Best movie of this year hands down!

A Masterpiece!

it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

. . . that Racist Revisionist Endless Melodramatic Exercise in Hate Speech known as GONE WITH THE WIND (on the shelves of most every American Urban High School Library, while THE Great American Novel--THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN--is Universally banned by the self-proclaimed Know-Nothings!), she was "inspired" (more accurately, Dispired) by this John Wayne flick, THE LONELY TRAIL. Wayne plays "John Ashley," to whom Ms. Mitchell pays homage with her similarly mealy-mouthed "Ashley Wilkes" character. TRAIL covers the entire War to Defeat Lazy Southerners' Racist Evil in about 12 seconds (beating GWTW by roughly an hour and a half--which most viewers will find to be a definite improvement!). Ann Rutherford plays the model for Ms. Mitchell's "Scarlett O'Hara," called "Virginia" here. To pad out GWTW into an Umpteen-hour soap opera, Mr. Mitchell splits Ashley and Virginia into a couple characters each. Otherwise, most of the familiar GWTW scenes are here, such as when Clark Gable convinces the Union Commander that Ashley is NOT the Grand Wizard of the KKK. By cutting out most of Ms. Mitchell's unseemly histrionics and cursing, TRAIL clocks in at a shade under 56 minutes, which is more than enough of a not-so-good thing.

It seems that after the Civil War ended, some resentful Yankees took on the land of Dixie with a vengeance, sending in "Carpetbaggers" to try and teach the people of the south a lesson for having separated from the union. In doing so, these people are breaking the law themselves, stealing their land, increasing taxes to unspeakable amounts, and shooting rumored enemies on sight for no reason other than just trying to fight for their rights. John Wayne plays a Northern soldier who tries to expose the injustice, and takes up with an old childhood pal (Ann Rutherford) who at first doesn't think he's on their side. It's ironic to see Rutherford here, as just two years later, she would be the much younger Andy Hardy's girlfriend in a series of MGM comedies where she appeared to be younger than she was rather than someone who could be the same age as John Wayne. This mixes both comedy and drama with political intrigue, and ranks as one of John Wayne's best Republic films before he went on to superstardom with "Stagecoach". The print released through Olive Films is much better than some of the same films which he did at the same time that fell into the public domain, so that makes this one a lot more watchable, even though many of those films are entertaining in their own right.

John Wayne is indeed traveling The Lonely Trail in this film. He's a Texan who enlisted with the Yankee army and has now returned home after the war to the scorn of his neighbors. They've been given less reason than ever to like the color blue. Reconstruction has come to Texas in the position of profiteering carpetbagger Cy Kendall who had a specialty in roles showing corpulent corruption.The more Wayne sees, the more he doesn't like, the trick now is to convince his neighbors he's really on their side.Sad, but this is one of John Wayne's worst films. It abounds in racial stereotyping. East Texas back in the day was not too different from the culture of the Deep South, it had its share of cotton plantations and slaves. Looking at the blacks in this film you would think those Yankees were their enemies as well. Seeing Etta McDaniel and Fred Toone and the other plantation hands singing because of the 'death' of the young master Dennis Moore is one of the worst examples of racism I've ever seen in any film.Only the most devoted fans of the Duke will find anything good in this film.

Although I am a John Wayne fan, this film was painful to watch. Which begs the question, did John Ford bring something to John Wayne's career that he didn't possess before they worked together? I would say that they both needed each other. The John Ford films without John Wayne weren't that good, and the westerns that John Wayne appeared in like this one (which were not directed by John Ford) were just as bad. So what exactly did John Wayne lack in this film? I think the non-John Ford directed John Wayne westerns lacked a story, emotional depth, colour, scenery and a bit of spectacle. Before the John Ford/Wayne collaboration, westerns were just some B picture, but what John Ford did was to give it spectacle like the Cecil B. DeMille films.