The Horse Soldiers

David Thomson in his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" does a hatchet job on John Ford and only mentions "The Horse Soldiers" in passing. He accuses him of lying about America's history and of sentimentalising characters especially old drunks. It's a blistering attack that you have to say has a lot of truth in it. But he mentions the lines of troopers marching or riding horses against the sky line in a disparaging way.
This is how "The Horse Soldiers" begins: a long line of soldiers on horseback riding along a long ridge against, yes, rippling clouds in an orange sky...... Wonderful. It may be a lie in that soldiers don't do that sort of thing but I like to think that they sometimes do. And then, of course, to add to the "colour" of the scene you get the song. Of course soldiers don't sing so well as this if they sing in unison at all, but it's a great pleasure to see this and hear this hoping that they might have. Ford used heaps of songs in his films, most of them favourites with the public and always lovely to hear. Here he has a sort of marching love song: "I left my love a letter in the hollar of a tree/ I told her I was off to join the US cavalry".
There is much brutality in this film and it's not untrue to say, with David Thomson, that Ford seems to relish it. But the main character played by John Wayne, though he enjoys a fight, is basically a kind soul who is wholly devastated by the senseless killing and destruction. There's a wonderful scene in which he is so upset with the way his soldiers and the enemy have died that he gets almost leglessly drunk, kicks a fellow colonel out of the bar for glorifying in it all, yanks a yippeeing soldier off a horse that has come into the bar and throws him out. Then.... you know it's coming - there a pyramid of glasses standing at the end of the counter and what does he do to them? The same thing Fred Astaire did at the end of his song, "One for my Baby and one more for the road" in an early film: he smashes them to smithereens.
Probably it's all lies. Probably there never were pyramids of glasses on the counters. But don't you wish there were?
How on earth does the film reviewer in The Radio Times give "The Horse Soldiers" only three stars? The opening scene, before the titles is worth 4. The rest is worth all of 5.