They Died With Their Boots On (Warner Bros., 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next item on TCM’s program of final films by famous movie duos was They Died With Their Boots On (1941), an ostensible biopic of George Armstrong Custer made at Warner Bros. with Errol Flynn as Custer, Olivia De Havilland as his long-suffering wife Elizabeth Bacon Custer, and Raoul Walsh directing from a script by Wally King and Aeneas MacKenzie that played fast and loose with American history in general and Custer’s life in particular. One gets the impression that the writers had a checklist of elements they needed to include to shoehorn Custer’s life into the traditional Hollywood formulae and get in the romance and comedy audiences would have expected a big movie – even a big movie whose main subject is war – to include. The film starts in 1857 when Custer arrives at West Point in a uniform of his own design with, as one cast member puts it, “more gold braid than a French admiral.” At first he’s mistaken for a senior officer instead of just another cadet, and during his four years at the school Custer racks up an imposing list of demerits and punishment details – including one that becomes the meet-cute between him and Libby (as she was nicknamed both in the film and in real life) as she’s there to visit her father and has got lost, but he’s not allowed to give her directions because part of his punishment is he’s not allowed to speak at all.

Then Abraham Lincoln gets elected President, the Civil War breaks out, and there’s a surprisingly orderly scene in which the class that’s about to graduate from West Point breaks apart when they are asked to take a new oath swearing to fight for the United States rather than any particular state – and the Southern officers go to one side of the parade ground and are sent off while the Northern ones who stay loyal to the Union stay and are assigned to regiments. (I’m sure the real division of the U.S. Army and its officer corps on the outbreak of the Civil War was nowhere nearly this orderly.) Custer, as the most scapegrace officer in West Point history since Ulysses S. Grant (obviously this is the writers’ idea of irony), fails to land a regiment and has to take a train to Washington, D.C. (breaking a date with Libby to do so) and personally crash the office of the overall Civil War commander, General Winfield Scott (Sidney Greenstreet in his second film – his first was The Maltese Falcon – and he looks exactly like the extant photos of the real Winfield Scott), to get an assignment – which he has to steal a horse from a superior officer to get to. (One of the film’s biggest deviations from history is that Scott remains the supreme commander of the Army not only throughout the Civil War but even afterwards. In reality Scott was forced out of that position by the ambitious George B. McClellan even though he had already worked out an overall strategy that not only would have won the Civil War for the Union but actually did win the Civil War for the Union when Ulysses S. Grant thought it up independently three years later.) The first half of the film focuses on the Civil War and depicts Custer as nearly winning it single-handedly for the Union by constantly disobeying orders and being proved right.

Then Custer settles into an unhappy retirement from active service, living off his wife’s money (she inherited it from her father, Samuel Bacon, played by Gene Lockhart as an arrogant blowhard Custer tells off in a bar, then has to make up to when he wants to marry Bacon’s daughter) and drinking a lot (the old Hollywood cliché Douglas Sirk wanted to insert into Battle Hymn, only the real person that movie was about, Dean Hess, was there to tell Sirk, “I didn’t drink,” essentially saying to Sirk, “Don’t fall back on such a stupid cliché. Work harder as a director and make the audience believe in my story as it really happened”). He gets an offer from three speculators, Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy), his father William Sharp (Walter Hampden) and Fitzhugh Lee (Regis Toomehy), to become nominal president of a railroad they’re organizing to lobby for government contracts and sell stock to unsuspecting victims. (Richard White’s fascinating book Railroaded! documents how the original transcontinental railroads were built exactly this way: by speculators and grifters who weren’t interested in building railroads as much as they were in milking the government for subsidies, including free land for rights-of-way; so this portrayal is one of the few things about this movie that’s historically accurate. It’s also typical of the mild critiques of capitalism that often insinuated themselves into Warner Bros. movies before the line hardened at the end of World War II and Jack Warner became one of the most ferocious and committed defenders of the Hollywood blacklist.) Custer, whom we’re obviously supposed to believe has a sense of righteousness despite his scapegrace and egomaniac exterior, angrily turns down the offer and throws the grifters out of his home.

