My Tag Answers for Legends of Western Cinema Week 2025

Time for me to fill out our party tag!  

I'm going to put down the first western movie or TV show that comes to mind for these, and not agonize over whether they are the perfect example or not.  And I'll muse just a little on why each one came to mind for those prompts.

Cliff -- a tense cliffhanger Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024)  The ending of this movie is a series of cliffhangers, and I have been hanging off those cliffs for a year now with NO word on when they are releasing chapter two!  This is so agonizing!

Gulch -- a cool ambush scene The Professionals (1966) A set of professional gunfighters and adventurers are on a mission to rescue a kidnapped woman, only to get ambushed by her captors when they've almost got her back to her husband.  The gunfighters and the woman are stuck in a desert-mountain pass, and the only way to escape is if one of them stays behind to hold off their enemies... who used to actually be friends with a lot of them.  Lots of excitement and emotional impact.

Canyon -- a big gunfight A Fistful of Dollars (1964)  Oh, that finale, with the lone, nameless hero coolly facing down three evil brothers and their henchmen -- it's positively iconic.  Then you add in this brilliant trumpet theme by Ennio Morricone and the music swelling behind it, the dust in the street, the slow walk toward certain death, the quiet courage with a secret smile in front of it... oh my heart, I love the end of this movie so much.

Mountains -- high stakes The War Wagon (1967) An ex-con gathers a team to help him steal an armored wagon full of gold -- and help him get revenge on the man who had him unjustly accused and sentenced and thrown in jail.  High stakes indeed.

Valley -- a beautiful romance Angel and the Badman (1947)  It's like a Beauty and the Beast retelling where the Beast ends up at Beauty's family home instead.  And when I say the ending gives me goosebumps and brings tears to my eyes, I mean that in the best way possible!

Desert -- a suspenseful plot 3:10 to Yuma (1957)  A desperate rancher agrees to ensure a sly outlaw gets on the train headed for the Yuma Territorial Prison, the outlaw spends the next day doing everything in his considerable power to get free.  The tension just ratchets tighter and tighter --it's masterful.

Forest -- themes about renewal The Rare Breed (1966)  This is a movie about second chances.  A widow gets a second chance at love, a father and son get a second chance at understanding each other, a discontented cowhand gets a second chance at career choices... and it's all revolving around a big Hereford bull intended to bring new life and vitality into a Texas herd.

River -- traveling to a new home Buck and the Preacher (1972)  Black pioneers trying to get to Kansas to start new lives as farmers... but a lot of people seem to not want them to get to do that.  It's the only movie I know of that's set during the real-life Exoduster migration, too.

Plains -- characters who are farmers Shane (1953)  Even though the title character is a gunfighter, he befriends a farming family and gets semi-adopted by them.  If they weren't farmers, he wouldn't have to protect them from people trying to push them off their farm, so the whole plot really revolves around the fact that they are trying to raise crops and animals, not graze cattle.

Mesa -- an animal central to the story The Proud Rebel (1958)  A sweet, unassuming sheepdog is the heart inside this sweet story about family, love, and sacrifice.  And the dog doesn't die, which is a total bonus!

Have you seen any of these?

My Ten Favorite New-to-Me Movies of 2024

Here we are again, ready to reminisce over all the movies we've watched in the past year and figure out which ones we liked best.  If you've done a similar post this year, leave a link in the comments so I can check out what your favorites were!

If you want to see my past lists, I've got ten years' worth at the bottom of this page.  Meanwhile, here are my favorite ten new-to-me movies that I watched last year!

1.  Horizon: An American Saga, Chapter One (2024)  A variety of people have experiences in the Old West, many of them in or around the fictional town of Horizon.  It's a sprawling epic with lots of storylines and little or no closure to any of them, and I'm somewhat obsessed with it.  So much of it pleases me, from the authentic historical details to the filmography to the storytelling.  (I could do without the scene with nudity or the implied sex scene, though.  It's not a family friendly movie.)

2.  The Train (1964)  A bitter and disillusioned member of the French Resistance (Burt Lancaster) helps sabotage a train filled with precious pieces of French artwork that an equally bitter Nazi officer (Paul Scofield) is desperately trying to steal away from Paris before the Allies arrive.  My son is particularly pleased with all the very real train-related details, and I'm pleased by all the cool stunts Lancaster does.

