Directed by John Ford
Written by John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin
Starring: John Wayne, William Holden, and Constance Towers
Running Time: 2 hours
Available on Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber June 14

by Ian Hrabe, Staff Writer

You don’t need a film studies PHD to tell you that John Wayne was, to put it mildly, a piece of shit. Grab any random quote from that infamous 1971 Playboy interview and you’re going to find homophobia (he refers to Midnight Cowboy as a “story about two fags”), racism towards African-Americans (“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility”) and Native Americans (“There were a great number of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves), and the usual entitled bullshit you still hear today from Trumpers who love to talk about how they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps while their parents paid their way through college. So while John Wayne didn’t feel like he needed to feel any sort of shame about American slavery or the genocide of Native Americans, I do feel the need to feel shame for a very strange affinity for the singular tough-guy character John Wayne plays in every movie. I grew up with John Wayne movies playing in my house regularly. I sent my father–a bizarre blend of Western Kansas hillbilly and staunch Democrat–a still from The Horse Soldiers with a “name that movie” tag and he got it without hesitation. I’ve even visited John Wayne’s childhood home in Winterset, Iowa. Which is all going to say that we want separating the art from the artist to be some easy binary, but it’s usually a lot more complicated than that.

John Wayne was such an asshole that even 40+ years after his death it feels like I’ll have to include this caveat anytime I talk about John Wayne in print in perpetuity. Because I love John Wayne the actor. That’s not to say that he’s a good actor, but his on screen persona is something that just works from role to role (except for maybe, the time he played Genghis Khan). For something like The Horse Soldiers–a Civil War story about a Union cavalry brigade riding into the deep south to blow up some railroad tracks and disrupt Confederate supply lines–Wayne is at his absolute peak (even if his conservative views would make him better cast as a Confederate, I guess he is still technically an actor). No-nonsense, tough as nails, and when he needs to be, vulnerable in the right spots. What separates The Horse Soldiers from every other John Wayne flick though is the casting of William Holden as the army doctor sent along for the ride. It gives us a classic Man of Action vs. Man of Science showdown that elevates a boilerplate Civil War story into a film that puts itself right up there with John Ford’s latter day classics The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Add to the mix a feisty Southern Belle who is taken captive after listening in on the calvary’s plans to blow up a railroad station, and you can see why this one is getting its profile raised by the Kino Lorber remaster/reissue treatment. Even if you hate John Wayne, you can at least take solace in the fact that he usually plays an asshole character, and his Colonel John Marlowe is no exception. Sure, he’s got a great tactical mind and is a natural born leader, but once William Holden’s Major Henry Kendall is introduced and the bristling starts you see Marlowe for who he really is: a man whose “take a slug of whiskey and rub some dirt on it” approach to battlefield healthcare is informed by a surprisingly emotional distrust of modern medicine that is revealed later in the film. William Holden is just so great here, but when is he not? Every time you see him you wonder why he wasn’t a bigger star. His Doctor Kendall is the sort of guy who goes into slave quarters to help deliver a baby once his work is done tending to the injured Union soldiers, much to the dismay of Wayne’s Marlowe. It’s the first major blow up between the two and it’s pure cinematic lightning.

John Wayne is always made better when he has a proper actor acting opposite him. Jimmy Stewart in the aforementioned The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Robert Mitchum in El Dorado, and Maureen O’Hara in the three films they made together all come to mind. In addition to Holden undercutting all of Wayne’s macho bullshit, Constance Towers’ captured southern belle both adds tension (as she tries to escape or give away the calvary’s position at every turn) and serves to soften Col. Marlowe’s tough-guy gimmick. By the end all three primary characters have experienced a surprising amount of growth and mutual understanding and that kind of commitment to character over yee haw, bang bang, giddy up cowboy shit is kind of incredible. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of yee haw, bang bang, giddy up but there’s also a surprising amount of Kumbaya by the time the last rebels have been dispatched.

The Horse Soldiers is a couple steps behind the all-time classics of the genre. While it’s certainly less problematic than, say, The Searchers, you can see the cracks starting to form in Ford’s direction. There are some jarring tonal shifts that undercut some of the movie’s big emotional moments, usually involving cutting to Sgt. Maj. Kirby–the platoon’s resident drunk and numbskull–doing something dumb. Or a whole little segment that involves a military school for boys rising to the call of duty and running of the Union cavalry. A movie with two self-serious leading men needs a little bit of humor to lighten things, but it almost always takes it to the point of parody. Still, despite its flaws, The Horse Soldiers is an easy one to recommend (especially with Kino Lorber’s new 4K master which looks, you guessed it, fantastic).