This is a rousing western with great ingredients: Errol Flynn, Olivia De Haviland, Michael Curtiz direction, Max Steiner score, and vivid color. It's a fun movie. But it belongs to an earlier generation of western movies that was superseded by many films that later appeared during the golden age of the genre in the late 1940s and 1950s.
John Ford's Stagecoach appeared in the same year as Dodge City and already pointed the way forward to a deeper, more grown-up western. It would be followed by other fine films by Ford himself, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and many others. These movies focused on character, complex themes, or simply the poetry of the western myth itself.
What Dodge City provides is standard horse-opera fare elevated by great production values. We have the pure-hearted, noble hero, kind to all ladies even when they scorn him; the comical but dumb sidekick; the saloon brawl, the really nasty bad guy and his even nastier gang, and so on.
There's a great opening sequence in which the new railroad train races a stagecoach. Another attraction is Olivia De Haviland, whose delicate beauty perfectly complements Flynn's persona. It's easy to see why Flynn was so popular in swashbuckling movies like this one--he could wield a six-gun or sword, handily defeating enemies, yet remain a gentleman. Compared with movie heroes to come--Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca! John Wayne in The Searchers!--Flynn was a Boy Scout.
The famous saloon fight in Dodge City is way over the top. We are meant to revel in the high spirits and manly foolishness of many dozens of Yanks and Confederates literally reducing the establishment to rubble as they beat each other with every weapon available. Later westerns continued the tradition of bar-room confrontations, but the casts would be smaller and the situations far more desperate ones with lives at stake and justice at issue.
John Ford's Stagecoach appeared in the same year as Dodge City and already pointed the way forward to a deeper, more grown-up western. It would be followed by other fine films by Ford himself, Howard Hawks, Anthony Mann, Budd Boetticher, and many others. These movies focused on character, complex themes, or simply the poetry of the western myth itself.
What Dodge City provides is standard horse-opera fare elevated by great production values. We have the pure-hearted, noble hero, kind to all ladies even when they scorn him; the comical but dumb sidekick; the saloon brawl, the really nasty bad guy and his even nastier gang, and so on.
There's a great opening sequence in which the new railroad train races a stagecoach. Another attraction is Olivia De Haviland, whose delicate beauty perfectly complements Flynn's persona. It's easy to see why Flynn was so popular in swashbuckling movies like this one--he could wield a six-gun or sword, handily defeating enemies, yet remain a gentleman. Compared with movie heroes to come--Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca! John Wayne in The Searchers!--Flynn was a Boy Scout.
The famous saloon fight in Dodge City is way over the top. We are meant to revel in the high spirits and manly foolishness of many dozens of Yanks and Confederates literally reducing the establishment to rubble as they beat each other with every weapon available. Later westerns continued the tradition of bar-room confrontations, but the casts would be smaller and the situations far more desperate ones with lives at stake and justice at issue.