The Horse Soldiers (1959) Reviews

The Horse Soldiers is another John Ford cavalry film. This time John Wayne must lead Union troops from Tennessee to Newton Center to destroy the South's main railroad supply route to Vicksburg followed up by a 300 miles journey through the deep South to Baton Rouge to escape.. This movie, in color, is based on true events. Although there are several battles with Confederate troops the main antagonists in this picture are William Holden and Constance Towers. We learn that Wayne has a bitter distrust of doctors and Holden plays a Union doctor who treatments of the injured are constantly slowing down Wayne's march. Towers is a Southern belle who learns of Wayne escape route. He must therefore force her to accompany the troops on the their long journey. This is not one of John Ford's best pictures but it certainly will appeal to John Wayne fans and civil war buffs who do not mind a lot of fiction tossed in with some history.
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Considering both John Wayne and William Holden were in this movie, it was a BIG disappointment! It may have been a true story, but it was so "hokey" in the telling that it wasn't believeable as a Civil War movie.
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This movie, aside from my boy William Holden putting on an acting clinic, is a major stinker. Coming from 1959, it straddles two eras in filmic Westerns: slapstick-laden good guy movie and cynical shades-of-grey philosophical movie. Watching this movie made me realize just how brainwashed the Vietnam generation was . . . it has so many mixed messages: war is pointless but it helps you get laid and is sometimes funny . . .WTF?!?!?! And the production values were awful - terrible television-grade costuming, anachronistic dialogue writing . . . I guess they spent all the cash on all those horses. Not a good one, even by the Duke's standards.
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