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10 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
Errol and Alexis, 9 May 2007
6/10
Author: jotix100 from New York

"San Antonio", directed by David Butler must have been a vehicle for the handsome, and debonair Errol Flynn, who could do nothing wrong during that period of his career. Warner Bros. went all out to make this film that has a little bit of everything to please the fans of the Western genre.

The surprise of the film was Alexis Smith, who was at the height of her beauty at the time. She makes a wonderful Jeanne Starr, an entertainer, who is the center of attraction among the men one sees in the film. Not only was she a gorgeous woman who blended well with her screen partners, in this case with Mr. Flynn.

The supporting cast does good work under Mr. Butler's direction. The adorable S. Z. Sakall is wonderful as the conductor of the orchestra in the saloon where Jeanne plays. Also, Glorence Bates, an accomplished character actress appears as Jeanne's maid, Henrietta. Also in heavier roles Victor Francen and Paul Kelly do wonders with their evil roles.

"San Antonio" has kept its wonderful colors. Max Steiner's musical score also helps the action.

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9 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
, 6 September 1998
8/10
Author: Scott Tunnicliff (sdtuniclif@aol.com) from Bettendorf, IA

While not the best of Flynn's westerns, San Antonio offers appealing players a lavish budget, and plenty of action. It was the Christmas offering from Warner Bros., and, perhaps due to the returning G.I.'s, the highest grossing film Flynn ever made (in its original release). Some good music helps, as does the chemistry between Errol and Alexis Smith. Raoul Walsh is uncredited for some of the direction, and I speculate the action scenes are those he worked on.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
The wonderful flash and charm of Errol Flynn, 28 May 2000
7/10
Author: A. Judas Rimmer from Northeast USA

I admit, this is the first Flynn movie I have seen. I have long been intrigued by the actor's reputation: as THE dashing movie swashbuckler and dandy. After seeing San Antonio, I find that that reputation seems well earned. Flynn's Clay Hardin is a bit of a super-hero, tossing witty dialog right and left, outsmarting and outfighting bad guys, charming ladies effortlessly and looking swell throughout all. As Westerns go, it does not hold up well with the more dramatic and textured movies that started being made a few years later; the plot is not exactly the most believable and the film is loaded with perfectly stock characters (conniving cattleman, scheming Acadian, loyal father figure/partner, etc.). Then again, it is clearly a different sort of movie and I recommend it as that; a pulp Western, the sort of pulp that Indiana Jones is homage to, a story of villains, damsels, and one unstoppable roguish hero.

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3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
Rip-snortin' shoot-em-up, 5 April 2006
6/10
Author: hildacrane from United States

"San Antonio" is a lively movie, with a lot going for it: two very attractive leads who look good together, beautiful Technicolor, enjoyably unsubtle and melodic Max Steiner score, good villains. It's a Saturday-afternoon kind of film, best accompanied with a bucket of buttered popcorn. The script isn't inspired, but it moves, and the big fight sequence toward the end is quite spectacular and well choreographed, and made me really appreciate the contributions of stunt players in this kind of film.

Alexis Smith is gorgeous and well-costumed, if a bit reserved, and gets to lip-sync two very pretty songs. There was always something very identifiable about Warner Bros. orchestration for musical numbers--a cheeky brassiness. Errol Flynn is characteristically cheeky in his own slightly self-mocking way, as when he carries on a conversation while interspersing it with bits of a romantic song, also strumming a guitar. Florence Bates does a reprise of her "mentor to the female lead" from "Saratoga Trunk." Victor Francen and Paul Kelly make a good, hissable pair of bad guys.

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2 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
Errol Flynn wins Alexis Smith in a dynamite Technicolor Warner Brothers western, 31 August 2007
9/10
Author: Van Roberts (zardoz@bellsouth.net) from Columbus, Ms