3.  Murder on the Orient Express (1974)  Even though Hercule Poirot is not played by Peter Ustinov or Kenneth Branagh (my two favorite Poirots), but instead by Albert Finney (who gets a bit shouty), this is still such a fun time.  That's mainly thanks to the amazing cast: Lauren Bacall, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, John Gielgud, Vanessa Redgrave, Anthony Perkins, Richard Widmark, Michael York... are you drooling yet?  What a lineup, huh?

4.  The Man from the Alamo (1953)  A Texan (Glenn Ford) is elected to leave the Alamo to warn the people of his town that something bad is about to befall them.  By the time he reaches the town, it's too late, and everyone assumes he ran away from the Alamo because he's a coward.  This makes him angry and vengeful, and the storyline took a few turns that surprised me, which I enjoyed.

5.  Emma (1996 -- Kate Beckinsale)  Yes, it took me this long to finally see this adaptation of the classic Jane Austen novel.  I was surprised how much I liked it -- it's never going to rival the other 1996 version that stars Gwyneth Paltrow, but I liked it a lot better than the 2009 and 2020 versions.

6.  The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)  A bunch of military misfits are brought together to stop the Nazis during WWII.  Yes, that premise has been used oodles of times.  But this movie brings some fresh fun to it -- and it's based on a real people and real incidents, which bumps the whole thing up a notch.  I'm particularly fond of how Henry Cavill keeps trading up for better and cooler coats.

7.  Love Crazy (1941) A woman (Myrna Loy) suspects her husband (William Powell) is cheating on her and decides to get a divorce.  Her husband pretends to be mentally ill so she can't divorce him.  I'm not usually a big fan of screwball comedies, but I love Loy and Powell together, and this one never gets daffy enough to annoy me.

8.  Anastasia (1956)  A con artist (Yul Brynner) uses a mentally unstable young woman (Ingrid Bergman) to try to convince the world that the Russian princess Anastasia is still alive.  It's acerbic and twisted and melodramatic... and a lot more like the animated movie Anastasia (1997) than I'd expected.

9.  Christmas in the Air (2017)  A widower (Eric Close) who designs and makes toys hires a professional planner (Catherine Bell) to help him juggle his Christmastime family activities and work commitments so he won't disappoint his kids by forgetting anything important, but will also be able to help his brother land a big contract for their family-owned toy company.  Yes, it's a Hallmark movie.  Yes, I will willingly watch it again.

10. My Cousin Rachel (1952)  A wealthy young man (Richard Burton) becomes obsessed with his cousin's widow (Olivia de Havilland) because he's convinced she killed his cousin.  And then he's convinced she didn't.  And he loves her.  But he hates her.  But she loves him.  But she might be trying to kill him.  Come on, it's a very young and toothsome Richard Burton growling at a middle-aged and gorgeous Olivia de Havilland -- that's all you really need to know.

My Ten Favorite Swashbucklers

Swashbucklers are their own brand of swaggering cool, aren't they?  Devil-may-care heroes, feisty heroines, and plenty of sword fights and chases and fisticuffs to keep things galloping along.  A good swashbuckler is pretty well guaranteed to raise my spirits even on the gloomiest day.  Here are my favorites!

1. The Princess Bride (1987)  After Buttercup's (Robin Wright) true love Westley (Cary Elwes) is murdered by pirates, she agrees to marry Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), but gets kidnapped before the wedding. I'll never forget the first time I saw this movie -- it changed my ideas about humor and fantasy forever.

2. The Mask of Zorro (1998)  An aging Zorro (Anthony Hopkins) is unmasked and imprisoned by the greedy and cruel Don Montero (Stuart Wilson), who also steals his baby daughter Elena.  When Montero and a grown Elena (Catherine Zeta-Jones) return to California, Zorro trains a bumbling thief (Antonio Banderas) to be his successor and fight oppression in his place.  I saw this in the theater the summer before I went to college, and it kind of dominated my life for a while.  I had the poster on my dorm room wall, I listened to the soundtrack until my roommates were sick of it, and I watched the movie so often I basically memorized it.  Twenty-five years later, I'm still not tired of it!

