They Died with Their Boots On (1941)

I’m not a fan of historical movies or of biopics and They Died with Their Boots On, a 1941 Warner Brothers release, is both. It’s a movie I was therefore always going to approach with a certain scepticism. I have never understood why anyone would want to make historical movies or biopics that are mostly pure fantasy and I have never understood why anyone would want to watch such movies.

This movie is also a western of sorts and it is very much an epic. That made Raoul Walsh the ideal director. Walsh had directed The Thief of Bagdad for Douglas Fairbanks in 1924 and while Fairbanks was very much the auteur and Walsh’s job was simply to put Fairbanks’ vision on screen it still provided Walsh with invaluable training in handling epic material and huge productions. And Walsh had already directed a western epic, The Big Trail, in 1930. There was no way that Raoul Walsh was going to be intimidated by a project such as They Died with Their Boots On.

And since this is a movie about George Armstrong Custer, one of the most colourful and controversial men in American history, Errol Flynn was a very obvious casting choice indeed. Whatever you think of Custer he was a larger-than-life character and Flynn was most definitely was a larger-than-life figure himself.

It’s a very long movie and it takes us two hours and twenty minutes to get to the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It begins with Custer’s extraordinary career at West Point which is not exaggerated very much. Custer really did have one of the worst disciplinary records in the history of that august institution.

While at West Point he meets Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland). They both know they’re destined to get married, which they eventually do.

Custer’s spectacular career in the Civil War (he was a general at the age of 23) gets plenty of attention. Some of this stuff is historical and some is pure fantasy.

Custer fails to adjust to civilian life and starts to fall apart until his wife pulls some strings and gets him put back on the active list. He is to take command of a ragtag bunch of hopeless new recruits. He will build them into the legendary 7th Cavalry. There are battles with the Sioux until Custer and Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) decide they both want peace. Custer trusts Crazy Horse and Crazy Horse trusts Custer. They are both right to do so. Custer persuades Crazy Horse that he can trust the US Government as well and should sign a treaty. Trusting the US Government turns out to be a very big mistake.

The US Government is not the only problem. There are also crooked businessmen who want the last remaining lands of the Plains Indians. Every single businessman and politician in this movie is a liar, a cheat and a crook.

This is a movie that is very sympathetic to the Sioux and the other tribes and to Crazy Horse. Custer is the hero and always behave honourably but in the events leading up to the Battle of the Little Bighorn the movie makes it quite explicit that the US Government were the bad guys.

Custer and Crazy Horse are both brave, honourable decent men but they are helpless in the face of the manipulations of those crooked businessmen and politicians. And so they end up facing each other at the Little Bighorn.

Flynn is magnificent. He plays Custer like a dashing figure from an adventure novel and that is more or less how Custer lived his life. No-one did adventure heroes better than Flynn but here he gets the chance to show that he was quite capable of displaying subtlety and emotional depth as well.

Flynn and Olivia de Havilland always made a great romantic pairing and this film is no exception.

Mention must be made of Sydney Greenstreet’s wonderful turn as the army commander-in-chief Winfield Scott. He’s a joy to watch.

As you’d expect Walsh handles the action scenes with plenty of skill. There is a very real sense of tragedy to this movie. Custer is drawn inexorably to his fate by his thirst for both glory and honour. The movie is of course utter nonsense as history but that’s Hollywood. It’s still wildly entertaining. That sense of tragedy makes this more than just a movie about heroism. Highly recommended.

The DVD release includes a brief TCM featurette on the movie made about twenty years ago so it’s mercifully free of ideological lecturing.

Pursued (1947)

Pursued is a 1947 western that sometimes gets described as a noir western. We shall see.

It was directed by Raoul Walsh and photographed by James Wong Howe so you expect it to be visually impressive, and it is. The movie was shot in black-and-white in the 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

It was written by Niven Busch, a fine screenwriter who also wrote some great western novels including Duel in the Sun and The Furies, both of which were made into excellent movies.

It opens with a man obviously on the run from someone. The man is Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum). A girl has come to him with some food and other necessities. She tells him he has to get as far away from here as possible but that he can’t go with him. We then get the backstory an extended flashback.

