The last in a sort of trilogy - or, rather, the second follow up to Dodge City. Like that film, Errol is joined by Alan Hale and Big Boy Williams (and director Michael Curtiz, composer Max Steiner, writer Bob Buckner, etc) as they strive to clean up and rough and tough town in Kansas (there's even a scene where Errol visits a barber shop to get a shave and information). And their enemies are evil... abolitionists. Yes, that's right, abolitionists, that cancer on society. (Maybe Buckner thought he'd been a bit too nice to the North in Virginia City.)Politically, this is one of the most fascinating Westerns Hollywood ever made. Errol is in the lead, and the goody - playing Southerner Jeb Stuart, who tsk tsks a fire-breathing abolitionist at West Point, Van Heflin. The film admits slavery is bad but dislikes violence as a way to resolve it - which I guess is fair enough, a bit Ghandi-like for Hollywood, though, especially in an Errol Flynn film, a genre which normally advocates violence (albeit sancitoned by the establishment) as a way of resolving problems.
This film is really one that got away - the battles in bloody Kansas of the 1850s is marvellous stuff for drama, ditto the attack on Harpers Ferry: so many issues, peace vs violence, is it right to use force to combat a great evil?
Raymond Massey is in excellent form as the religious nutter John Brown, who hates slavers so much he doesn't mind massacring them in their sleep. But the film drops the ball - while the script has copped flack for silly things like having Jed Stuart, Custer, Picket, Hood, Sheridan and Longstreet all classmates together that isn't the big problem (they just use it in a sort of kid's way to get familiarity and besides Stuart was at Harper's Ferry); a bigger problem is not exploiting the inherent dramatic possibilities involed: for example Errol and Ronald Reagan (as Custer) are fellow army mates, one from the South one from the north , so you'd think there'd be some excellent chance for confrontation on the issue of Brown... but there's none, just some boring squabbling over Olivia de Havilland (as if Ronnie has a chance next to Errol - though mind you, that didn't stop Patric Knowles in The Charge of the Light Brigade).
And some blacks freed by Brown make the point about what happens after they are free (which is a valid question to ask) - only it's kind of ruined by the fact that all the black characters in this film are depicted as dopey darky types, stupid and wanting to go back to being a slave. I think Hollywood simply wasn't capable doing full justice to this subject in 1940, lest not within the constraints of an Errol Flynn action film. Twenty years later, add some conflict and three-dimensional black characters, this might have become a classic. As it is, the film is always interesting.
There is at least plenty of action - the final attack on Harpers Ferry is spectacular (more so than the real thing perhaps though there is some accuracy - Robert E Lee was there and Stuart did walk to the barn to negotiate with Brown) and there are some solid shoot outs. Errol being an army officer kind of meshes a bit uneasily with Errol being a cowbody with Hale and Williams.
The star is in decent form, a bit disconcerting to see him go so easily on slavery (always arguing for peaceful reform, saying Virginia were going to consider a referendum stopping it, never really condemning it) and his love scenes with Olivia de Havilland feel perfunctory (I wish she'd swapped with Brenda Marshall for The Sea Hawk - Brenda Marshall wouldn't have mattered here). Ronnie isn't much but Brown is superb, as is Van Heflin as a seemingly principled anti-slaver who (typcially) turns out to be a rat. There is a surprisingly moving scene where Stuart, Custer and his mates are told by an Indian fortune teller they will all fight each other in a few years.
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