Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet 1964

Laziness and looseness deteriorated into something close to sloppiness in A Distant Trumpet, Walsh's last picture, which can be described as a shambles, even though it does contain some of the most breathtakingly staged and photographed battle scenes not only in Walsh's work but in the entire American cinema.
--Jean-Pierre Coursodon, American Directors (McGraw Hill, 1983)

By 1964 the studio system, which allowed many great American directors to flourish, was gone and directors were on their own.  Yesterday I wrote about Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport from 1964, a year that also included John Ford's Cheyenne Autumn and Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet, films that explored some of the directors' themes and interests while struggling with a new generation of actors.  The film of Walsh's that is most like A Distant Trumpet is They Died with Their Boots On, 1941, that explored the relationship of the U.S. army to the Indians of the West.  Walsh, like Ford, was always sympathetic to the Indians and showed in both films how Indians were mistreated by the army as well as the traders who sold them whiskey and rifles.  Unfortunately Walsh was saddled with Troy Donahue and Suzanne Pleshette in A Distant Trumpet, rather than Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland of the earlier film.  Walsh's understandable reaction was to emphasize the sweeping beauty of the Arizona landscape and the battles that took place there, beautifully photographed in color and widescreen by William Clothier --who also photographed Ford's Cheyenne Autumn -- with the impressive musical score of veteran Max Steiner, who also did the music for John Ford's The Searchers (1956).  The Indians are treated with dignity, speaking their own language, while James Gregory is the Latin-quoting general who passes on his knowledge and compassion to the new generation represented by Donahue.