It begins in Jeb’s childhood. Something very bad happened. He was taken in by Mrs Callum (Judith Anderson) and raised with her son Adam and her daughter Thor (Teresa Wright) on a ranch just outside the town of Lone Horse.

Shortly afterwards, for no reason whatsoever, someone tries to shoot the young Jeb.

Jeb grows up. Mrs Callum’s ranch thrives. Then war with Spain comes. Jeb is sent off to fight and comes back a hero.

Jeb and Thor want to marry. Thor wants a long courtship. Jeb wants to get married straight away. He then wants them to move away. He doesn’t know why but he is sure something bad is going to happen. He is still troubled by bad dreams.

Jeb isn’t paranoid. There’s someone from his past who has spent years plotting against him, and he’s right here in Lone Horse.

There is tension between Jeb and Adam, which leads to a major confrontation.

There are shootings but Jeb can’t figure out why these things are happening. He ends up going into partnership with Honest Jack Dingle (Alan Hale) in a gambling saloon.

Things get weird between Jeb and Thor. There’s another shooting. And eventually Jeb ends up back at his childhood home for a kind of climactic showdown.

Some movies makes the mistake of revealing too much too soon. This movie perhaps conceals things for too long so that the behaviour of most of the characters is so incomprehensible that it’s hard to get engaged with the story.

There are obvious affinities with film noir, especially the use of the extended flashback. What strikes me much more forcibly are the film’s affinities with Spellbound. Hitchcock had made Spellbound just two years earlier and it was a major hit. Like Hitchcock’s film Pursued deals with a man haunted by traumatic childhood events which he cannot clearly remember or understand. And like Spellbound Pursued includes dream sequences.

Pursued also resembles Spellbound in being a muddled mess. Jeb has no idea what is going on in his head and nor do we. His behaviour is bizarre. Thor’s behaviour is bizarre. There’s a sinister character with a grudge against Jeb but the reasons for the grudge are obscure. When we find out the reason we can’t help thinking he’s been holding a grudge against the wrong person.

One interesting aspect to this movie is that there are several gunfights but not one of them is a fair fight. These are not the formalised duels you get in so many westerns. These are ambushes. You don’t give the other fellow a chance to draw his gun. You just plug him, preferably in the back.

Mitchum is OK. Teresa Wright is truly awful.

There really is nothing remotely film noir about Pursued. It’s more of an attempt at a psychological thriller western. Or a psycho-sexual thriller with the sexual bits left out. It has the hallmarks of a screenplay that had been butchered by the Production Code Authority or the studio. It just gives the impression that the characters’ actions are not sufficiently motivated. I suspect that there may been some more obviously Freudian themes that got watered down to the point of virtual non-existence.

For me Pursued is an interesting movie but a bit disappointing. It just doesn’t quite work. It’s still worth a look.

The Olive Films Blu-Ray looks great.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

The Thief of Bagdad, released in 1924, is the greatest of the 1920s Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers. It’s one of the greatest swashbuckling adventure movies of all time, and in my opinion it’s the greatest Hollywood movie of the silent era. Fairbanks considered it to be his best movie, and he was right.

It was not the huge box-office bonanza that had been hoped for. It’s an ambitious demanding movie and audiences looking for pure escapist entertainment found it a little bewildering. It has long provoked conflicting critical assessments, but then great works of art tend to do that.

There have been many movies since that have been inspired by the Arabian Nights but none have surpassed the Fairbanks film.

By 1924, in the wake of box office blockbusters such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) Fairbanks was a huge star. He had a great deal of creative control. He conceived, produced and wrote his 1920s swashbucklers and had major input into every aspect of these films. For The Thief of Bagdad he was also lucky to have very talented collaborators. Raoul Walsh directed and William Cameron Menzies was the art director. But there is no question that this is Fairbanks’ movie. The idea was his and the movie is his vision. He supervised every aspect of the production. Fairbanks was very much an auteur, possibly the outstanding example of a producer-star as auteur.

Fairbanks plays a thief in Bagdad. The Caliph’s daughter is to be married but her husband has not yet been chosen. Three of the greatest princes in the known world have arrived as suitors. They are not merely keen to marry a beautiful princess. Marriage to the princess will make the successful suitor master of Bagdad one day. One of the suitors, the Prince of the Mongols, intends to take Bagdad by force if his suit is unsuccessful.

