damarissteele

Agree with the previous reviews. It's all a bit too far fetched.

This gem from Hollywood's 1930s British period revolves around an enduring friendship between Horatio Nelson and a fictional boyhood friend, Jonathan Blake. The boys are separated early in their lives, after spotting an attempted scuttling of a ship on the Norfolk coast in order to claim the insurance. Horatio is sent away to sea and goes on to become Lord Nelson of Trafalgar. Jonathan goes to London to warn Lloyds, and is subsequently taken on to work there.

The superb cast includes Freddie Bartholomew, Tyrone Power, Madeleine Carroll, Sir Guy Standing, George Sanders, Virginia Field, C Aubrey Smith, Una O'Connor and Douglas Scott, as the young Horatio Nelson. I don't want to single out one actor because they are all so good.

The film is very touching but never descends into sentimentality. It is available in its entirety on You Tube. Not to be missed!

The Last Command

This rousing 1955 version of the events surrounding Texas' fight for independence from Mexico ticks all the boxes. A ruggedly attractive hero, a touching romance, and a stirring score by Max Steiner. Sterling Hayden is ideally suited to play Jim Bowie, ably supported by Richard Carlson as Travis. Arthur Hunnicutt is perhaps a bit too homespun as Davy Crockett (he was a Congressman, after all!). Anna Maria Alberghetti is lovely as the naïve young girl who falls in love with Bowie, with Ben Cooper as her would-be suitor. Virginia Grey is good as Susanna Dickinson, the wife of one of the Alamo's defenders, as is Otto Kruger as Stephen Austin. Hugh Sanders is highly effective in a small role as Sam Houston, at the end of the film.

While The Last Command contains inaccuracies most films based on famous historical events do this in the interest of telling a good story and creating dramatic effect, then and now. It is perhaps a bit sentimental in places, and the romance is undoubtedly fictional. But on the whole it is very moving and a worthy tribute to the men who died at the Alamo.

This rousing film represents the final teaming of Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. He plays George Armstrong Custer throughout his West Point, Civil War and Indian fighting years, and she plays Elizabeth Bacon Custer, his wife. There was certainly a real-life attraction between the two and Olivia de Havilland has said that she sensed at the time that it would be their last picture together. Hattie McDaniel, who beat her for the best supporting actress Oscar for Gone With The Wind, features, also Sidney Greenstreet as General Winfield Scott and Arthur Kennedy as a very suave and attractive villain. George P Huntley Jr does a comic turn as an Englishman caught up in the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

Above and beyond Errol and Olivia, the poignant farewell between Custer and his wife must have had considerable resonance with contemporary audiences as the film came out at the end of 1941, when American servicemen were saying goodbye to their wives and sweethearts as the US entered the war. It is possible the director overdid it slightly with having Olivia collapse onto the floor at the end of the scene, just leaving her standing there would have spoken volumes. But at the time the film was made I guess this did not seem as corny as it does now.

I simply love this film. It takes considerable liberties with history, but who cares. Custer not as he probably was, but as he should have been. And I have always had a sneaking suspicion that while this movie is pure 1940s Hollywood, the real Custer was not a great deal unlike the real Errol Flynn.

For me as probably for many people this film is forever defined by the poignant opening scene with John Wayne and Coleen Gray. However there are sterling performances from Montgomery Clift, Joanne Dru, Harry Carey Jr and especially Harry Carey Sr, a leading man of silent westerns and a very good character actor later on. He died shortly after the film was completed. Red River with its stirring score simply soars like the western sky. One of the best!

Errol Flynn was well past his prime when this film was made in the early 1950s, but the charm is still there, and you could not ask for better in the rest of the cast, Anthony Quinn, Maureen O'Hara and Mildred Natwick, among others.

A delightful, well written and frequently witty pirates movie.

I never fail to be moved by this Civil War western from 1940, ever since the first time I watched it on late night television with my father when I was in the seventh grade. Errol Flynn (representing the Union) is on top form, and Randolph Scott, a native Virginian, is ideally suited for the role of a Southern gentleman soldier.

Miriam Hopkins (from Georgia) is very beautiful and perfect as a Southern aristocrat fallen on hard times because of a war which is obviously being lost. The leading lady in this film perhaps needed to be a bit older and to have seen a bit of the world. Humphrey Bogart may at first seem a bit ridiculous as a Mexican bandit, but he was good at playing the bad guy and you have to remember that this film was before Casablanca and his other great classics.

The film does have one or two corny lines, which it is hard to believe were not laughable even at the time it was made. And one historical detail was a bit out, people in Nevada would have heard of the battle of Vicksburg before the spring of 1865. However the score by Max Steiner is absolutely wonderful and helps to convey the sadness and desperation of both sides nearing the end of the conflict. The courtroom scene with Errol Flynn, while probably not rooted in reality, is to me one of the actor's finer moments. And the portrayal of Abraham Lincoln, shown in shadow towards the end of the film, has always been my vision of Lincoln.