SANTA FE TRAIL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 117, 19 September 1941, Page 16

SANTA FE TRAIL

(Warner Bros.)

T is perhaps unfortunate that I happened to have read Thoreau’s two essays in defence of Captain John

Brown just before seeing Santa Fe Trail and so was unable to accept Raymond Massey’s interpretation of "old Ossawatomie Brown" in this picture at its grimly unsympathetic face value. It might be more correct to say the author’s interpretation, for it seems fairly plain that the man who wrote the screen play of’ Santa Fe Trail was a Southerner with no very high opinion of John Brown, the anti-slaver whose soul went marching on to the climax of the Civil War. According to this version, Brown was simply a murderous fanatic whose only redeeming quality was his obvious sincerity (and Raymond Massey certainly conveys the wide-eyed fervour excellently), ‘but I prefer to accept Thoreau’s word for it that Brown was a greater man than that. Another criticism I would make of Santa Fe Trail is that it attempts too much. There are a number of interlinked themes and with the possible exception of that dealing with Brown’s part in bringing about the Civil War, none is able to be developed properly within the compass of the one picture. American audiences may more readily recognise the tragedy inherent in the fact that the five young officers who graduate from West Point in 1854 and who remain firm friends throughout the story are named J. E. B. Stuart, George Custer, Phil Sheridan, James Longstreet, and George Pickett; but if I hadn’t chanced to have been reading a bit of American history recently I probably wouldn’t have realised that these were all the names of real persons, all destined to become generals on opposing sides in the Civil War. There is real tragedy in this, that their activities in line, of duty throughout the story, in pursuing and bringing John Brown to the gallows, are unconsciously helping to precipitate the war that will make them enemies, but I doubt if that fact gets over properly. And it was unnecessary to obscure the exciting account of Brown’s exploits im Kansas while smuggling slaves out of the South by super-imposing a conventional theme about pushing the frontiers westward on steel rails along the old Santa Fe Trail. Though this pioneering theme just gets left in the desert, it is enough to. confuse the dramatic issue. More obvious, and therefore rather more successful, is the motif of romance between the gallant Captain J. E. B. Stuart (Errol Flynn) and a prairie flower (Olivia de Havilland), with the handsome Captain Custer playing second fiddle. I must say I found Errol Flynn much more convincing than usual, even though there was too much of the ours-not-to-reason-why spirit for my liking in the character of the man he had to portray ("It isn’t our job to decide what’s right or wrong about this, any more than it is for John Brown to decide about slavery "’-surely "a servile philosophy!) °%

The film’s big sequence is Brown’s capture of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry and the counter-attack by Government troops (in which Captain Stuart really did play a prominent historical part). This is followed by the very realistic hanging of Brown, but the emotional effect, the sense of destiny and John Brown’s soul_on the. march, is almost completely ruined by a silly orangeblossom fade-out. . On the whole, the dramatic structure of the film is thrown so much out of plumb by conflicting stresses that I came away feeling I'd like to sit through Gone With the Wind just to get the background of the Civil War into proper perspective. Yet in spite of its several unsatisfactory aspects this is a film that is well worth seeing — the kind of film that Hollywood makes better than almost any other. It is particularly worth seeing because of Raymond Massey. If I have perhaps seemed unduly critical in this review it is only because I was so much interested.