They Died With Their Boots On

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I posted about Star of the Month Sydney Greeenstreet that one of his movies I hadn't blogged about before, They Died With Their Boots On, would be running at 6:00 AM on Nov. 25. That's tomorrow morning, and since I have the movie on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set, I made a point of watching it to have it fresh in my mind for a post on the movie.

Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, who at the start of the movie is entering West Point as a plebe in the summer of 1857. Custer, as presented here, doesn't seem to care much for rules, naïvely thinking that he'll be able to bring his hunting dogs with him and get the biggest suite in the barracks, egged on by upperclassman cadet Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy). This is just the first of many, many incidents in which Custer will pick up demerits, he being constantly wary of authority.

One of those incidents results in his having to march guard, basically marching back and forth and having to keep his mouth shut. Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland) is a young woman from the same town as George, Monroe, MI. But she comes from the well-to-do part of town while George was a blacksmith's son, so there's a class difference that her father may not approve of. Of course, it's going to take a while for George and Elizabeth to meet each other again.

1861 comes, and this of course means the start of the Civil War. All of the cadets from the South leave West Point, while those in Custer's class are still a year away from graduating (at the time, West Point was a five-year school). The Union was badly in need of junior officers, so they took the West Point cadets and graduated them a year early. Custer fights in his own iconoclastic way, eventually rising to the rank of brevet general, although that's not a full general but only a temporary rank. So when the Civil War ended, he was returned to his regular rank of Captain and sent back to Michigan with the thanks of a kind nation.

Having married Elizabeth, who father died soon after the war, Custer is in need of a good job, even though the military is all he really knows. Ned Sharp shows up looking to trade on Custer's name to have it behind a development company looking to develop the Dakota Territory. Custer rightly doesn't trust Sharp one bit, and refuses, instead looking to get put back into regular service.

Custer does, in fact, get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and sent as a cavalry commander west... to Fort Lincoln, which is in the Dakota Territory and where Ned Sharp just happens to be. Custer finds all sorts of chicanery going on, including with the Indian agent for the region, which causes him to try to take his case to Washington. Ned and the agent are trying to get the treaty with the Sioux and other tribes abrogated so they can bring more white settlers onto the land, from which they hope to make a hefty profit. Custer's patrols eventually take him to the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana, and his unorthodox command style finally does him in.

Pretty much anybody who has a good knolwedge of history and who has seen They Died With Their Boots On will tell you that the movie is more or less a whitewashing of history, along with a hefty dollop of Hollywood tropes deemed necessary to entertain the viewers. I can certainly say that the tropes are laid on in grand style, from the romance between Flynn and de Havilland to Hattie McDaniel as the Bacons' servant, to the whole military gallantry.

From what I've read, the real life Custer was indeed a discipline problem and unorthodox. There might actually be room for an interesting movie about the question of unorthodox command when the battle is actually raging and the communication lines break down. It's generally presented in World War II movies that Nazi generals were fairly rigid, with American initiative and ingenuity winning the day. But when is it right to take that initiative, and when not?

Also, in later years there were a lot more westerns about how the Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheating the Indians blind, something we wouldn't get in pre World War II days. The real-life story of Custer seems interesting in that the corruption apparently ran all the way up to the Secretary of War (nowadays Secretary of Defense) and President Grant's brother; Custer was a witness in the impeachment proceedings of the Secretary of War and arrested when he wanted to return back to his post out west instead of staying around to testify when he thought his written testimony was enough. There's material for a Tennessee Johnson type movie there, but nobody in Hollywood ever thought to make it.

What we do get, however, is more than worth watching as examples of what Flynn and de Havilland could do, and on the whole an example of what the studio system could put out. Just don't expect real history from They Died With Their Boots On.

You'll note that I haven't brought up Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet once. That's because he's got a smaller role as General Winfield Scott, fighting the war from central command in Washington. He has a few scenes during the portion of the movie covering the Civil War, but once the war ends, he's pretty much out of the picture.