Santa Fe (1951)

Captain Canfield is a good man in a fight, I ought to know.

Santa Fe is directed by Irving Pichel and adapted to screenplay by Kenneth Gamet from the James Marshall novel and a story by Louis Stevens. It stars Randolph Scott, Janis Carter, Peter M. Thompson, Jerome Courtland and John Archer. A Technicolor production, it's photographed by Charles Lawton Jr. Story is set following the American Civil war and finds Scott as Britt Canfield, one of four ex-Confederate brothers heading West for a new life. While Britt finds honest employment on the Santa Fe railroad, his brothers veer towards the other side of the law.

A routine Western boosted by some quality set pieces and a well crafted script. Watchable from the off, film follows a true course whilst launching off narratively from the bitterness still felt by those who were on opposite sides of the war. It pitches Scott front and centre as the stoic character fending off all sorts of challenges, challenges that come courtesy of Indians, rival companies and his own kin! The acting around Scott is pretty average, though the comic relief from Billy House & Olin Howland is most appealing, while it would have been nice to have some more imposing scenery filling out the screen. All told it's a safe recommendation to Western fans, even if ultimately it's not a genre film to revisit often. 6/10

With the American Civil War finally lost, the four “Canfield” brothers go their own way. One, “Britt” (Randolph Scott) is a railway engineer and he ends up working on the route down to Santa Fe in New Mexico for it’s chief engineer “Baxter” (Warner Anderson). Meantime, his siblings continue to nurse their grudges against their former Yankee opponents and so are gathered up on the side of those opposed to the railroad - and that also includes the odd hold-up or two. “Britt” is loathe to betray his brothers, but now he has taken a shine to the suspicious “Judith” (Janis Carter), whose father had been killed fighting for the bluecoats, he has to tread carefully else she might conclude that he is their fifth columnist. For a while this works fine as it illustrates the difficulties faced by these steel beast pioneers. If it wasn’t their competitors it could be greedy landowners or angry Apache or any combination of manmade obstacles just as potent at the mountains, rivers and great expanses that had to be covered in these vast engineering exercises. Sadly, though, I felt the plot rather lost it’s way in the closing stages with too many loyalties strained and tested before a conclusion that I felt fizzled rather than flared. Scott was never my favourite star, but he usually rose to the occasion if he had a strong foil for his almost always upstanding character. Here, there isn’t really a baddie to focus on but more a conflicted familial melodrama that screamed out for a Barbara Stanwyck or a Jimmy Stewart. It’s watchable enough, just not great.