Rent The Horse Soldiers (1959)

Lesser Ford. - The Horse Soldiers review by Steve

Civil war western which has the usual John Ford signifiers: manly baritone singing; comical Irish soldiers in a constant search for strong liquor; a gratuitous punch up... and the competing males leads.  Here, John Wayne is a veteran cavalry Colonel leading his column south to sabotage Confederacy railway lines, and William Holden is an army medic trying to keep his men alive.

Into this contrived mano a mano is forced Constance Towers as a southern aristocrat who has listened in on the cavalry plans and so is taken along to keep her quiet and adorn the horse soldiers with some decorative glamour, rather than shooting her as a spy. She begins the film promising ruination on all Union soldiers and their kinfolk and ends it falling in love with the Colonel.

The comic tone of the early part of the film gives way to the conflict, but while the battle is photogenic, Ford doesn't reveal much of the human cost. A potentially quite poignant attack by children enlisted into the Confederate army doesn't extract any sense of absurdity or pity for the horror of war. The scene ends with one of the boy soldiers being spanked.

The actors do well under the circumstances, particularly the elegant, urbane Holden who is surprisingly at home in Ford's old west. It's quite entertaining. Ford frames his cavalry soldiers attractively, but it has very little sense of authenticity. There is no impression of poverty or famine, or that the black people the Union soldiers encounter are actually slaves. A lesser John Ford, I suppose, but not untypical.