‘Santa Fe Trail’ and the Birth of the Crackpot Liberal Terrorist

The fact that anyone could get a film like Santa Fe Trail (1940) made should remain an inspiration to D– minus history students everywhere.  It’s a Warner Bros. western starring Errol Flynn as the young JEB Stuart and the capture of violent abolitionist John Brown (Raymond Massey).

I saw Santa Fe Trail on Max a few nights before Elias Rodrigues shot two Israeli Embassy workers outside the Jewish Cultural Museum in Washington, DC.  Later, he yelled, “Free Palestine!” at media as cops took him away in cuffs, in case you doubted his motivation.  As it turns out, the day I saw it was the day of the Palm Springs IVF clinic bombing, which fortunately only killed the bomber.  Law enforcement has since discovered his anti-natalist  manifesto and designated it domestic terrorism, so we know he also felt completely justified in his act.  Even without last week’s violence, Luigi Mangione came to mind several times as Santa Fe Trail played out.  Who knew Santa Fe Trail would so topical?  There’s no shortage of little John Browns out there who all feel entitled to kill for their causes.

Santa Fe Trail was not the first movie to put a terrorist onscreen, but it turned John Brown into one of the earliest, if not the first, of a very familiar screen type today:  The crackpot liberal-terrorist. “In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) brings Godzilla and King Ghidorah back to stop global warming. In the MCU, Thanos (Josh Brolin) wipes out half of life in the universe to decrease populations.  In Watchmen (2009), Ozymandias hopes to end nuclear war and unite the world by starting one.”

Santa Fe Trail is a not particularly well-remembered or well-liked by film history, nor should it be. Directed by Michael Curtiz and written by Robert Buckner, it portrays the capture of John Brown as the first mission of six dashing young West Point grads led by George Armstrong Custer (Ronald Reagan) and JEB Stuart (Errol Flynn) (who never actually met) as part of a pre-Civil War Avengers team that includes Phil Sheridan, George Pickett, John Bell Hood, and James Longstreet.  None of them were in the same West Point class.  Longstreet and Custer graduated 19 years apart.  But enough of that, God isn’t always in the details.

In Alan K. Rode’s biography of Curtiz, he describes a meeting between production chief Jack Warner and Robert Buckner, who had written two westerns for Flynn, Dodge City (1939) and Virginia City (1940).  Looking for another, Warner asked Buckner if there was anything interesting going on in Kansas around the building of the railroad.  Buckner replied with stories of “Bleeding Kansas,” the violent battle over Kansas statehood that hinged on whether the state would enter the union a slave or free state.  He focused on John Brown’s instigating the murders of five pro-slavery activists in the Pottawattamie Massacre, his attempted slave revolt and apprehension at Harpers Ferry, and the advent of the Civil War.  Warner liked the Brown angle more than the railroad one, especially in the year Gone with the Wind (1939) swept both the Oscars and dominated the box office.

It should come as no surprise that Jack and Harry Warner, the liberal studio bosses who made anti-Klan pictures like The Black Legion (1936), and anti-Nazi films like Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939) would make an anti-slavery movie.  Still, Warner knew such a movie might ring a touch problematic at all the theaters he owned in the Jim Crow South.  Knowing half his audience despised Brown, he came up with a compromise that we’ve seen in movies ever since.  “Fine, go ahead,” Warner told Buckner on their John Brown movie. “We’ll make the son of bitch the heavy.”

That is, the anti-hero.  Curtiz cast the lot’s matinee idols as the young officers out to stop John Brown, and then cast grimy goons and tough guys as the abolitionists.  “Buckner’s screenplay and Raymond Massey’s acting turned John Brown into a psychopathic prince of darkness,” Rode writes. “Massey’s florid performance could have been the centerpiece of a relevant biography about a transformational American figure.”

True, but at no point does anyone actually deny that John Brown is right about slavery. As Reagan’s Custer tells Flynn’s Stuart, “Jeb, there’s a purpose behind that madness. One that can’t easily be dismissed.” “I’ve always known where your sympathies lay,” says Stuart,” but it never affected our friendship and it never will. But it isn’t our job to decide who’s right and who’s wrong about slavery any more than it is John Brown’s.”  Ashamed of himself for even suggesting that slavery is wrong to a Southerner, a sheepish Custer says, “I guess you’re right, Jeb. I’m sorry.”

Yes, how dare you.  Despite John Brown’s capture and death sentence, the final image of him in Santa Fe Trail is his walk up to his gallows against the sunrise, shot at up angles on a hill, an ascension to Heaven.  Buckner even threw out Brown’s actual gallows speech for one quoting Jesus:  “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”  The movie does depict him as God’s instrument.  God’s extremely blunt instrument, but still. Producer Hal Wallis considered cutting that gallows scene.  Rode’s book recounts Curtiz and Buckner pushing back hard. Buckner replied, “What is Santa Fe Trail in any honest analysis but the story of John Brown? That’s the very thing that makes it important from the ordinary Western. We must see the end of John Brown.” [italics Rode’s].

It’s hard to imagine a time when slavery was still so polarizing you couldn’t just say it was wrong on screen, but we still live in one where saying we need to stop climate change right now gets you equated with a mad scientist willing to do it with a giant three-headed space lizard.