3. The Black Swan (1942)  Former pirate captain Jamie Waring (Tyrone Power) kidnaps, then woos, then rescues a governor's feisty daughter (Maureen O'Hara) while also helping Governor Henry Morgan (Laird Cregar) clear the pirates out of the Caribbean.  This is one of the most fun movies I have ever seen, and I judge all other pirate movies by it.

4. The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)  Robin Hood (Errol Flynn) has a jolly time robbing the rich Normans to feed the poor Saxons, wooing Maid Marian (Olivia de Havilland), and foiling Prince John (Claude Rains) and Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Basil Rathbone) when they plot to steal the throne from King Richard (Ian Hunter).  It has everything I could possibly want in a Robin Hood movie :-D

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)  Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) resorts to commandeering, raiding, pillaging, plundering, and otherwise pilfering his weasely black guts out, all to regain his beloved ship. More fun than a barrel of undead monkeys!

6. The Three Musketeers (1993)  Young d'Artagnan (Chris O'Donnell) just wants to be a Musketeer, but he ends up embroiled in unmasking a plot against the king. His three Musketeer friends (Kiefer Sutherland, Charlie Sheen, and Oliver Platt) are hilarious and awesome too.

7. The Count of Monte Cristo (1975)  Simple, honest sailor Edmund Dantes (Richard Chamberlain) is betrayed by his supposed friends and sent to prison on false charges. He escapes, gains staggering wealth, and seeks vengeance against his enemies. Based on the book by Alexandre Dumas, king of the swashbucklers.

8. The Mark of Zorro (1940)  Diego de la Vega (Tyrone Power) returns home to California from studying in Spain and discovers oppression and injustice everywhere.  He disguises himself as a cunning rogue called Zorro and sets about righting wrongs and championing the poor and dueling with Basil Rathbone and generally having a grand time.

9. Against All Flags (1952)  A roguish naval officer (Errol Flynn) pretends to be a pirate in order to infiltrate a pirate stronghold, only to find himself falling for a strong-willed, lemon-tongued Pirate Captain (Maureen O'Hara). Jolly good fun.

10. The Prisoner of Zenda (1952)  A British hunter (Stewart Granger) masquerades as the king (Stewart Granger) of a small European nation so that the king's enemies (including James Mason) can't usurp the throne while the king lies ill. Things get complicated when the fake king falls in love with the woman (Deborah Kerr) who is intended to marry the real king. 

Well, those are my ten favorite swashbuckler movies!  If you'd like to see my list of favorite swashbuckler books, I recently posted that on my book blog :-)

My Answers to This Year's LOWCW Tag

Every year, Olivia and Heidi and I have a lot of fun coming up with the questions for our tag.  Every year, I look forward to answering them myself.  And, every year, there's at least one question that stumps me or makes me have to think really hard about my answer.  Which is all part of the fun!  (This year it was question #9 that I struggled with.  Now you know.)

You can find the original tag here, on my kick-off post.  Also, don't forget that today is the LAST DAY to enter my giveaway!

If I've reviewed a movie I talk about here, I've linked its title to my full review, in case you're curious to read more about a particular film.

1) Favorite western focused on a lone hero? 

That would be 3:10 to Yuma (1957), in which struggling rancher Dan Evers (Van Heflin) singlehandedly stands up against an entire outlaw gang to take its leader, notorious Ben Wade (Glenn Ford) to the train that will transport him to prison.  It is a moody, atmospheric, aesthetically pleasing masterpiece of tension.

2) Favorite western focused on a group of compadres? 

The Magnificent Seven (1960), no contest.  It truly is magnificent.  The acting is superb, the writing is taut and masterful, and the score by Elmer Bernstein is one of the finest movie scores ever written.  I never, ever get tired of this movie.

3) Favorite western with a female main character? 

The Rare Breed (1966).  It's about a British widow (Maureen O'Hara) and her daughter (Juliet Mills) who bring a prize Hereford bull to the St. Louis stockyards to auction off.  They get worried that something terrible will befall the bull while it's being shipped to its new owner (Brian Keith) in Texas, so they insist on accompanying the man (James Stewart) tasked with delivering him.  It's a pretty unusual western in a lot of ways, and really enjoyable.