The princess is superstitious and believes that the man who first touches the rose-tree beneath her window is the man she should marry, and she knows that her father will accept her choice of husband.

The thief sees an opportunity to enrich himself. He steals expensive clothing and presents himself as a fourth suitor, the prince of an entirely mythical land. Of course when he meets the princess he genuinely falls in love with her. And of course his imposture is revealed and he is whipped for his presumption.

A holy man tells him that he must earn the right to the princess’s hand by undergoing a series of quests. If he succeeds then he will surely be enable to marry the princess.

The princess, in order to buy herself time (she dislikes the other three suitors intensely) proposes a quest for the suitors as well. She says she will marry the man who bings her the most fabulously valuable gift. The suitors set out to find suitable gifts which naturally must have magical properties.

The princess has a spy in her midst, a treacherous slave-girl (played by Anna May Wong) who serves the Prince of the Mongols.

It’s a fine story but it’s the way Fairbanks unfolds the story which is entrancing.

In 1924 techniques for moving the camera did not yet exist. F.W. Murnau and his cinematographer Karl Freund are usually given the credit for inventing these techniques in Germany at around this time although the truth is slightly more complicated. In the case of The Thief of Bagdad it doesn’t matter. There are many ways of bringing a sense of movement and dynamism into shots without moving the camera and both Fairbanks and Walsh were keenly aware of the importance of avoiding a static feel. With a star like Fairbanks that was easy. The man was a human dynamo who never stopped moving. If he did stop moving he had the ability to make you think he was about to burst into action again any second.

All the cast members are constantly in movement. Also utilised is the very effective technique of having things happening simultaneously in different parts of the frame. The editing is also lively and very modern. While Walsh must be given some credit it is clear that his job as director was simply to help Fairbanks realise his vision.

One of the most impressive things about this movie is the extraordinary sense of scale that it achieves. You know the sets cannot possibly be that big and yet you find yourself believing that you’re seeing enormous palaces and vast caverns. And in fact the sets really were enormous - the biggest ever built in Hollywood. The movie is extraordinarily successful in achieving a genuine sense of a fantastic world of unreality, a world in which you believe even while acknowledging its unreality. This really is the Arabian Nights brought to life.

The look of the film was heavily influenced by Léon Bakst’s designs for Diaghilev’s ballets, especially Scheherazade.

When watching movies from this period you have to remind yourself just how new was the technology of motion pictures. Motion pictures were being made in the late 1890s but in 1924 the feature film as we know it was only a decade old. Taking this into account the special effects in The Thief of Bagdad work pretty well. How well the special effects work is unimportant. It is the beauty and grandeur of the images and the soaring imagination required to create those images that is breathtaking.

It’s interesting to compare this movie to Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen (1924), made in Germany the same year. Fairbanks had been impressed by Lang’s films, especially Destiny. Fairbanks set out to surpass the German masters, and to a certain extent he succeeded.

Fairbanks brings power and manic energy to the rôle of the thief but also extraordinary grace. He is like an athlete and a dancer rolled into one. Julanne Johnston is both sweet and clever as the Princess. Most reviewers focus quite a bit on Anna May Wong but while she’s fine she has no more than a minor supporting rôle.

The Eureka Masters of Cinema release includes the movie on both Blu-Ray and DVD, with various extras. The transfer is excellent and most importantly it preserves the tinting. Tinting was an important technique is silent film and Fairbanks used it to perfection.

Fairbanks was one of the grand masters of cinema. The Thief of Bagdad is very highly recommended indeed.

The Big Trail (1930)

Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail was an early attempt to make a truly epic western. Fox (this was before the merger that created 20th Century-Fox) not only spent a fortune on the film they also decided to shoot it in an all-new experimental format which they called Grandeur. This was the first widescreen process to be used in Hollywood.

The timing could not have been worse. By the time the movie was ready to go out the Depression was starting to bite. Added to this movie theatre owners were still reeling from the expense of converting to sound. There was no way anyone was going to spend the money required to convert theatres to allow The Big Trail to be screened in the Grandeur format.

