The Horse Soldiers 1959 123movies

Watch: The Horse Soldiers 1959 123movies, Full Movie Online – A Union Cavalry outfit is sent behind Confederate lines in strength to destroy a rail/supply center. Along with them is sent a doctor who causes instant antipathy between him and the commander. The secret plan for the mission is overheard by a southern belle who must be taken along to assure her silence. The Union officers each have different reasons for wanting to be on the mission..
Plot: A Union Cavalry outfit is sent behind confederate lines in strength to destroy a rail supply center. Along with them is sent a doctor who causes instant antipathy between him and the commander. The secret plan for the mission is overheard by a southern belle who must be taken along to assure her silence.
Smart Tags: #u.s._cavalry #confederate_soldier #union_army #union_soldier #confederate_army #historical_fiction #old_west #civil_war_veteran #confederate_flag #behind_enemy_lines #sabotage #american_civil_war #based_on_true_story #based_on_novel #man_murders_a_woman #murder #three_word_title #african_american #childbirth #cabin #american_south

Find Alternative – The Horse Soldiers 1959, Streaming Links:

123movies | FMmovies | Putlocker | GoMovies | SolarMovie | Soap2day

Ratings:

	7.1/10 Votes: 10,672
	81% | RottenTomatoes
	N/A | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 184 Popularity: 10.826 | TMDB

Reviews:

Under-rated American Civil War movie.
General critical consensus seems to feel that John Ford’s The Horse Soldiers is a bit of a let-down, at least by the dizzyingly high standards of the director. However, it’s quite liberating if you try to forget that you’re watching a John Ford movie and just treat it as an American Civil War movie like any other. Then, the film’s qualities become more apparent. Yes, The Horse Soldiers is inferior to many of the other John Ford movies. But Ford working at half-speed is still better than most directors working at the peak of their powers. And The Horse Soldiers is still a fascinating, exciting and expertly told war film.

Colonel John Marlowe (John Wayne) is ordered by the Union generals to lead his army 300 miles into the Confederacy, where they are to sabotage and disrupt the vital railway supply town of Newton Station as much as possible. After a disastrous few months of lost battles and heavy casualties, the Union generals are determined to swing the battle back in their favour before the arrival of winter. Marlowe is unhappy to learn that his orders include allowing army surgeon Major Kendall (William Holden) along on the mission. Since the death of his wife at the hands of two blundering surgeons, Marlowe has had little respect for those in the medical profession. To further complicate matters, a feisty Southern belle, Hannah Hunter (Constance Towers) with Confederate sympathies, overhears Marlowe informing his men that Newton Station is the target, and that once the town has been raided the Union forces plan to head for the safety of Baton Rouge. In order to secure her silence, Marlowe has to take her prisoner and suffer her sharp Southern tongue (plus escape attempts) during the trip.

The Horse Soldiers is filmed in loving detail, with gorgeous autumnal backdrops. Its story is very interesting, especially the volatile relationship between Wayne and Holden, and the mission itself provides excitements along the way. In particular, a street battle at Newton Station is memorable, as is a scene later in the film when the Union soldiers come under attack from an army of Confederate army cadets still at schoolboy age. Towers’ character is written as a very cunning and feisty woman, who disguises her attributes by coming across as a melodramatic, gossipy airhead. Towers plays the part well, but because of how she’s encouraged to handle the role she becomes rather irritating too. One disappointing moment in the film comes when Wayne and Holden reach breaking-point with each other and ride off to a secluded glade to slug it out. The sequence is set to be a real humdinger, but is curiously cut short by the arrival of the enemy forces. On the whole, though, The Horse Soldiers is a good, solid Civil War entertainment, well worth a look.

Good Civil War Action-Drama
In “The Horse Soldiers” John Ford returns to the theme of the US Cavalry which he had immortalised in his “Cavalry Trilogy” made around a decade earlier. As in all three films of that trilogy, the leading role is taken by Ford’s favourite actor, John Wayne, although this film is not set in the West but in Mississippi during the American Civil War. (Despite being set in the eastern half of the USA, it is nevertheless occasionally referred to as a “Western”).

The story is a fictionalised version of the real-life “Grierson Raid” of 1863 in which a unit of Union Cavalry penetrated deep behind Confederate lines in order to destroy a strategically important railroad junction being used by the Confederates to supply their garrison at Vicksburg. Wayne plays the raid’s commander, here called Colonel John Marlowe, who ironically was a railroad building engineer before the war. Apart from the battle scenes, much of the drama in the film arises from the clashes between Marlowe and his politically ambitious second-in-command, Colonel Philip Secord, and between Marlowe and the regimental surgeon, Major Henry Kendall. Kendall makes little secret of his dislike of war and sees himself as a doctor first, a soldier second. He considers that his main duty is to relieve human suffering, wherever it may occur, rather than to further the military aims of the Union armies.

An additional complication occurs when the unit stops at a plantation house and Marlowe discovers that the plantation’s attractive young mistress Hannah Hunter and her black slave Lukey (played by the tennis star Althea Gibson) have been spying on them. To prevent them from betraying his mission to the Confederate forces, and unwilling to shoot two unarmed women in cold blood, Marlowe is forced to take them with him.

Ford does not really attempt to explore the causes of the war or the moral issues involved. Three years earlier he had made “The Searchers”, in which he analysed the nature of racism in the Old West, but here he does not take up the challenge of analysing racism in the Old South in the same way. Doubtless, however, he was well aware of the economics of Hollywood film-making. The most commercially successful films were those that could appeal to audiences both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and in the fifties a film which took too hard an anti-Confederate line would be likely to alienate Southern sympathies.

Although the film is essentially a war film, it combines action with other elements, including psychological analysis and occasional humour. There is even an element of romance, something not generally found in films of this type, as Marlowe falls in love with Constance Towers’s Hannah, something I did not find particularly element in the film; it struck me as an unsuccessful attempt to import into an action drama that hoary old convention of the romantic comedy whereby two characters start off as bitter enemies and end up falling in love. (As had had shown in films like “A Man Betrayed”, Wayne was not the world’s greatest exponent of romantic comedy). Wayne is, however, very good when he concentrates on being a tough soldier rather than a sentimental lover, and William Holden is also good as the no-nonsense medic Kendall. “The Horse Soldiers” is not perhaps quite in the same league as “The Searchers” or “Fort Apache”, but it is a good action-drama and one of the better Ford/Wayne collaborations. 7/10

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 2 hr (120 min), 1 hr 59 min (119 min) (UK), 1 hr 59 min (119 min) (DVD) (USA)
Budget 0
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated Approved
Genre Adventure, Romance, War
Director John Ford
Writer John Lee Mahin, Martin Rackin, Harold Sinclair
Actors John Wayne, William Holden, Constance Towers
Country United States
Awards 1 nomination
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Mono (Westrex Recording System)
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1 (intended ratio)
Camera N/A
Laboratory DeLuxe (as De Luxe)
Film Length N/A
Negative Format 35 mm
Cinematographic Process N/A
Printed Film Format 35 mm