4) Favorite western with a POC main character? 

That would be Silverado (1985).  It has three main characters: Emmett (Scott Glenn), Paden (Kevin Kline), and Mal (Danny Glover), who join forces to take down a common enemy.  Mal's trying to save his family's homestead and convince his sister to abandon some questionable life choices she's been more or less forced to make.

Now, since Silverado is an ensemble piece, I'm going to answer this question twice so I can also mention Buck and the Preacher (1972) , which Sidney Poitier starred in and directed.  It's about African American pioneers seeking new homes in Kansas after the Civil War.  I highly recommend it to older teens and adults.  It probably hits a little too heavy for kids.

5) Favorite western with kids in it? 

Shane (1953) is told through the eyes of a boy (Brandon de Wilde) who idolizes the gunfighter (Alan Ladd) that his father (Van Heflin) and mother (Jean Arthur) have befriended and hired to work on their farm.  It's a beautiful meditation on what happens when a child idolizes an adult, and the kind of influence that idolization can have on the adult in question.  Shane works as hard as he can not to let that little boy down, but he works even harder to convince the boy that his own father is the real hero of the story.

6) Favorite western set somewhere other than the United States? 

The Man from Snowy River (1982).  It's also my favorite movie of all time, and it's all about a young man coming of age in Australia, finding work and falling in love and generally proving himself.  I saw this in the theater when I was two years old and fell in love with horses, Australia, and westerns all in one fell swoop.  It's been my favorite ever since.

7) Favorite "western" that doesn't fit the genre's dictionary definition? 

Well, The Proud Rebel (1958) takes place in Illinois, and so it's not technically a western.  But it feels like a western, so I call it one anyway.  It's about a man (Alan Ladd) searching for a doctor who can cure his mute son (David Ladd).  They end up working for a farmer (Olivia de Havilland) who's being harassed by some neighbors that want to buy her land, or force her off it if she won't sell.  And they have to overcome a bunch of problems, but they also form a nice little family in the process.

8) Favorite funny western? 

Support Your Local Sheriff (1969), always and forever.  A quirky, clever drifter (James Garner) takes the job as sheriff in a lawless goldrush town, makes a deputy out of the town drunk (Jack Elam), falls in love with the mayor's daughter (Joan Hackett), and dispatches a family of ne'erdowells, all in the most unconventional ways possible.  It's a spoof of western tropes, but such a loving spoof that its humor completely works.

9) Favorite tragic/sad western? 

The Alamo (1960).  Almost every single character dies.  Gloriously, yes, but still!  Tragic.  And yet, I watch it over and over.

10) Favorite western TV show?

The Big Valley (1965-69).  I love every member of the Barkley family, most especially Heath (Lee Majors) and Victoria (Barbara Stanwyck).  I want to be friends with them and hang out with them and go on adventures with them and just... can I either get adopted into or marry into that family already?  Please?

There you have it!  I can't believe that today is the last official day of Legends of Western Cinema Week already!  Like I said, if you haven't entered my giveaway yet, do that here.  And if you haven't made your guesses about my movie poster game yet, do that here.

"A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1935) -- Initial Thoughts

I have come to realize that I actually don't like A Midsummer Night's Dream very much.  The story and characters don't grab me, and I find several characters and much of the story preposterous, even grating.  However!  This filmed version is a fascinating watch, worth it for the special effects and the luminous Olivia de Havilland alone.

Because this is supposed to be High Art, or Important Theatre, or whatever, we have an Overture, and an Intermission.  They used Felix Mendelssohn's Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream, but with additional music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold (who wrote such wonderful scores as The Adventures of Robin Hood [1938]).

The opening credits alert us that this is going to be a magical, effects-laden film.  I have no idea how they did this swooshy effect to get the credits to swirl into being.  I tried to capture it with a gif:

It's so cool.  (I'm terrible at making gifs, btw -- I just film a little snippet with my phone and then use it to make the gif.  At least it gives you an idea of what I'm talking about.)

The costumes department must have come to blows over what era this is supposed to take place in, and settled the question by including ALL the eras.  We've got Elizabethan costumes.

