER their lawful government in Mexico City had emancipated ALL victims of Human Slavery nationwide! Similarly, John Brown and his Freedom Fighters, libeled here in SANTA FE TRAIL, are largely responsible for Blacks being Free in America today. Without Brown, Abe Lincoln would NOT have been elected president, and NO Civil War would have been fought. (Robert E. Lee is shown here personally stringing up Brown for killing a few dozen in Freedom's Cause; Lee's henchman John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln before Abe could string up Lee for murdering 300,000-plus in Slavery's Cause!) As Errol Flynn's mealy-mouthed version of Stuart says to Ronald Reagan's Custer, today the Slave Owners of the South would still be debating whether Oprah, LeBron, and Tiger's grandkids might one day be set Free. (Stuart was a firm believer in Millenia of genteel discussion among the lazy Plantation Owners.) SANTA FE TRAIL places Custer in the West Point Class of 1854, and asserts that he hails from the Buckeye State. Even Australian Flynn knew that George was a Michigan cadet from the class of 1862, so he insisted on playing Custer himself the following year in THEY DIED WITH THEIR BOOTS ON to set the record straight. The latter flick includes Custer's oft-quoted line, "Charge, you Wolverines!" which initiated the defeat of Stuart's cavalry by Custer's horsemen, dooming Pickett's Charge, and the hopes of the South to persist in their evil Racist Slavery System. It's just so tragic that Flynn, by his birth, was ineligible to become U.S. President. If he had been a viable candidate, it's likely he would have taken better care of himself and been around to beat "The Gipper" once again in the 1980 election. The theft of 99% of America's Wealth by the One Per Centers never would have gotten a start under President Errol, and Virtual Slavery would not have been imposed on the American Majority!

lmbelt A classic Flynn-DeHaviland film no doubt. But as an adequate depiction, or attempt at, historical fiction... well, not hardly. If you love a good western, love triangle, or Errol Flynn action epic, this is definitely the one to catch. As for the facts, well why bother. Being a Civil War buff, the extreme inaccuracies of the story line and fictionalized accounts of the principal characters was, for me, a major distraction. But as a film buff, hey what's not to like? Lots of action, great scenery, a handsome cast, and two zany, Shakespearean sidekicks.The biggest distraction for me was the grouping of West Point graduates. It is simply ludicrous beyond belief. For example, James Longstreet graduated from the Academy in 1842, John Hood and Phil Sheridan in 1853, J.E.B. Stuart in 1854, and George Armstrong Custer in 1861 (prematurely at that). Yet here they are all happy-go-lucky classmates sharing the same graduation class and thus assigned to Fort Leavenworth upon leaving West Point. In actuality, Custer was only 19 and still at West Point when John Brown was captured! This is not to say the depiction of commandant Colonel Robert E. Lee is not wonderful. It is. That of Secretray of War Jeff Davis is actually better! A blind hog finding an acorn, make that two acorns, maybe? In the film, the arsenal at Harpers Ferry is surrounded by mountains (a good thing), even if it is in no way surrounded by a town (not so good). And Brown's raid is staffed by about ten times the actual number that took the arsenal. Probably the saddest misrepresentation, however, is the lack of any black raiders, of which there were a few, including the first raider to have been killed.Yet this is still a very entertaining movie and one not to be missed by Flynn fans, Reagan worshipers, DeHavilland admirers (of which I am one), or John Brown worshipers (of which I am not). Where that train at the end is headed is anyone's guess since the track was probably not yet laid. But that's what Hollywood was about back then. Maybe the train was taking the crew back to L.A.

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.