Big, loud, noisy. I don't think Michael Curtiz was as interested in Westerns as other genres. It forms part of a trilogy with Dodge City and Virginia City and is probably the least of these. For every vaguely decent point the script makes, like blacks wondering what happens to them after they are free, or vaguely historical point, like Jeb Stuart being at Harper's Ferry, it's undermined by making the slave owning Stuart the hero, emasculating the abolitionist Custer (he loses the girl, doesn't get to be heroic), having more sympathetic slavers than abolitionists.
Van Heflin is meant to be a villain, causing trouble with his anti slavery ways at West Point - but it's he who tips off the government about Harpers Ferry. He saves more lives than Flynn!
Olivia de Havilland is charming but wasted in her part - any starlet could have played the role (why not give her a position on slavery?). There's plenty of action but it isn't that memorable. The best bit is when the Indian fortune teller predicts the Civil War - this is genuinely creepy.
This is a post Gone with the Wind MAGA movie.
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