For history buffs this must be more of a Santa Fe trial. Here is John Brown (a real historical figure played by Raymond Massey) demanding money from Boston abolitionists (also real) just before the Civil War. Give me the money, he shouts, and I'll start a slave revolution in the upland South. He knows that country. It's filled with hiding places for guerrilla warriors. So he and his handful devoted followers take over the federal arsenal and settle down in Harper's Ferry, Virginia. The tiny town was, and is, a sinkhole at the confluence of two rivers. If you stand in the main street of Harper's Ferry and look in any direction, all you see are tall wooded hills looming over you. It's about the least defensible place on the planet. There are a few African-Americans in the movie. The script has one of them say something like: "Mistuh Brown, he promised us da freedom. But if dis here Kansis is freedom, I wants to go back to Texas where Ah kin live mah lahf in PEACE." You bet.
However, let us skip over the anachronisms -- the absence of muskets, the presence of generic Colt pistols, the fact that Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn), George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan), Bell, Sheridan, Longstreet, Hood, and Pickett didn't graduate from West Point in the same year -- and examine the movie as a Ding an Sich.
The errors of time are lost in the headlong pace of this Western. And it IS a Western, though some scenes are set in the East. There is never any doubt who the good guys are. They're the ones who shoot their pistols jauntily, without aiming, and hit their targets. John Brown and his followers are bad guys, yes, but with mitigation, your Honor. His passion to free the slaves was all right, but his violent methods were all wrong. Every Western, though, must have a genuinely evil guy and in this case it's Van Heflin. His character seems lashed together in haste. At West Point, before he's thrown out, he reads treasonous literature to the other cadets and gets into fist fights (with Flynn!) over the issue of slavery. By the end, he's revealed as a craven money-grabber who only joined Brown's movement for the moolah, and when it's denied him he squeals on Brown to the government. That's known as discontinuity. I speak here not of historical inaccuracy but of dramatic clumsiness. God help me, my phraseology has been contaminated by listening to John Brown's dialog.
You ought to see this movie if only for Raymond Massey's overblown portrait of John Brown. He never blinks. His eyes bulge -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- his eyes bulge until the dark irises are completely surrounded by white. I just tried it in the mirror and I can't even come close.
There is an attempt at comedy. Its instruments are Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. It fails dismally. Nothing they say or do would be funny to anyone with a sensibility quotient higher than that of a head of broccoli. The delightful Olivia de Havilland plays "Kit Carson" Halliday, the girl Flynn marries while rival Reagan stands by, shrugs good-naturedly, and smiles. The real Custer later married a smashing brunette named Libby, almost as attractive as de Havilland.
It's a straightforward Warners production with Flynn, Reagan, Michael Curtiz, Max Steiner, Perc Westmore, and Sol Polito all hard at work in the factory, turning out their fast, unpretentious, actioners and dramas in their classic style.
However, let us skip over the anachronisms -- the absence of muskets, the presence of generic Colt pistols, the fact that Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn), George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan), Bell, Sheridan, Longstreet, Hood, and Pickett didn't graduate from West Point in the same year -- and examine the movie as a Ding an Sich.
The errors of time are lost in the headlong pace of this Western. And it IS a Western, though some scenes are set in the East. There is never any doubt who the good guys are. They're the ones who shoot their pistols jauntily, without aiming, and hit their targets. John Brown and his followers are bad guys, yes, but with mitigation, your Honor. His passion to free the slaves was all right, but his violent methods were all wrong. Every Western, though, must have a genuinely evil guy and in this case it's Van Heflin. His character seems lashed together in haste. At West Point, before he's thrown out, he reads treasonous literature to the other cadets and gets into fist fights (with Flynn!) over the issue of slavery. By the end, he's revealed as a craven money-grabber who only joined Brown's movement for the moolah, and when it's denied him he squeals on Brown to the government. That's known as discontinuity. I speak here not of historical inaccuracy but of dramatic clumsiness. God help me, my phraseology has been contaminated by listening to John Brown's dialog.
You ought to see this movie if only for Raymond Massey's overblown portrait of John Brown. He never blinks. His eyes bulge -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- his eyes bulge until the dark irises are completely surrounded by white. I just tried it in the mirror and I can't even come close.
There is an attempt at comedy. Its instruments are Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams. It fails dismally. Nothing they say or do would be funny to anyone with a sensibility quotient higher than that of a head of broccoli. The delightful Olivia de Havilland plays "Kit Carson" Halliday, the girl Flynn marries while rival Reagan stands by, shrugs good-naturedly, and smiles. The real Custer later married a smashing brunette named Libby, almost as attractive as de Havilland.
It's a straightforward Warners production with Flynn, Reagan, Michael Curtiz, Max Steiner, Perc Westmore, and Sol Polito all hard at work in the factory, turning out their fast, unpretentious, actioners and dramas in their classic style.