VividSimon Simply Perfect

Console best movie i've ever seen.

Derry Herrera Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

Rosie Searle It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Richie-67-485852 Decent Western type movie with West Point Soldiers riding, shooting, drinking and all the rest with a love interest thrown in. It has a nice flow to it and worth the watch. We also get some history but don't go quoting Hollywood for accuracy as they are not history buffs but in the movie business and as such get away with things. I also tend to not like too much playing around or a type of corniness in my Westerns but they do sneak in a character or two to lighten it up. Why I don't know. Its not too bad here but instead entertaining which is its primary function. I always get a kick out of watching Ronald Reagan and thinking if this guy only knew that he would be the most powerful man on the planet for 8 years one day. Lots of extras in this movie and Raymond Massey just plays a good character no matter what his assignment is. There is a scene were they need to find out some information, in a strange town without rousing suspicion and lo and behold they choose the logical "go to" place. See if you could guess it right before it happens. You will have a minute or two to do so. Take note of the Wild West, the old towns, horses and the laid back but dependable life styles that drove it. Good movie to eat dinner with a tasty drink and snack to follow. Mount-up....

utgard14 Abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey) is on the warpath to end slavery by any means necessary. Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan) lead the effort to capture him. There's also a romantic triangle subplot involving Flynn, Reagan, and pretty Olivia de Havilland. Historically inaccurate but enjoyable western that can't seem to make to up its mind about what it wants to say. Flynn, de Havilland, and Reagan are all fine but it's Massey who steals every scene he's in. Van Heflin is good in a villainous role. Wonderful WB supporting cast includes Alan Hale, Guinn Williams, Henry O'Neill, and John Litel. Good direction from Michael Curtiz. If you read the rest of the reviews here, you'll see a lot of righteous indignation and bluster from certain types. Some of it's pretty funny. The movie is more balanced and measured than these people are letting on but it does play fast and loose with history as most movies based on historical events and people tend to do.

GManfred This is an excellent Golden Age picture which is heavy on action and light on historical accuracy. I wasn't around in 1940 and I don't know why, as several contributors have noted, studios routinely rearranged facts to such a degree as to make history unrecognizable, and I don't really care. I paid attention in school. What I want from an action picture is action, and "Santa Fe Trail" really comes through on that score.There are several sweeping fight and battle scenes to satisfy any action fan, which makes this one of the more rousing westerns of the 40's, or any other decade. Just swallow hard as Errol Flynn (Jeb Stuart) and Ronald Reagan (George Custer) are depicted as West Point classmates and how Reagan, sporting a contemporary 40's haircut, looks nothing like depictions of Custer. You also have to take the abolitionist/slaver narrative with an enormous grain of salt. Raymond Massey plays John Brown as a wild-eyed fanatic in which must be one of his best movie roles in a long, distinguished career, and the rest of the cast is made up of many of Warner Bros. stable of supporting actors.As noted, this is one of Hollywood's best westerns but which gets a bum rap from the PC crowd, which piles on due to the lack of historical accuracy in the film. As a result, the website rating is a distortion which does not reflect true entertainment value.

secondtake Santa Fe Trail (1940)Here's one of the great and not so rare mysteries of the movies. How in the world can the same people who put together some of the great classics be responsible for the near-clunkers just a year before or after? "Santa Fe Trail has great themes--slavery, John Brown, and the coming Civil War--and it's not a bad film, surely, but it has some awkward moments, some filler, and is not half the movie it could have been. It seems almost to want to follow along the success of the great Civil War themes of two other recent successes, "Jezebel" (1938) and "Gone with the Wind" (1939), but it gets distracted by little bits of nonsense and some awful writing."Santa Fe Trail" has the same director (Michael Curtiz) who would make "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Casablanca" two years later, the same leading actress (Olivia de Havilland) who had just finished an important role in "Gone with the Wind" and would win an Oscar for "The Heiress" later in the decade. There's music by the best in the business, Max Steiner, and photography by one of the best, Sol Polito. In fact, in the best scenes, like the night fighting halfway through, the photography is excellent and the music charges it up with good Steineresque excess.So what goes wrong? You might start what is called chemistry. The director is definitely to blame for not making the parts fit together in the first half, using lots of intertitles and chopping up the progress between fairly dull scenes (Curtiz had a famously up and down career). But other things must be at work that we can't see. The cast and crew and worked together, in parts ore in entirely, many times as part of the famous Warner Bros. family. Polito and Curtiz had just made other Westerns together, some with de Havilland. And the leading man Errol Flynn worked often with all three, including one of Curtiz's most famous films, "The Adventures of Robin Hood." Of course, that one had Bette Davis, too.And this one has Ronald Reagan. (If you wonder if he can act this is bad place to start because he's an awkward, handsome dud.)The key problem here is something Curtiz should have controlled--the script. As a two sentence pitch to the producer it sounds great--the wild-eyed John Brown is on a violent anti-slavery crusade in Kansas and a group of young West Point graduates are sent there to bring order. The story is loaded with unnatural foresight about the coming war against slavery, and even the war against the Indians (because General Custer is one of these young military men). It's the story of John Brown, mostly, and yet this story gets watered down by a silly rivalry over de Havilland (Flynn vs. Reagan), and with a somewhat caricatured mercenary Northerner (played well by Van Heflin) who joins Brown on his rampage.At one point de Havilland, translating a fortune-telling Indian to all these men, says, "Two of us are going to kill him, but none of us can stop him." And this is the best writing in the movie, bringing the themes to the front. It's about morality at the deepest level. It's about how wrong John Brown was, and how right. Turning it into a partly-joking, partly bitter and violent series of escapades doesn't do any of it justice. Including the movie itself.The last scenes are sort of epic and characteristic Curtiz, who could handle complicated movie-making like few others. His use of dramatic light, lots of foreground and background action at once, and moving camera are all put to use here. The terror of the God-crazed and "righteous" John Brown becomes central to the plot, and the famous battle at Harper's Ferry is depicted with a fury. The year is 1859 at this point, and what Harper's Ferry meant most of all was the inevitability of the Civil War, which started two years later. Some people give John Brown respect for being willing to cut through the pacifist chit-chat by politicians and get the things rolling. This is a small attempt to make it come alive on the screen.