We've got Ancient Roman costumes.

We've got medieval peasant costumes.  Oh well.  This is supposed to be a fantasy, so why not mix all the time periods together when it comes to clothes?  Certainly saves a lot of money on making everything match up -- just use whatever the wardrobe department already has and it'll be fine!  Save some money for the special effects!

The plot, in case you aren't aware, is this: Theseus (Ian Hunter) the Duke of Athens and Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale) the Queen of the Amazons are going to get married.  How should they celebrate their nuptials but by watching a play enacted by commoners with zero acting experience or talent?  Totally makes sense, right?

One plot is not enough for Shakespeare right now, so we've also got a young woman named Hermia (Olivia de Havilland) who loves and is beloved by a guy named Lysander (Dick Powell).  That's great, but Hermia's dad wants her to marry this other guy, Demetrius (Ross Alexander).  Hermia doesn't like Demetrius at all, especially because her friend Helena (Jean Muir) loves him.  So Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius, and her dad takes her to see Theseus and Hippolyta about it, to see if he can just have this wretched daughter killed for being so disagreeable.

As it turns out, two plots is not enough for Shakespeare today either, so we've also got King Oberon (Victor Jory) and Queen Titania (Anita Louise) battling each other over this random little kid Titania has adopted, but Oberon wants as his servant.

Now, mix those all together so that the fairies use magic to mess with the humans and each other, and everyone except Theseus and Hippolyta (who wisely remain in Athens and don't go wandering around any enchanted forests) are in for a very bad and confusing few days.  Which somehow is supposed to be funny.

Weirdly enough, Victor Jory makes a really cool King Oberon.  They give him this creepy crown, they superimpose spangly glimmers over all his shots, and he has such an unusual face anyway that it just works.

Anita Louise is a mystifyingly beautiful Queen Titania. She's ethereal without being twee, which is a hard line to walk.  I was surprised by how well I liked her.  Honestly most of my favorite parts of this film involved the fairies.

Oberon has these demonic bat-like fairies that follow him around, which get really creepy.

Titania has gauzy, glittery fairies that accompany her.  Their costumes are juuuuuuust this side of scandalous, but they're very pretty.  Unfortunately, whenever they appear, they tend to dance around for several minutes on end while the whole story stutters to a stop, which I could definitely have done without.  If you're a fan of glittery fairies dancing, though, you'll dig those parts.  These dances sometimes involved more very good special effects:

I mean, this movie is almost a hundred years old, and that's some pretty spectacular stuff even now.  Must've wowed the socks off audiences in its initial run.

Rounding out the fairies, we have Puck (Mickey Rooney).  Puck is always played exactly the same way in every single production of this story I've ever seen (granted, I've only seen 3, two live and this filmed version).  He's mischievous and squeaky and capers a lot and makes weird noises and is generally irksome.  Just once, I'd love to see him played as bored with the whole plot and totally done with Oberon's crap.  A sarcastic, annoyed Puck would be so amazing, I think.  As opposed to the rampant overacting every director seems to expect and encourage.

Speaking of overacting, oh my word.  James Cagney, what were you ON?  He never actually quite chewed on any scenery as Bottom, not even when he had a donkey head, but he might as well have.

I'm also not sure if he was supposed to break the fourth wall here and look directly at us, or if it was kind of accidental, or what, but it cracked me up.

The donkey head thing was another excellent effect, though:

Once Puck gave him that donkey head, I started to really like Bottom.  Cagney toned everything down and was really expressive and pitiable.  Very much liked him from then on.

His utter confusion over Titania falling madly in love with him was quite charming.

Of course, once Oberon gets what he wants, he reverses almost all the love charms.  Titania loves him again.

Lysander and Hermia get to get married after all.

Demetrius I guess gets to stay under a love spell forever so that Helena will be happy, and I don't know why Helena is totally cool with this sort of pretendy love, but I don't actually like either of them anyway, so whatever.

Theseus and Hippolyta have lots of fun laughing at the commonors' play-acting, which we have to sit through, and which I am just never amused by.  But it ends eventually.

Whew.

