Santa Fe Trail

Entertaining, if not totally successful film that tries to combine a frontier adventure story with a moralizing message, Santa Fe Trail ends up being a bit of a mess, but it has its moments. Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland have a kind of chemistry that can make any piece of work watchable no matter its qualities, which is good since Trail needs a lot of help. They, along with director Michael Curtiz, made far better films in The Adventures of Robin Hood (arguably the masterpiece from the trio) and Captain Blood. While Santa Fe Trail is pretty horrific as history, but when has that ever been the strongest point in Hollywood storytelling, it’s also fairly problematic and tonally inconsistent about its desire to be either a romantic adventure story or a sermon-disguised-as-a-western.

For every great shoot ‘em up scene there’s another which positions abolitionists as zealots with quite a few loose screws, even if their end goal is justified. This split personality isn’t helped by any of the supporting actors – Raymond Massey and Van Heflin would turn in far better performances in other films and here decided to chew the scenery and act like ridiculous fire-and-brimstone caricatures. The film’s presentation of the black characters is both symptomatic of the times and a clear hedged-bet that they didn’t want to offend the southern audience. The presentation of blacks as child-like and naïve is something any viewer of old films will just have to get through, but once we’re told that they’re by and large completely ignorant of their circumstances I had reached my limit. But I will give the film credit for presenting the main characters as divided and shades of gray over the major conflict of the plot. They’re more like defined pros and cons engaging in debates that push the others to explore the murky middle ground, and it gets heavy-handed if well-intentioned at times. As for what the title has to do with the story – nothing other than a quick and cursory mention and stop. None of the main action has anything to do with the real Santa Fe Trail, so who knows why the film was dubbed this. To call it uneven would be putting it mildly, but Santa Fe Trail has its moments, I don’t know if the rest of the film is worth the trip to get to them, but if you’re a fan of Flynn, de Havilland or Curtiz, I suppose you must give it a glance.