Then he gets a commission from the U.S. military to join the wars against Native Americans in the Montana Territory, which then included not only modern-day Montana but North and South Dakotas as well, and when he arrives at Fort Lincoln, Montana he learns that the troops he’s supposed to command are dissolute louts – courtesy of Ned Sharp, who’s wangled a government contract to operate it right next to the base and says that if the soldiers want to spend their pay in his establishment, that’s their business. (It’s not like there’s a lot of other things to spend it on in the middle of the Great Plains, and in those days before national banks and wire transfers they can’t easily send it home either.) The only friends Custer makes in this territory is a British cavalry officer who moved to the U.S. and fought with him in the Civil War, Lt. “Queen’s Own” Butler (G. P. Huntley, Jr., who appeared with Fred Astaire on stage in the 1931 musical Gay Divorce; when the show was filmed by RKO in 1934 as The Gay Divorcée, with Ginger Rogers replacing the stage lead, Claire Luce, Edward Everett Horton played Huntley’s part); and California Joe (Charley Grapewin, Uncle Henry from The Wizard of Oz), who advises Custer that if he wants to fight the “Indians” he will need to learn to fight the way they do. (That suggested an interesting road-not-taken for writers Kline and MacKenzie: Custer asks Joe to join the Army to advise him on tactics, but we never see him doing so – just some cute byplay about how Joe will only join if he doesn’t have to wear a uniform or salute.)

Custer literally wrecks Sharp’s saloon – it’s interesting how strongly an anti-alcohol attitude this film, made only eight years after the repeal of Prohibition, takes – and manages to discipline his troops into an effective fighting force, partly to keeping them off booze and partly by teaching them an old British cavalry song, “Garry Owen,” which Butler taught him. (Not surprisingly, this becomes a major Leitmotif in Max Steiner’s typically thundering music score – in many Warners films Steiner put a particularly loud, brassy chord under his own credit, and I’ve joked, “Music by Max Steiner – as if you couldn’t tell!”) Custer also catches Sharp and his equally slimy staff selling rifles to the Natives, thereby ensuring that they actually have better guns than the ones the U.S. has issued to his men – which reminded me of the magnificent pro-Native 1932 Western End of the Trail, produced by and starring Tim McCoy, who plays a U.S. officer cashiered for allegedly selling guns to the Natives. McCoy’s character denies the charge but protests that the Natives are getting a raw deal from the U.S. government, which has broken every treaty they have made with a tribe, and he lives with the Natives for a while – I once showed this astonishing film to a group of Native American activists and they were astonished that this history had actually been the subject of a Hollywood movie in 1932.

They Died With Their Boots On actually tries to remake Custer as a sympathizer to the Natives; when Crazy Horse (Anthony Quinn) comes onto the grounds of Fort Lincoln to buy himself and his braves the guns Sharp’s operation is selling, Custer busts him and sentences him to two months in the brig but carefully prevents his men from lynching him. (I thought of the irony that two decades later, in Lawrence of Arabia, Quinn would also be playing a native leader making common cause with a sympathetic white person to drive an occupying force from his native land.) Crazy Horse gets sprung by a war band from his tribe, and as he (though I’m not sure whether it was Quinn or a stunt double) leaps onto his horse and rides off, Custer tells his men, “That’s the only real cavalryman I’ve seen out here.” Later, on the eve of the battle of the Little Big Horn, Custer tells his men they’re fighting for the “real Americans” and Butler rather inconveniently reminds him that the only real Americans are the ones they’re fighting against. Meanwhile Libby Bacon Custer (ya remember Libby Bacon Custer?) is living on the fort with her and Custer’s faithful maid Callie (Hattie McDaniel, reuniting her and De Havilland from the cast of Gone With the Wind), anxiously awaiting word of each new battle. The crisis is sparked when Custer negotiates a treaty with Crazy Horse in which the Natives cede the rest of the Montana territory to the whites in exchange for a promise that the Black Hills will remain theirs forever. Well, we all know how that turned out: Sharp sparks a fake rumor that there’s gold in the Black Hills, thousands of white settlers flock in, and the Army is obliged to defend the whites even at the cost of breaking their treaty with the Natives. The Sioux put together a coalition of all the tribes in the area (including the Cheyenne, who were usually their sworn enemies), and Custer’s rout at the Little Big Horn is presented here as a deliberate suicide mission to buy time for another white army in the area to receive reinforcements and beat back the Native hordes.