Olivia de Havilland was just 19 years old in this film, and she's wonderful to watch.  Sweet, happy, unhappy, confused, angry, fearful -- she gets the best range of emotions to run through of anyone in the film, and she nails all of them.  Which is why I decided to review this for the Olivia de Havilland Blogathon hosted by Charity at The Sacred in the Secular in honor of Ms. de Havilland's 104th birthday today!

Happy birthday, Ms. de Havilland!  It's so wonderful that we still have you with us.

Check out the blogathon for the list of other blog posts in her honor!

"Dodge City" (1939) -- Initial Thoughts

For Dodge City (1939), director Michael Curtiz reteamed with a trio of actors from the previous year's Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) to make a feel-good western with plenty of action and adventure of its own.  Instead of Robin Hood, Errol Flynn here plays Wade Hatton, a Texas cowboy with plenty of cheerful determination.  Instead of Maid Marian, Olivia de Havilland plays Abbie Irving, a sturdy pioneer with a wayward brother.  And instead of Robin Hood's loyal sidekick Little John, Alan Hale plays Wade Hatton's loyal sidekick, Rusty Hart.

This movie is just gobs of fun.  I can't wait to watch it with my kids.  They already love Olivia and Errol in Robin Hood, after all, and they're fond of westerns.

So what happens is, Dodge City, Kansas, is run by a greedy meanie named Jeff Surrett (Bruce Cabot).  He keeps the city wild and woolly and violent because then no one will challenge his right to buy cattle for ridiculously low prices and make gobs of money on them.

Wade Hatton brings a herd of cattle to Dodge.  Along with the cattle, he's bringing a few wagonloads of people.  People like pretty orphan Abbie Irving and her brother Lee (William Lundigan) -- they're on their way to live with their uncle (Henry Travers) in Dodge City.  Lee's a drunken fool who keeps causing trouble, like stampeding the cattle, and one day he tries to kill Wade, so Wade has to kill him.  You can imagine how much that makes Abbie like Wade.

Wade doesn't actually care if she likes him or not, as he's just there to sell cattle.  Only that greedy meanie Surrett doesn't offer him a fair price for them, so he refuses to sell them.  You can also imagine how much that makes Surrett like Wade.

Because Wade stands up to Surrett, the people of Dodge City want him to be their new sheriff.  Wade doesn't want to do it, but after he gets a few tastes of Surrett's villainy, he agrees.  This movie doesn't exactly have a plot aside from "let's get rid of Surrett," but it's so much rollicking fun that it doesn't need more than that.  We get one of the biggest saloon brawls ever filmed, lots of derring-do from Errol, and a grand finale that involves a burning train hurtling down the tracks with our heroes aboard.  Good stuff.

This has been my contribution to the Fourth Annual Olivia de Havilland Blogathon hosted by Phyllis Loves Classic Movies and In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.  Happy belated birthday to Ms. de Havilland, who turned 103 on Monday!

Is this movie family friendly?  Yes.  Some violence and alcohol consumption, but that's all.

"Santa Fe Trail" (1940)

This is the first movie I ever saw Errol Flynn or Ronald Reagan in!  Possibly the first Van Heflin movie I saw too, though I'm not entirely sure -- I might have seen 3:10 to Yuma (1957) before this.  My first Olivia de Havilland movie was Gone With the Wind (1939) though, as I saw that when I was just a kid.

But anyway, I saw Santa Fe Trail for the first time when I was a teenager, and I didn't care much for it.  I was expecting a cowboy movie, for one thing, and this isn't really a cowboy movie.  It's actually a pre-Civil War story about newly minted cavalry officers with famous names fighting to subdue Bloody Kansas.  So it's a western, but a cavalry picture, not a cowboy movie.  I didn't really start appreciating cavalry pictures until I was an adult, with the exception of She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), so I'm not surprised that I didn't like this when I was younger.

Best pals Jeb Stuart (Errol Flynn) and George Custer (Ronald Reagan) get into trouble for fighting with a fellow student named Rader (Van Heflin) just before they graduate from West Point.  Rader was spreading abolitionist literature, and all politics have been banned at West Point, so while Stuart and Custer are reprimanded, Rader is dishonorably discharged from the Army and West Point.

