Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Simply A Masterpiece

Brilliant and touching

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

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....

Santa Fe Trail, an epic western from Warner Brothers' golden era, is high-powered, fast paced, action-packed entertainment. Not the standard western story line or time setting, it takes place in the years immediately preceding the War Between the States. The action is not the usual cavalry versus Inidians or law versus outlaws, but the Army fighting against John Brown's depredations in "bleeding Kansas". This first class "A" production put first-rate director Micheal Curtiz in charge of a cast topped by Errol Flynn, Ronald Regan, Olivia De Havilland, Raymond Massey (as John Brown), and Van Hefflin in a villainous role, along with Warner's terrific stable of supporting players, and hundreds of extras. Flynn is at his best here as gallant Army officer Jeb Stuart, and the trim Mexican War era uniform compliments his dashing image. Massey is overpowering and absolutely riveting as half-mad, fanatical abolitionist leader Brown. Miss De Havilland doesn't have one of her better parts as the love interest of both Flynn and Regan, but she makes the best of it and comes off both fetching and engaging. Regan is solid and likable in a second banana role. Flynn's two favorite sidekicks (and real-life drinking buddies), those crude but lovable buffoons Alan Hale and Guinn "Big Boy" Williams lead the supporting cast, which also includes Moroni Olsen (as Robert E. Lee), Henry O'Neill, and the ever-reliable John Litel. Acting is first rate from top to bottom.Santa Fe Trail is almost non-stop action from beginning to end, all of it well staged, well filmed, and driven along by a rousing Max Steiner score. This movie has so much kinetic energy, it reminded me of a silent picture at times. The night gunfight in and around the burning barn at Palmyra, which eventually turns into a full-scale pitched battle between the cavalry and the Brownites, is one of the most spectacular and exciting action sequences ever staged in a movie. Yet the script by Robert Buckner is intelligent with sharp and engaging dialog. The final battle with Brown's forces at the Harpers Ferry Arsenal is staged on an epic scale. In both this scene and the one at Palmyra it seems more like a war movie than a western.Santa Fe Trail is top-notch entertainment in every way. Unfortunately the picture has come under a barrage of unfair criticism from two of the most irritating creatures who lurk about IMDb -- the self-appointed history professor and the politically correct gestapo enforcer. The professors of course are right in saying the movie plays fast and loose with history. But who cares! This is a work of fiction, **based** on actual events but not bound to portray them with circumspect accuracy. When the facts get in the way of the story, the story comes first. Only the most naive and uneducated expect a movie to give accurate history. You have to go to one of those old artifacts of the pre-electronic age, a book, to get the facts. Santa Fe Trail does, however, give an excellent impressionistic view of the events and attitudes leading up to the Civil War. It should set off a looking-up binge for the curious. I recall when first seeing the picture about fifty years ago, I did a lot of looking up. I didn't expect to find Jeb Stuart and Custer in the same West Point class. I already knew enough to know that Custer was much younger. But I was pleasantly surprised to find Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart were in fact at the siege at Harpers Ferry. By the way some of the professors erred in complaining that lever action rifles were used -- meaning repeating rifles, which would be incorrect for the time period. The rifles used in Santa Fe Trail were Sharps single shot breech loaders, which employed an under lever to open and close the breech for reloading -- in wide use during the 1850's. Not everything was inaccurate!The politically correct thought-control police have labeled Santa Fe Trail "racist" simply because it tries to show both sides of the issue and because it portrays Brown as an unbalanced murderer, which no serious history denies, rather than the hero they horrifyingly think he was. They have been joined by the rabidly Southerner-hating Yankees who come out of the woodwork to comment on any Civil War era movie. In fact this movie takes no side. The movie studios of the Golden Era had no agenda, except entertaining people and making stacks of money doing it, which Santa Fe Trail delivered on both accounts. It wasn't taking the Southern side to have Jeb Stuart say the South would eventually take care of the slavery problem itself. That was a common Southern attitude. Because he said it doesn't mean it was true or the movie makers approved it. And on and on. What Santa Fe Trail failed to show about the era leading up the the War Between the States was the real cause of the war. It wasn't slavery, or saving the Union, or state's rights or Southern independence. Those were just excuses for fighting. The War happened because the people of the North and the people of the South hated each other's guts. Did then, did from the very beginning of the Republic, and still do! No, the movie Santa Fe Trail didn't show that, but the IMDb reviews and message board posts demonstrate it all too well.

