Virginia City (1940)

The title gives no hint, but Virginia City (1940)  is an interesting attempt to impose a national unity upon the America fractured by the Civil War. The current public dispute over the Civil War — its causes, its observances, its simmering schisms — gives the film particular pertinence.

The title seems a nod to the 1939 Dodge City, in which Michael Curtis first directed Errol Flynn in his western debut. There Flynn played a Wyatt Earpy sheriff bringing lawn order to an anarchic cattle town. 

Here Flynn plays Union Captain Kerry Bradford. He and two buddies tunnel out of a notoriously cruel Confederate prison, run by the courtly Vance Irby (Randolph Scott). The two antagonists meet again in … Virginia City, which assumes a symbolic significance. 

To the Confederates, Virginia City is a Southern city now under unwelcome Union control. To the Northerners. the city teems with dangerous Rebels. It feels a threat to both sides. That is, the same reality has contradictory perspectives upon it — as did the Civil War and America itself. And not just then.

The city is also home to three major mining companies, including the Comstock lode, making it the South’s financial centre even under Union hold. As the South is losing the war, three Virginia City mining moguls offer $5,000,000 in gold to the Confederate cause. Captain Irby undertakes the challenge of leading the wagon train to deliver it through Union lines and uncompromising desert. Captain Bradford has intuited this danger and undertakes to thwart it.  

This being an American film, the political clash between the Union’s Bradford and the South’s Irby has to be made significant by adding a romantic tension. Both love Julia Hayne (Miriam Hopkins), a Southern belle whom the war has reduced to saloon singer. She arranges for that big donation, draws Irby into his mission and — after meeting and falling in love with Bradford — expedites it even at the cost of betraying her beloved. As both men place their political commitment ahead of their romantic interest the film anticipates the triangle in Curtiz’s more famous Casablanca (1942). In both films, too, the Hungarian immigrant Curtiz unites conflictied Americans against a foreign enemy. 

In the film’s spirit of reconciliation, there is no villain on either side of this version of the war. As the dying Irby passes command onto his rival, they agree that in different circumstances they might have been — friends. 

The function of evil is instead vested in the Mexican marauder John Murrell (a risible casting of Humphrey Bogart). The fight between North and South, between Bradford and Irby, dissolves before the outside threat from the (i)outlaw and (ii) Mexican Murrell. Bradford leads his small troop to help the overwhelmed Southern train fight off the outlaws. The timely arrival of the Union soldiers wipes them out.   

Similarly, the film sanitizes the South’s cause by ignoring the issue of slavery. Indeed, the only negro in the film is a black wagon-driver who has a genial exchange of jokes with a Southern officer. With both sides led by respectful good guys and slavery forgotten, the film allows no reason why the war was ever fought. 
      Could this film be the source of the current president’s chief of staff General John Kelly’s understanding that the war was caused by a failure to compromise? I digress.

To secure the gold from Murrell, Bradford buries it in an induced avalanche. To leave it for the South to use in its reconstruction, he refuses to turn it over to the Union. For this he is charged with treason, court-martialled and sentenced to death. 

This gives his betraying chantoosie the chance to save his life by appealing directly to President Lincoln. Lincoln tells her the war is just now over — but mentions nothing like a “surrender.” Both sides are just agreeing to terms. As the killing must cease, he pardons Bradford. His romantic union with Miss Hayne emblematizes the reunion of America, the burial of past differences. 

Done.