I’m not sure why all those people who raised such politically correct hissy-fits over HBO Max’s showing of Gone With the Wind – first getting it pulled from the streaming channel altogether and then insisting that if it’s shown at all, it be preceded with “woke” content explaining that holding African-Americans in slavery was really a bad thing – haven’t made a similar fuss about this movie when it’s at least as problematic from an historical and moral standpoint. The effort to whitewash Custer and present him as a true friend of the Natives flies in the face of his actual historical record – including one huge event that’s missing from this film altogether: the massacre at the Washita River in Kansas in November 1868. It was this event that gave Custer the image of America’s bravest “Indian-fighter” and led to his assignment to the Dakotas in 1874 (after, not before, the rumors of gold in the Black Hills had led to a mass invasion by white settlers) – even though it was an out-and-out massacre, sort of the 19th century version of My Lai, in which most of the victims were women, children or men too old to fight. It was a slaughter, pure and simple – in modern-day terms, it was a genocide – and in a movie made in 1941, on the eve of America’s entry into World War II (in which it would be our principal enemy, Germany, which would be practicing genocide), it’s easy to see why this battle would be left out of a script that aimed at turning Custer into an inspiring war hero.

One thing this movie does get right was Custer’s actual rank in the Army: on the eve of the Civil War he was a lieutenant, though during the war he was promoted to colonel and later made what was called a “brevet general.” That meant he got a promotion, but only for the duration of the war; after the war he no longer carried the official title of general, and this film correctly refers to him as “Col. Custer” up until his death at the Little Big Horn. It’s also interesting in giving Crazy Horse a much bigger role than Sitting Bull (who isn’t listed on the imdb.com page for the film, at least not as such, and appears in only one scene during the Native war council), though that’s apparently how it was in real life as well. Four years before he made End of the Trail Tim McCoy had participated in an oral history project on the Little Big Horn and interviewed survivors of the battle – on the Native side, the side that had survivors. The braves who had actually fought the battle said it was Crazy Horse, not Sitting Bull, who was the battlefield commander and the officer they gave credit for their victory. They Died With Their Boots On is a problematic film – I remember seeing it for the first time in 1971 at a theatrical revival and shortly thereafter seeing Arthur Penn’s 1971 film Little Big Man, which took almost the exact opposite view in its depiction of Custer (Richard Mulligan) as a vainglorious egomaniac with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. In some ways the attempt to portray Custer as a friend of the Natives in They Died With Their Boots On makes the film even more annoying than if the “Indians” had just been shown as mindless savages the way they would have been if John Ford had made this film – Ford’s films are surprisingly progressive in many ways but one blind spot, at least until his late movie Cheyenne Autumn, was that he bought into the traditional American myth of “Indians” as barbaric beasts whose elimination was a necessary step for the progress of American civilization.

They Died With Their Boots On was also the final straw for Olivia De Havilland: she was tired of working at Warner Bros. and getting mindless roles like this. In 1941 Warner Bros. had lent her out to Paramount for a romantic comedy about immigration, Hold Back the Dawn, directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Billy Wilder and Charlie Brackett. She was so impressed by the movie and the overall working conditions at Paramount that she decided to file suit to break her Warners contract and in particular to have the “suspension and extension” clause abolished. “Suspension and extension” meant that if you turned down a role the studio was ordering you to do, they could put your contract on hold without pay and then extend the length of the contract pretty much however long they wanted to. De Havilland won her case; she was freed from Warners and allowed to free-lance, and “suspension and extension” was modified so the suspension and extension could last only for the length of time it took for the studio to make the film with someone else. (This put an end to a particularly exploitative use of the clause: sometimes a studio would deliberately offer an actor a bad script they had no intention of actually filming, just to give themselves an excuse to take the actor off payroll and keep him or her in limbo, unable to work either there or anywhere else, until the actor caved and met the studio’s demands.) Along with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision against Paramount in 1948, which forbade movie studios from also owning theatre chains, and the advent of television, the De Havilland decision helped break down the studio system that had kept actors, directors, writers and virtually all the creative personnel involved in filmmaking in long-term bondage to their employers. It also shaped the politics of minor Warner Bros. star Ronald Reagan, who blamed the collapse of the studio system in general and the antitrust decision that had severed studios and theatres in particular for the decline in his own career. Decades later, President Ronald Reagan virtually halted antitrust enforcement in the U.S., at least partly because he had never stopped blaming the whole idea of antitrust for the end of his movie career.