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This is a wonderful film as a film - it gets an 8 out of 10. As a filmed piece of accurate history...one wishes to be more loving, but it is a 5 out of 10. And I think I am actually being very charitable.
What was he like - that man of horse and saber who was the youngest "boy" general in the Union Army of the American Civil War, and ended dying with all his command in the greatest military victory of the North American Indian tribes? Opinionated, militant, bumptious, bloody-handed, ambitious, clever, too-clever, Indian-foe, Indian-friend(?), and national hero. His death in 1876 was treated as a national tragedy and pushed him into a position of fame equal to Washington, Lincoln, Jackson, and Grant/Lee, and Sherman/Jackson. It is only with a growing awareness of the mistakes made in his career - the overly ambitious hot-spur, that his reputation declined. Yet to this day, George Armstrong Custer remains the best recalled figure in our history's military annals to lose his last battle (I can't really think of a similar one - maybe General Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright, forced to stay with his men on the Bataan Death March - but Wainwright survived the March and the Second World War).
Custer has appeared in more films than far better generals, due to the Western adventures and Little Big Horn. Pity that the details of the real career were never handled so lovingly as Raoul Walsh and Errol Flynn handled them in this film. But even in 1941 the legend was still potent. Olivia De Haviland portrayed Libby Custer, who was recently pointed out in another film review on this thread survived George until 1933, so her effective handling of the story was still in place eight years later. Custer was seen as our wayward but brave knight errant, and with the shadow of World War II looming closer we had to keep the myth and bury the truth. John Ford would have fully understood this and approved it.
So we get the view that he was a hot-spur, but he was patriotic. Although almost pushed out of West Point by demerits (which was true), Custer was in the class of 1861, and it would have been really stupid to be picky about such a fighter that year. You see, most of the so-called military talent from West Point (from Robert E. Lee down) was southern, and joined the Confederacy. The Union needed every northern "Point" man they could find.
Custer's Civil War career should be given closer study - he was attached to the staff of General - In - Chief George B. McClellan, and distinguished himself in the Peninsula Campaign and other eastern front warfare. But he was a cavalryman - and he would rise under the watchful eyes of Grant and Sherman's buddy Phil Sheridan in the latter parts of the war. In particular he served with dash and distinction at the battle of Cedar Creek, which ended the threat of the Confederacy in the Shenandoah Valley. It also hit Custer hard on a personal level (his close West Point friend, Stephen Ramseur, joined the Confederacy and rose to a position like Custer - mortally wounded, Custer sat with Ramseur all through the latter's last night alive).
Following the war things fell apart. He wanted to make his brevet - Major Generalship permanent (it wasn't, as it was a battlefield promotion). They only had a Lt. Colonelship to give him in the shrunken army along the frontier. He tried to play politics, making the error of supporting President Andrew Johnson on a political trip in 1866, and finding most Northerners hated Johnson as an inept idiot. He supposedly admired the Indians (he certainly was eloquent in writing of them and the West), but he caused a genuine military massacre in 1868 of Indian women and children that ended with a court martial. Later, during the 1870s he would support Indian claims against a ring of politicians (that went up to the Secretary of War, William Belknap) who bought and sold Indian trading posts for profit. It ruined Belknap, and left a black eye on the Grant Administration. It put him into the doghouse with Grant and Sherman (who was Belknap's former commander), and Sheridan barely saved his career. Then he was sent on the final Big Horn Campaign. And immortality arrived.
That career is worth a real film, but would it be too critical? Should we hold a man of the 1850s - 1876 to the standards of 2007? Would we like that done to us in a hundred years? Certainly it could happen, but I'm not sure we'd like it.
Custer (1941 style) fit Flynn like a glove, with his giving the closest to a "dance" performance in any of his major films. His final movie with Olivia De Haviland is underlined with a melancholy due to the fate of the hero's character. In support actors like Sidney Greenstreet, Stanley Ridges, Arthur Kennedy and Anthony Quinn did very nicely as friends, foes, or even treacherous sneaks (Kennedy). As an entertaining piece of myth making it remains high - but as a study of a complex military hero it is not what it should be.


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