Santa Fe Trail (1940)
Fresh out of West Point and posted to Kansas Territory, cadets Jeb Stuart and George Custer find themselves pitted against John Brown's escalating campaign against slavery, their friendship strained further by their shared feelings for the same woman.
Santa Fe Trail pairs Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland for the seventh of their eight films together, with a young Ronald Reagan cast as George Custer; the film takes broad, now widely criticized liberties with John Brown’s story, treating the abolitionist raider as its villain rather than its history.
Background
Santa Fe Trail pairs Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland for the seventh of eight films the two stars made together, with Ronald Reagan, years before his political career, cast as George Custer alongside Flynn’s Jeb Stuart. Set in the years before the Civil War, the story follows cadets fresh out of West Point confronting abolitionist raider John Brown’s escalating campaign against slavery in Kansas Territory, while the two friends’ rivalry over the same woman complicates matters further.
What to watch for
The film has been widely criticized by historians for the liberties it takes with John Brown’s actual story, framing the abolitionist as a dangerous fanatic and villain rather than engaging seriously with the injustice of slavery that motivated his actions; it reflects attitudes toward Civil War-era history that were common in Hollywood films of the period but that look very different to modern audiences. Watch it with that historical distortion in mind, alongside the technical craftsmanship director Michael Curtiz brought to the production’s large-scale action sequences.
