A Head Full of Wishes is a site for Galaxie 500, Luna, Damon & Naomi, Dean & Britta and Dean Wareham. With news, articles and lists of releases and past and future shows.
My record collection
#138: Dean Wareham and Cheval Sombre - Along The Santa Fe Trail
This is my second copy of the Along The Santa Fe Trail lathe cut single, I think Dean sent me this copy, the previous one was the one that came with the deluxe edition of the Dean Wareham vs Cheval Sombre release.
Since it’s a one sided single I thought as well as listening to it, this time I’d also watch Santa Fe Trail the film that the song comes from. I have probably seen this before way, way back in the day but certainly not in the last 40 or so years. I’m not a great fan of westerns, although there are a good few westerns that I do love. I also love Olivia de Havilland and her 30s and 40s partnership with Errol Flynn and Michael Curtiz, and while I’m not expecting a Captain Blood, or The Adventures of Robin Hood, I’m hoping it might put up a decent show… as long as its better than The Charge of The Light Brigade I’ll be happy.
[… watching the film…]
Wow! That was shocking! It comes across as a pro-slavery film and does precious little to try and shake that off. At one point some freed slaves suggest that they’d be better off being enslaved! Now, I don’t know a great deal about the US and its civil war (short of what I’ve seen in film) but I do know that a film made in the 20th Century shouldn’t suggest that slavery wasn’t so bad, and that the whole problem with the time was those darned abolitionists.
Wikipedia suggests that portraying John Brown as a ‘monomaniacal zealot’ (aka Hitler) was to persuade the still problematic South that the US entering the war was the right move, but if that’s the case it was a shockingly bad way of doing that.
Raymond Massey is splendid as that ‘monomaniacal zealot’ but that can’t excuse the awful, awful message that this film seems to have no problem delivering.
The film scores points however for the sequence where Olivia de Havilland is dressed in a check shirt, with a grubby face, running things better than any man could. Shame she goes all rubbish and happily marries a racist at the end.
And to top it all the song isn’t really in the film, the theme is heard a couple of times, and it plays over the end credits but is never sung so… not a song.
Sadly this film is even worse that The Charge of The Light Brigade and one that I feel a bit grubby for having sat through.
- Catalogue Number: AHFOW 11/073
- Artist: Dean Wareham vs Cheval Sombre
- Title: Along The Santa Fe Trail
- Notes: Lathe cut
- Packaging: PVC envelope
- Format: 7”
Previously in my record collection: