Virginia City

… is the birthplace of “Mark Twain,” as this was the first place Sam Clemens used his famous pseudonym in 1863. He would have been resident there during the time this film portrays, which is 1864. It’s a real swashbuckler cowboys and Indians action picture, but without the Indians. Standing in for them, even to the point of enacting the famous cliché scene of the savages a-whoopin’ and a-hollerin’ around a circled wagon train, getting picked off like a shooting gallery, are a huge gang of Mexican banditos, headed by … wait for it …Humphrey Bogart (fourth billing!) sporting a pencil-line mustache and a terrible Mexican accent. He should have won the Oscar for Best Mis-Casting of 1940.

The story is about Errol Flynn as a Union spy and Randolph Scott as a Confederate officer, and a big shipment of gold. Abe Lincoln wants it for the North, and Jeff Davis desperately needs it to fund another year of losing the war. The solution is a lot of espionage and trickery and a cockamamie plan to ship all five million dollars of gold bars by wagon train all the way from Nevada to Galveston, then by blockade runner to Richmond. No way it could have worked, but they gave it the old Southern try. Flynn is as dashing as always, Scott is stolid and honorable, and Miriam Hopkins is a tiny Southern belle who falls in love with the Union spy. There are a lot of shoot-outs (with anachronistic six-shooters that wouldn’t be available until 1870), and most of the shooters use this weird technique of sort of throwing the gun toward the target, as if to give the bullet more velocity. Very bad shooting style, almost impossible to aim that way, but that’s okay because they seldom hit anything. Right at the beginning you can spot Ward Bond, uncredited, as a Confederate sergeant, and both Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis have small roles, only you never see Abe’s face, just the shadow of his profile, just like they usually treat Jesus in movies.