They Died With Their Boots On

Released in 1942, They Died With Their Boots On is a perfectly fine Western, with some well-shot battle footage and an excellent and sly performance by Errol Flynn. The one thing it fails at, spectacularly, is as history. Flynn plays George Custer, one of the most written-about men in U.S. history, and practically none of the facts are correct. If you have any knowledge of him or the Battle of the Little Big Horn, check it at the door.

The film was directed by Raoul Walsh, as Flynn had had a falling out with Michael Curtiz and demanded a new director. He did have Olivia DeHavilland as his usual co-star, but it would be the last time they would work together. The film covers Custer's life from the time he entered West Point to his death at the hands of Crazy Horse (played by a very young Anthony Quinn), and appears to have been shaped by his wife Libbie's hagiography (she outlived her husband by almost sixty years and built his legend). It's interesting to see how Custer's reputation has changed over the years--by 1970 he would be depicted as a fool by Richard Mulligan in Little Big Man. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between.

Custer's West Point years, which constitute almost half of the film, are depicted in a light-hearted, almost comic vein. It starts with him showing up and being hazed in a gag that was seen in a Laurel and Hardy movie, A Chump at Oxford. This hazing earns him a life-long enemy, played by Arthur Kennedy. The college humor ends poignantly, though, when war is declared and the Southern cadets leave to take up arms for the Confederacy.

Custer is then shown winning battles in the Civil War and bedeviling superiors who hate him. There are all sorts of historical inaccuracies, from how he met Libbie to his being appointed as a brevet (or temporary) general during the war. It was not through a clerical error, as the film has it. Nor was he ever out of the army after the war.

Perhaps the most outrageous lie the film tells is that Custer knew exactly what he was getting into when he led the Seventh Cavalry to their last stand, vastly outnumbered, in some kind of noble sacrifice. Custer is also depicted as being sympathetic to the Indian cause (one of the first Hollywood films to take such a tack). But despite these outrages against history, there is an undeniable power to some of the scenes, especially one in which Libbie helps Custer prepare to leave and they both know it will be for the last time (all the more poignant because DeHavilland realized, deep down, that she would never work with Flynn again). When he leaves, Walsh has the camera pull away from DeHavilland, and she faints after Custer has left the room.

My advice: watch They Died With Their Boots On if you like old-fashioned Westerns, but do not watch in place of doing actual research on a paper on George Custer.