Olivia de Havilland

What I hadn't known about Olivia de Havilland until reading her obituaries is that she (and her sister, Joan Fontaine) grew up in my area, a mere eight miles uphill from where I live now, in the then tiny village of Saratoga, built around the hot springs.

Here's the state's historical-site inventory record of their house.

(Add her to Teri Hatcher, who was born to a family living only a block from us, at just about the time we moved away.)

Alas, I don't know much else about Olivia de Havilland. I think I'd never seen her in anything except Gone with the Wind, a movie I don't remember much detail about and in particular not her in it. So I decided to remedy this by watching something else with her, so I went looking for her movies available online without charge.

The first one I found was Santa Fe Trail (1940). Olivia de Havilland plays apparently the only white woman in 1850s Kansas, a tough and outspoken young woman who helps her father with his freight haulage business. She's courted by two simpering young Army officers played by Errol Flynn and Ronald Reagan, and if this casting makes you think, as I did, "I've gotta see that," trust me, you don't. The officers' names are Jeb Stuart and George Custer, but if you think they have anything to do with the real officers by those names, forget it (Stuart did serve in Kansas, but Custer didn't; and they weren't in the same West Point class and didn't know each other; the details are all invented, including de Havilland's character). De Havilland is energetic but doesn't have much to do except tease her suitors and translate the prophecies of an old Indian woman who says there's a civil war a-comin'. (Strangely, this scene enables the otherwise undeserving movie to pass the Bechdel test.)

In fact, the harbingers of war in Bloody Kansas are the main plot of the movie, its real star being a lower-billed Raymond Massey. In the same year that he played Abe Lincoln, he here thunders out the apocalyptic rhetoric of John Brown. That the movie concludes with an epilogue featuring an equally imaginary retelling of the Harper's Ferry raid only confirms the primacy of this plot. With the army, including Jeb and George [no, not Bush] and under the command of Robert E. Lee (yes, this bit is real), professing its loyalty to the Union, as the heroes, that makes Brown the villain, but it certainly allows him to have his say. I'm not going to unpack all the misframing in this movie, for it would make my head hurt.