I had seen this film some years ago, and the only scenes that I remembered were those when Johnson and Stone sing "Tapioca" as a code song to identify themselves to Southern agents. But I still enjoyed it second time around, and perhaps I should have first read Alice Liddel's intellectual comments written here so that I would have appreciated it better.
Boone, playing an out-and-out villain, steals his scenes.I wasn't too sure about the comic interlude halfway through with Dru accidentally getting drunk, though it did teasingly leave us with the question: did Johnson really change her into her night-dress and put her to bed? I incline to nitpicking, and I thought it ham-fisted the way the Union troops charged in to town to arrest the Southern-sympathising storekeeper, only to shoot him dead. It would have been more convincing, but less spectacular, to send three or four men in to the store posing as customers - he could still have been shot in a struggle.
I wonder what Southern audiences would have made of Johnson's change of heart at the end (I'm British)? Both sides in the Civil War used Indians, and by its end the fact that women and children - families of Union soldiers - would be killed would be of minor concern to many Confederates.
Boone, playing an out-and-out villain, steals his scenes.I wasn't too sure about the comic interlude halfway through with Dru accidentally getting drunk, though it did teasingly leave us with the question: did Johnson really change her into her night-dress and put her to bed? I incline to nitpicking, and I thought it ham-fisted the way the Union troops charged in to town to arrest the Southern-sympathising storekeeper, only to shoot him dead. It would have been more convincing, but less spectacular, to send three or four men in to the store posing as customers - he could still have been shot in a struggle.
I wonder what Southern audiences would have made of Johnson's change of heart at the end (I'm British)? Both sides in the Civil War used Indians, and by its end the fact that women and children - families of Union soldiers - would be killed would be of minor concern to many Confederates.