Santa Fe Trail with Errol
Flynn and Ronald Reagan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwpaq1d_RhQ
The fifth-highest grossing film of 1940, "Santa Fe Trail" stars Errol Flynn as J.E.B. Stuart.
His frequent co-star Olivia de Havilland plays his love interest, Kit Carson
Holliday. Ronald Reagan portrays his West Point
1854 'classmate' George Armstrong Custer. Historical inaccuracies abound in
this film. The film is centered on abolitionist John Brown--who is painted as a
villain--but not as much as Custer and Stuart's fictional classmate, Carl
Rader, who was played by Van Heflin.
Custer wasn't even enrolled into West
Point until 1858. However, Col. Robert E. Lee was the commandant
of the academy in 1854--and was appointed by President Buchanan to lead the
attack on Brown at Harper's Ferry in 1859..
On contemporary standards--this film is racist. Blacks are
portrayed as noble sufferers who don't know how to cope with the freedom Brown
gave them. In one scene, Brown abandons a group of slaves--leaving them to burn
to death in a barn fire with Stuart. And Brown treated the Harper's Ferry
hostages well--in this movie, Brown shoots one. The abolitionist stronghold of Palmyra is referred to as "the cancer of Kansas."
Michael Curtiz, who won a a Best Director Academy Award
three years later for "Casablanca,"
directs here.
This was Reagan's last big movie before "King's
Row." The future president later joined the Army--just as his Hollywood career was set to take off.
Oh, this movie has very little to do with the real Santa Fe Trail. I suspect the title was chosen because of
the popularity of westerns at the time. Most of the civilians in this film wear
cowboy hats, although the Stetson Boss of the Plains hat, arguably the first
cowboy hat, wasn't produced until 1865.
There are some terrific character actors in this movie,
including Alan Hale Sr., Ward Bond, Moroni Olsen, and Raymond Massey--who plays
Brown.
The film ends with an ominous warning from the abolitionist,
"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land
can never be purged away but with blood."
World War II had started the year before. The crimes of
Nazism had to be extinguished in the same manner.
The final words I leave to Reagan.
From a 1984 speech: "We don't lump people by groups or
special interests. And let me add, in the party of Lincoln, there is no room for intolerance and
not even a small corner for anti-Semitism or bigotry of any kind. Many people
are welcome in our house, but not the bigots."