At their graduation, Stuart, Custer, and some of their pals get sent west to Fort Leavenworth to help keep the peace in Kansas Territory, which is filled with violence between abolitionists and anyone they don't like.  One of their pals has a sister named Kit Carson Holliday (Olivia de Havilland), a pretty girl who is prone to shouting "Yippee!" at improper intervals.

Custer and Stuart do their best to get to know Miss Kit better on the train ride west.  She's returning home after a few years at a "finishing school" back East.

Kit's also the sort of girl who tells vaguely inappropriate stories involving bathtubs that shock her father and make Jeb Stuart look at her like this:

Yeah, there's really no question as to where this is going, is there? After all, this is de Havilland and Flynn's seventh movie together, and as they generally end up together, we all can be pretty sure that Kit's going to end up with Jeb Stuart, not George Custer.

Interestingly, de Havilland and Flynn would make only one more movie together, They Died with Their Boots On the year after this.  In it, they play George Custer and his wife.  

Anyway!  When they arrive in Kansas, we quickly learn that Kit has a good head for business, as she sets about fixing up her father's freighting company.  It's gotten all disorganized while she was back East, so she sets about scolding everyone and putting things in order.

Even so, she still has time to look pretty and have a good time.  She IS played by Olivia de Havilland, after all.  Even with smudges of dirt on her face, she's still radiant.

Naturally, Custer and Stuart both want to woo Kit.  Stuart suggests drawing straws for who gets to go say goodbye to her first before they head out to guard her dad's freight shipment to Texas.  They take this extremely seriously, as you can see.

Let's all just admit that this review is an excuse to post a bunch of screencaps of Olivia and Errol, shall we?

Okay, but back to the plot.  Chief among those trouble-causing abolitionists is John Brown (Raymond Massey), who is leading a kind of guerrilla campaign with the help of his sons and a bunch of followers.  And guess who's come to join his band?  Their ex-classmate Rader, of course.  And also Ward Bond, because a little Ward Bond makes every movie better, right?  Even when he's a Bad Guy.

So then a bunch of exciting things happen, like John Brown's men trying to rob Kit's dad's freight wagons that Stuart and Custer are guarding.  Custer and Stuart ride around looking nice in their uniforms.

We get an exciting chase scene, too.

And basically, that's the whole movie -- excitement interspersed with buddy comedy (especially from Alan Hale and Guinn Williams as two bumbling cowpoke types) and romance.

When I watched this movie in preparation for writing this review, I let my kids watch it with me because they all like Olivia and Errol so much in Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).  They watched it companionably enough, but afterward, they mostly talked about how much they liked "the silly guys," aka Hale and Williams, and how funny John Brown's fake beard looked.

Eventually, Stuart changes out of his uniform into a cowboy outfit so he can go spy on John Brown's bunch, and he looks so wonderful there that I have to include a couple of screencaps.

Goodness, he should have worn that hat much more in this movie.

Also, he almost gets lynched.  And if there's one thing I love, it's a good averted lynching.

So I kind of figured this movie would end with them driving John Brown out of Kansas.  But nope!  It went on through the attack on Harper's Ferry and Brown's capture and execution.  While the acting is all perfectly fine, I have to admit that the story drags.  This is one to watch if you're a fan of the people in it, or of semi-factual retellings of things that led up to the American Civil war.  But if you want a really good cavalry picture starring Flynn and de Havilland, watch They Died with Their Boots On instead -- it's way better.

Is this movie family friendly?  Mostly.  I was rather shocked to find it had two mild cuss words in it toward the beginning, actually.  There's also a lot of old-movie shooting and fighting.  Like I said earlier, I let my own kids (ages 5, 7, and 9) watch it with me.  You can watch this for free on Amazon Prime Instant Video if you have Amazon Prime, and there's usually a copy floating around YouTube too.  I watched on Amazon, but the picture quality wasn't great, as you can tell from my screencaps.  There's a restored version available on DVD that you can also pay to watch on APIV if you want to.

This has been my contribution to the Second Annual Olivia de Havilland Blogathon (+Errol Flynn!) hosted by Phyllis Loves Classic Movies and In the Good Old Days of Classic Hollywood.  Olivia de Havilland turns 101 today!  So amazing that she is still with us.  Happy birthday, Ms. de Havilland!