Virginia City Film Review

Virginia City is in Nevada. I didn't know that.

This is a terrific sweeping Civil War Western that begins in a Confederate prison and moves west through the stunning topography of the rough demanding terrain throwing in loads of drama, history and just enough action to keep you happy. All directed by the master Michael Curtiz with a cast of heavies - Errol Flynn, Humphrey Bogart, Randolph Scott, Miriam Hopkins and character actors Alan Hale, Guinn "Big Boy" Williams, Frank McHugh and Douglass Dumbrille. The South is on the verge of defeat and needs a fast infusion of cash to keep going. They send a man to Virginia City to bring back a few wagon loads of gold with the Yankees controlling most of the land between Richmond and the West. It makes for a terrific adventure tale with gobs of a three-way romance and danger. The film plays it right down the middle taking neither side which back in 1940 was probably wise marketing. No talk of slavery. There was still a lot of sympathy for the Southern myth of the Confederacy (still is of course). But ends it with a lovely if corny moment of Lincoln saying "Tomorrow Lee will meet Grant at Appomattox to sign the treaty. We will be friends again. This is not an end. It is a beginning".

Flynn and his two sidekicks Hale and Williams break out of a Confederate prison run by Scott. All honorable men. Flynn and his accent goes north while Scott meets up with his childhood friend and hoped for love, Miriam who has come from Virginia City where she is a dance hall girl and spy for the Confederacy. She informs him of the gold and the need to bring it east. Jefferson Davis approves. Flynn meanwhile has been assigned to stop it not knowing who is heading the effort. In the stagecoach west with his two buddies are Hopkins and Bogart. Nice coincidence. They fall in love. Hopkins and Flynn that is. Bogart plays a Mexican bandit named John Murrell who was a real life legendary bad guy who sometimes had a gang as large as two hundred men.

But he wasn't Mexican and he died in the 1840s. With his pencil moustache and accent Bogart must have hated doing this. He was so frustrated with his roles at Warner and was acting in this and another film, It All Came True, at the same time. Don't worry Bogie, later in the year he would act in High Sierra in which he received critical applause and even better met the writer, John Huston. The next year Huston would fight with the studio to star Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. They wanted George Raft. Now seeing Bogart as a smirking Mexican bandit seems like terrible casting but back then perhaps not. Admittedly, Bogart was sure not associated with Westerns - the only other two were an obscure B film in 1931 called A Holy Terror and then with Cagney in The Oklahoma Kid, perhaps the worst cast film of all time. They were much better in the gangster films they did together.

Once they get to Virginia City after Bogart fails to rob them, there is a great scene in which Flynn goes into a bar - is shocked when he sees Hopkins on stage singing and flirting with customers and then bumps into Scott. One look at each other and they know exactly why each of them is there. It turns into a tense cat and mouse game between the two of them for the gold but also for the heart of Hopkins. I have to admit Hopkins has never appealed to me - lips so thin they practically vanish. So, I didn't really get their attraction to her but she was a big star at the time.

Scott manages to sneak out of the town with wagons holding gold hidden in them and they begin an arduous trip across inhospitable land with Bogart and his gang not far behind. Heroism all around. Curtiz throws in a number of emotional pinpricks that are effective - the sound of trumpets to the rescue, a tiny girl picking up the rifle of her dead father and saying "You dirty rats" as she fires it, Flynn and Scott showing respect to one another and saying we could have been friends at another time, another place. If only we could do the same today.