7 / 10
Official trailer
The Horse Soldiers is John Ford’s only Civil War film and one of his weaker collaborations with John Wayne. Wayne plays Colonel John Marlowe, a Union cavalry commander leading a long-range raid behind Confederate lines. William Holden plays Major Henry Kendall, the regimental surgeon. Constance Towers plays Hannah Hunter, the Southern belle Marlowe takes prisoner after she overhears their plans. The film is loosely based on Grierson’s Raid of April 1863, in which Colonel Benjamin Grierson rode seventeen hundred Union cavalry six hundred miles through Mississippi to distract Confederate forces from the Vicksburg campaign.
The film should be better than it is. Ford and Wayne together produced The Searchers three years earlier. The setup is interesting. The locations were real. The result is competent but tired, and the production was disastrous behind the camera in ways that affected what was put on screen.
I enjoy this one more than its reputation suggests. Wayne and Holden bickering their way through Mississippi is good company, and the cavalry scenes have that old Ford feel I’m always glad to see. What keeps it at a 7 is how visibly the air goes out of it in the last act.
The Production Problems
Production was difficult. Ford and Wayne were both showing the effects of age and alcohol. Tensions on set were high. The veteran stuntman Fred Kennedy was killed during a horse fall during the climactic battle sequence. Ford effectively gave up on the film after that. He shot several scenes once and printed them when he should have polished them. The final reels are noticeably less careful than the early sequences.
Ford was never the same after this production.
He continued making films for another decade, but the death on set affected him in ways he never publicly addressed. The Horse Soldiers is the breaking point of his classical Hollywood career. The films after it have their virtues, but the unguarded romanticism of his earlier work is largely gone.
I find those last reels hard to watch knowing what happened on set, and I can’t hold the carelessness against Ford. It reads to me like grief.
For Writers
Production circumstances affect what’s on screen. The Horse Soldiers is a tired film made by tired men in a difficult situation that became tragic. The fatigue is visible. The lesson for writers is that the conditions under which you produce work show up in the work. Burnout, grief, illness, distraction. They leave fingerprints. Sometimes you can’t wait until conditions are right because life doesn’t arrange itself for your convenience.
But you should know what the conditions are putting into the work, and you should consider whether the work deserves better conditions before it goes out.
What Works
The cavalry sequences are well-shot. Ford knew how to film men on horses. The early raid scenes have his characteristic affection for the cavalry as a way of life. The bridge sequence at the railroad junction is the best sustained action in the film. Holden’s performance as the surgeon is the best in the film. He plays Kendall as a serious doctor at odds with Wayne’s hardened soldier, and the conflict between battlefield medicine and battlefield necessity is the most interesting thread the script develops.
The decision to make a Union film with a Union protagonist is also unusual for Ford, who had a notable streak of Southern sympathy throughout his career. The Horse Soldiers is one of the few Ford films that doesn’t romanticize the Confederate side.
Holden is the reason I’d watch it again. The arguments between Kendall and Marlowe are the scenes I’d keep if I had to cut the film down to an hour, because the surgeon and the colonel disagree about something real every time they open their mouths.
For Writers
The conflict between two competent professionals with incompatible goals is a reliable engine for drama. Marlowe wants to complete the mission. Kendall wants to treat the wounded. Both objectives are legitimate. Both have costs. The conflict between them doesn’t have a clean resolution because both men are right. The lesson is that the strongest conflicts in stories often happen between people who agree on the facts and disagree about what to do given the facts. Disagreement without a villain is harder to write and more rewarding to read.
What Does Not Work
The Hannah Hunter subplot is poorly constructed. Constance Towers is good in the part but the script doesn’t know what to do with her after the first act.
She becomes a hostage, then a love interest, then a problem, then a love interest again. The dynamic with Wayne never settles into something the film commits to.
The Confederate scenes featuring the Jefferson Military Academy boys marching out to defend their school is uncomfortable in ways Ford didn’t intend. Modern viewers find the scene where teenage Confederate cadets are repulsed without serious casualties harder to take than 1959 audiences did. The film isn’t interested in the moral complexity of what the boys were defending.
The romance and the cadets lose me. I’d have cut the romance entirely and let Towers play a sharp Southern captive who never warms to Wayne. The cadet scene makes me wince, because the film plays it as a light interlude and never looks at what those boys were marching out to defend.
For Writers
A subplot needs to know what it’s doing or it should be cut. The Hannah Hunter material in The Horse Soldiers is the script’s biggest problem. It doesn’t have a stable function. The result is that the romance is unconvincing and the captive-narrative is incomplete. The lesson is that a subplot that exists primarily because the genre expects a romance subplot is worse than no subplot at all. Write the romance you have a reason to write or skip it entirely.
Craft Note
John Ford directed. John Wayne as Colonel John Marlowe. William Holden as Major Henry Kendall. Constance Towers as Hannah Hunter. Hoot Gibson, Anna Lee, William Tweedie, and Strother Martin in support. Based loosely on Harold Sinclair’s novel about Grierson’s Raid. Released June 1959. Stuntman Fred Kennedy killed during production. The film was the most expensive western Ford had made to date. Modest box office success.
Does The Horse Soldiers still hold up?
7/10. It’s a Ford-Wayne picture that falls well short of their best work together, and I enjoy it anyway. Holden’s surgeon, the cavalry sequences and the bridge sequence at the railroad junction justify the 7 on their own. The romance and the tired final reels keep it from climbing any higher. Skip it if you want major Ford, and watch it if you’re working through his filmography.
