The Horse Soldiers (Mirisch Corporation, Mahin-Rackin, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, October 21) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies called The Horse Soldiers, made by the Mirisch Corporation and various other concerns for United Artists release. It was a Civil War-era action film directed by John Ford and co-starring John Wayne and William Holden, based on a 1956 novel of the same title by Harold Sinclair which in turn was based on actual events. In April and May 1863 Union Col. Benjamin Grierson led a cavalry company from La Grange, Tennessee deep into Confederate territory to support General Ulysses S. Grant’s campaign to take the port of Vicksburg, Mississippi. His initial target was the railroad depot at Newton’s Station, Mississippi, through which the Confederates were sending supplies to support Vicksburg. (Ironically, the film’s script by John Lee Mahin and Martin Rackin already depicts Grant as overall commander of the Union forces. In fact he wasn’t yet; it was Grant’s success at taking Vicksburg that convinced President Abraham Lincoln to hire him for that role.) Grierson’s ultimate destination was Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the film Grierson is renamed “John Marlowe,” his civilian job is changed from music teacher to railroad construction foreman, and he’s played by John Wayne. After the previous Wayne/Ford collaboration The Searchers, in which he’d played a former Confederate officer who solemnly declares that the only oath he ever took was to the Confederacy, it was nice to see him on the Union side! The other male lead was named Dr. Erastus Dean Yule in real life but he’s called “Hank Kendall” in the movie and is played by William Holden. Marlowe is ordered to take Kendall on his mission because Union army regulations require that a doctor be along to treat anyone who gets wounded in combat. Marlowe is immediately antagonistic towards Kendall and it’s only about two-thirds into the movie before we’re told why: Marlowe delivers a long monologue about how years before his young wife was diagnosed by two doctors with a tumor. After they opened her up and subjected her to the inevitable pain associated with surgery in those pre-anesthetic days, they realized they had misdiagnosed her and she hadn’t had a tumor – only she died from the shock effects of the unnecessary operation. That led Marlowe to an insane prejudice against all doctors.

Part of the problem with this operation is that its success depends on complete surprise, to the point that when Marlowe’s troops encounter Confederate resistance, instead of fighting a pitched battle against it they’re supposed to lie low so no Confederates get to report to their high command that Union troops are operating in the area, heading towards Vicksburg and obviously up to no good (for the Confederate cause; given that the Confederates were fighting for their “right” to own Black people as slaves, it’s hard to muster much sympathy for them!). Along the way they take over Greenbriar Plantation and there encounter a young Confederate widow, Hannah Hunter (played by a truly awful “actress” named Constance Towers; obviously producers Mahin, Rackin, and Walter Mirisch had blown their casting budget on Wayne and Holden and therefore couldn’t afford a woman who could actually act!), and her Black slave Lukey (Althea Gibson, who in the 1950’s had been a star tennis player and won the women’s divisions at Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals in both 1957 and 1958). Realizing that they could compromise the security of the mission, Marlowe orders both of them to be taken prisoner and forced to travel with his unit. Midway through the march Dr. Kendall peels off the company in order to attend the birth of a new Black baby, and Marlowe puts him under arrest, allowing him to keep marching with the unit but forbidding him from treating anyone who isn’t part of it. Marlowe makes Hannah pledge on her honor (despite her belief that “Yankees” have no honor) not to run away from his column to warn the Confederates that they’re coming, but when the unit is stationed across the river from a Confederate one, she calls out to them and Marlowe grabs hold of her and stuffs his hand in her mouth. Of course she bites him. Also along for the ride are blowhard Lt. Col. Phil Secord (Willis Bouchey), who’s hoping he’ll win enough glory from the operation to run for public office in his native Michigan; and Corporal Wilkie (Ken Curtis), who’s badly wounded in the leg in one of the skirmishes. Kendall prescribes a homemade ointment made from tree mold, which he says he learned from the Cheyenne tribe, but Wilkie takes the stuff off as soon as it starts itching (later an angry Kendall said that itching was the first indication that the treatment was actually working) and he ends up dying from surgical shock after Kendall, in a last-ditch attempt to save his life, amputates his leg.

The Union soldiers take Newton’s Station and, after first using the cotton bales they find there as impromptu shields against a Confederate counterattack, they burn them and also uproot the train tracks, not only burning the crossties but bending the metal rails so they can’t be re-laid. Naturally Marlowe muses on the irony that before the war his job was to build rail lines for trains, and now here he is destroying one. Throughout the movie the name “Andersonville” is used as a dire warning of the fate awaiting any Union soldiers who were taken as prisoners of war, even though in fact the real prison at Andersonville, Georgia didn’t open until February 1864, almost a year after the events of this film take place. The film ends with Marlowe and his remaining troops marching on to Baton Rouge while Kendall agrees to stay behind and take care of the wounded even though that means they’ll probably all become Confederate prisoners of war. One of the movie’s most chilling scenes is one in which a batch of boys from the Jefferson Military Academy in Mississippi mobilize to fight the Union troops. This actually happened, though not as part of the same true-life story as the Garrison raid that inspired the overall plot; it was part of the Battle of New Market in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia a year later. The film features one boy who’s eager to fight in the war and brings along a drum; his mother, who’s already lost every other male in the family to the conflict, grabs him out of the line, much to his displeasure. When I saw his drum roll away from him I was thinking Ford, Mahin, and Rackin would have that be the signal to learn that the Southerners were on the march against them and knew where they were, but no-o-o-o-o. The film oddly peters out with the destruction of a bridge Marlowe and his men have just crossed; Marlowe and his men have lined up gunpowder along the route to destroy the bridge before the Confederates can use it to chase them. Originally it was supposed to end with Marlowe’s unit actually arriving in Baton Rouge, but according to the film’s Wikipedia page, quoting Ford biographer Joseph Malham, Ford was so upset when his stunt person Fred Kennedy broke his neck on set in an accident that he ended the film inconclusively. Also Althea Gibson’s biographer noted that when she got the script she was appalled that her lines were written in the usual stupid “Black” dialect, and (like William Wellman with Clarence Muse and Nina Mae McKinney in his proto-noir masterpiece from 1931, Safe in Hell) Ford let her speak her lines in normal English.

The Horse Soldiers today is dismissed as a minor work in the Ford canon, largely because no fewer than six production companies, including ones owned by Wayne and Holden, were involved and key decisions were being made essentially by committee. (According to an imbd.com “Trivia” item, the contracts to make this film ran 250 pages, twice as long as the actual script.) But I quite liked it; it’s certainly not a masterpiece (though in the remaining seven years of Ford’s career he’d rack up one more masterpiece, 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, also with John Wayne!), but it is solid, relatively unpretentious entertainment and it came off a lot better than more highly regarded items in the Wayne/Ford canon as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956). There are a few hints of a critique of war that, if expanded on, could have made The Horse Soldiers a richer and deeper film than it is, but though it has its flaws (including a non-performance by Constance Towers in a role that really needed the Barbara Stanwyck of three decades earlier – the real-life model for Hannah was in her 60’s and Stanwyck could have played that incarnation of the character – and John Wayne looking prematurely embalmed, as he did in most of his later films) it’s solid, unpretentious entertainment. It benefits from Ford’s lifelong love of the military’s rituals and his effective use of music, particularly popular songs from the period (we get to hear both “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” on the Union side and “The Bonnie Blue Flag” on the Confederate side, as well as a new Union anthem composed by Stan Jones for the film that hails “Ulysses Simpson Grant” as the top commander of the Union army months before Lincoln appointed him as such). The Horse Soldiers is no world-beater, but it’s a pleasant surprise.