THE HORSE SOLDIERS (46)

Directed by: John Ford (1959)

Starring: John Wayne, William Holden, Constance Towers

The Pitch: During the American Civil War, a Union Colonel leads a raid into Confederate territory.

Theo Sez: A flabby yet slightly under-rated slice of late Ford, which doesn't really work yet is at least as interesting in many ways as the sentimental, over-explicit LIBERTY VALANCE. As in that film, the director takes a subject dear to his heart - the Civil War, mentioned or used as background in so many of his movies (not least as a symbol of Ethan Edwards' wild, barbaric past) - and prettifies it, adding comic relief, a predictably "spunky" heroine, and a couple of stirring soundtrack songs to match the handsome shots of soldiers on horseback. The sequences involving the military-academy boys are typical of the film as a whole, turning a horrifying wartime incident - children press-ganged into fighting the Yankees - into something jocular and resolutely bloodless; yet, significantly, the film chooses to show this incident (it's unnecessary to the plot, which is episodic anyway), just as it chooses to show the bloody aftermath of a battle, or a soldier being told he's to have his leg amputated. Throughout, the sombre elements of the conflict seem to be very much on Ford's mind, not least in the various references to the root cause of the war, the question of slavery. Indeed, in Wayne's characterisation of a bull-headed military man gradually learning about compassion from a humane doctor may be found an implicit condemnation of everything absolute and authoritarian, and perhaps one of Ford's most doveish, humanistic movies - though, again, the film (unlike THE SEARCHERS) is too prettified to really explore the Colonel's dark side, nor can it resist finally turning him into a conventional hero. It's almost as though this macho director were nervous, even obscurely ashamed, of his better, more sensitive instincts.