It's funny to see the similarities of this movie to a movie Errol Flynn made a year later. 'They Died With Their Boots On' starts out the same way, at West Point. In 'Boots', Errol Flynn plays the part of George Custer and Olivia De Havilland plays his wife. John Litel plays General Sheridan. They both have similar beginnings but tell different stories during the Civil War. Santa Fe deals with the problem of slavery, the abolitionist John Brown and in part shows how the Underground Railway helped some blacks escape slavery. It also shows the harsh reality for those who helped those blacks on the run to freedom. 'Boots' deals with the life of General George Custer, his rise through officer ranks and the dilemma he is faced with that leads to his demise at Little Big Horn. Regardless of any 'liberties' taken by the directors, both movies give an interesting incite into these historical events of the American Civil War.

This is an odd film for several reasons. First, the title has nothing to do with the story. Second, the politics are extremely murky, to the point of being deliberately obscure but still unmistakable and, to the modern eye, eyebrow-raising. Third, it features a strange meeting between two future US Presidents. It is perhaps the weirdest Western Hollywood ever made, but, unlike, say, 1970s Westerns that strove mightily to be revisionist and different, this one is unintentionally strange.Errol Flynn stars as JEB Stuart, part of a cadre of West Point graduates who (supposedly) were great friends but who later formed the military leaders of both sides of the Civil War. They politely spar over women, but not so politely against a messianic wild-eyed fanatic who is determined to upset everybody's comfortable life because of his obsession. That madman is one John Brown, who ultimately takes his fight from the wilds of Kansas to the neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The story ultimately devolves into a quite accurate depiction of the John Brown raid on Harper's Ferry and its resolution (Brown's hanging).Anyway, the only reason this film is titled "Santa Fe Trail" is because some of the events in the film take place near that trail's beginning. But that's not the oddest thing about it, not by far. This film takes the extremely politically incorrect position of making abolitionist Brown into the Osama bin Laden of his day and a group of (later Confederate) officers who captured him (Robert E. Lee, JEB Stuart) into the heroes. It doesn't come straight out in the open and say that the Civil War was a bad thing, but it comes darn close. One of the odder scenes is when a former slave tells Stuart, "If this is freedom, I don't want it." Now, try putting THAT into a modern film. Well, you could try, I suppose....The strange sympathy shown for the South and its leaders and its cause isn't the end of the oddities, though. There is a bizarre scene where future General Custer, played by Ronald Reagan (one of Flynn's signature roles was Custer in "They Died with their Boots On," adding to the confusion), dances with a pretty young lady and then is taken to meet her dad - future President Abraham Lincoln! They have a polite exchange, then Ron goes off to fight the evil guy who wants to free the slaves. So one actor playing a future President (this is set two years before Lincoln took office) has a strange and completely unnecessary scene with another actor who actually became President (forty years after this film was made). And the actor who played the strangely shaven Lincoln is completely uncredited anywhere, along with the daughter. Of course, Lincoln didn't even HAVE a daughter! It's all a bit odd and makes my head hurt. One of those strange moments in film history that nobody even noticed but is full of resonance now.Strange politics aside and oddities forgotten for the moment, this is a rousing war drama about some crucial events that otherwise are completely overlooked by Hollywood, probably because of the weird politics involved. The good guys later became the bad guys, and then revered figures in the history books, while the bad guy's cause was completely redeemed by history, so was he really a bad guy at all? Raymond Massey completely steals the film as Brown, playing the character as a complete and utter fanatic with delusions of Godhood and the air of a latter-day Moses freeing the slaves. One of the most mesmerizing performances I've ever seen. It just happens also to be completely confusing as any kind of political statement or interpretation of the man himself and what he stood for.So, OK, it's impossible to put the weirdness aside if you know the history at all. But well worth catching in any event.