The idea of an epic western was also fairly new and perhaps movie-goers were not ready for it. The Big Trail performed poorly at the box office.

The legend has it that this was the movie that should have made John Wayne a star but ended up setting back his bid for stardom by a decade. Personally I think that in 1930 John Wayne was just not ready for stardom. His performance here has none of the effortless quality that characterised his later great performances. He seems a bit nervous and and a bit tentative. When he did finally achieve star status he was ready and in full command of himself as an actor.

The Big Trail is concerned with a huge wagon train full of settlers heading west. Breck Coleman (John Wayne) has been hired as a scout. The wagon boss is a disreputable character named Red Flack (played by Tyrone Power’s dad Tyrone Power Sr). Flack has with him his equally disreputable pal, Lopez.

Coleman signed on as scout because of Red Flack, and because of an old friend of Coleman’s. He very strongly suspects that Flack and Lopez murdered that old friend. Coleman intends to make them pay. He has no intention of turning them over to the proper authorities. That’s not how frontier justice works. He simply intends to kill both men.

Coleman has other things on my mind, principally one of the would-be settlers, Ruth Cameron (Marguerite Churchill). He got off on the wrong foot with her and she hates him but he’s still sure she’s the girl for him.

Gambler and con-man Bill Thorpe (Ian Keith) is a complication. He has also set his eyes on Ruth and has told her stories of his vast plantation in Louisiana. In fact Thorpe owns nothing but the clothes on his back but he’s a charming liar and Ruth believes him. He will cause lots of problems.

The trek to the West is an ordeal. There are constant setbacks, wagons are lost in river crossing, many settlers die crossing 500 miles of desert and there’s a full-scale battle with the Cheyenne. The wagon train pushes on regardless, while Coleman watches and waits for his opportunity to avenge his friend.

These were the very early days of sound pictures, when those pictures were very static and studio-bound. Raoul Walsh wasn’t having any of that nonsense. He intended to shoot on location with live sound, and he did.

This was an insanely ambitious movie. The scale of the movie is breathtaking. Every shot seems to include several hundred extras. There are huge numbers of wagons. This is not the sort of wagon train you see in most westerns. This is like a vast army of settlers on the march.

Walsh’s shot compositions are incredibly busy, there is so much happening in the foreground and the background, but they work. This is spectacle in the best sense of the word. And this was 1930. Walsh could not rely on special effects. If he wanted a scene with dozens of wagons being lowered down a sheer cliff-face the only way to do it was to lower dozens of wagons down a sheer cliff-face, which is what he did. Those kinds of scenes look real in a way that modern CGI never does look real. They look real because they were real.

There are some problems. The pacing is slow at times. The plot doesn’t have much complexity. Many of the supporting actors were forced on Walsh by the studio. He wasn’t happy with them, and he was right. Many of them are terrible. Tyrone Power Sr is just awful. The acting of most of the supporting cast members is stiff and some of the dialogue scenes are rather cringe-inducing. There is irritating comic relief, and there’s too much of it.

John Wayne is OK, but he’s not yet the real John Wayne, the John Wayne of his great movies. Marguerite Churchill on the other hand is very good (her performance is the best in the movie).

You have to make allowances for the fact that this was 1930. The conquest of the West was not something that happened in the distant past. There were plenty of people still living who took part in that conquest, and had first-hand memories of the Wild West. The director of the movie, Raoul Walsh, was personally acquainted with Wyatt Earp (and Earp and John Ford were good buddies). The West had an emotional resonance with Americans in 1930 that is difficult to imagine today. The triumphalist “planting civilisation in the wilderness” message is understandable when you take these things into account.

Somehow The Big Trail manages to overcome its flaws. The visual magnificence helps a great deal. What also helps is the total lack of modern fashionable irony. Whatever you think about the conquest of the West there is no denying that those pioneers had guts. This movie takes their courage seriously, and it takes their suffering seriously.

Watching this movie in its correct aspect ratio on Blu-Ray is an overwhelming experience. If you’re serious about classic movies it’s one that you have to see. And it’s one of the great Hollywood epics. With all its problems it’s still highly recommended.