The Horse Soldiers

UK Release Date. 3 December 1959
Certification. PG
Running Time. 1 hour 59 mins
Director. John Ford
Cast. William Holden, Constance Towers, John Wayne.
Rating. 54%

Review.

To this day John Ford remains the only film director to have won the Academy Award for Best Director four times [The Quiet Man, How Green Was My Valley, The Grapes Of Wrath and The Informer]. However, Ford is perhaps best remembered for his seminal westerns - the likes of My Darling Clementine, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In these films, the director would frequently cast John Wayne. Starting with 1939's Stagecoach, the pair would collaborate on a total of 14 films, with nine of them westerns.

1959's The Horse Soldiers is based on a novel by Harold Sinclair, which recounts a real-life, little-known insurgence from the US Civil War, the so-called Grierson’s Raid. In April 1863, Colonel Benjamin Grierson took three Union cavalry regiments and rode 300 miles into the heart of the Confederacy to destroy the rail link between Newton Station and Vicksburg.

In the film, John Wayne plays a battle-hardened cavalry colonel, Colonel John Marlowe, as he leads a guerilla-like strike on Confederate supply lines deep within enemy territory. Whilst Wayne played his usual swaggering heroic lead with typical bravado, the film's exploration of the psychology of conflict is left to William Holden's character, army surgeon Major Henry Kendall.

Another of the director's regular collaborators, Director of Photography William Clothier, produces visuals with the quality of paintings. Not withstanding Ford's lavish camerawork and on-location shooting style, the film is surprisingly uneven. Pedestrian in places. The repeated shots of lines of cavalrymen on horseback tend to become tedious after a while and there is little effort invested in character development. Even Ford's skill for staging epic battle scenes are reduced to only a few, perfunctory seconds of screentime, conveying the brutality of war while refusing to wallow in it.