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The lavish 1945 Warner Brothers western release "San Antonio" with Errol Flynn, Alexis Smith, Paul Kelly, and S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall qualifies as an above average frontier fracas, probably the last really top-notch oater that Flynn made before his career dried up in the late 1950s. Mind you, Flynn, Smith, and Sakall reassembled for Ray Enright's "Montana" in 1950. The chief asset of war-time western is Bert Glennon's glorious Technicolor photography. Check out the shots near the beginning as a horseman is silhouetted against a burnished gold sky and the night-time long shot inside the Alamo, these shots look dazzling even on my ancient 20 inch color TV. The action in this World War II era sagebrusher is fairly ordinary on cursory inspection until you've seen it a few times and you think about how anarchic things are in Texas that the hero is forced into exile in Mexico while the villains live things up in the lap of luxury in San Antonio. Flynn never made a movie where his heroic character was in such a bad way that he had to voluntarily leave America and conceal himself. Of course, in his incomparable "Captain Blood," he was wrongly imprisoned, but he didn't imprison himself. Flynn fans will enjoy his cheerful banter with co-star Alex Smith. Many feel that she was not as compatible with him the way that dainty little Olivia De Havilland was in their five films together. Actually, I think that the Smith & Flynn relationship is more even, because she projects a greater physical presence than De Havilland. In other words, Smith could go toe to toe with Flynn better than the diminutive Ms. De Havilland. The other outstanding thing about "San Antonio" is its Oscar nominated theme song "One Sunday Morning." This knock-out tune bolsters the movie and it improves with each viewing. The other Oscar nomination went to the art direction which the beautiful Technicolor lensing brings in fabulous detail. "San Antonio" ranks at the very least as an all around good looking western with a superb song, spectacular color photography, and Max Steiner's lively contribution to the orchestral score is unmistakable.

The action opens with Texas cattleman Charlie Bell (the ever reliable John Litel) crossing the Tex-Mex border to root Clay Hardin (Errol Flynn) out of exile. As it turns out, Clay has been biding his time before he returns to Texas for a showdown with lead heavy Roy Stuart (Paul Kelly of "The Springfield Rifle") who is the chief architect behind a massive cattle rustling ring that has robbed and stolen thousands of dollars from Texas cattlemen. It seems that Clay liberated a tally book from one of Stuart's henchmen has all the dirty details. Charlie Bell warns Clay that the opposition is expecting him and wants to kill him, but threats of death and violence do not deter Clay Hardin. He tells Charlie to get him a ticket on the next stage to San Antonio. Of course, Charlie regards this as a brazen and unwise thing to do, but Clay goes ahead with it anyway. Meanwhile, two Stuart henchmen are waiting for our hero who stops off along the way to catch a ride on a different stagecoach, one chartered for a New Orleans entertainer Jeanne Star (Alexis Smith of "The Doughgirls") who is supposed to sing in Roy Stuart's saloon. Jeanne's likable but befuddled business manager Sacha Bozic (lovable flabby jowled S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall of "Casablanca") lined up the engagement through an old acquaintance of her Jeanne's Legare (shifty-eyed Victor Francen of "The Desert Song") who is partners with Roy Stuart. Along the way, Clay tangles with Stuart-sent gunman Lafe Williams (Tom Tyler of "The Adventures of Captain Marvel") and guns him down in a memorable shoot-out. The rest of "San Antonio" consists of Clay Hardin and Roy Stuart circling each other warily like a mongoose and a cobra in an arena that only one can exit alive. The action really gathers momentum after an exciting scene where Legare guns down Charlie Bell in a back ally and the shadow of Sacha looms over both. Legare threatens to kill Sacha if the funny little fat man utters a word. Meanwhile, Clay gets the mistaken notion that Jeanne set him up for Roy Stuart. Later, we get to see a massive saloon shoot-out on the scale of the saloon brawl in Michael Curtiz's "Dodge City." The eventful, hard-as-nails frontier action in an above-average script by "Little Caesar" scenarist W.R. Burnett and Alan Le May—best known for his novel "The Searchers" that became a John Wayne classic—offsets the antics of Cuddles. Anybody who knows anything about Warner Brothers movies from that age knows that a lot of Cuddles' dialogue sounds like something that Michael Curtiz would have said. When Cuddles spots a rider less horse, he turns to the stagecoach driver and proclaims, "There goes an empty horse." This line immortalized first in David Niven's autobiography about the time that he made "The Charge of the Light Brigade" with Flynn and Curtiz referred to bare-backed horses as "empty" horses. The dialogue turns out to be filled in loads of quotable dialogue. Cuddles' comic dialogue sounds almost as good as the Marx Brothers with lines like: "If you can't say nothing, don't speak." Kelly and Francen make excellent villains as does Tom Tyler at the beginning of the film. Let's not overlook those sexy costumes that Alexis flaunts her oh-so-hottie body in.

You can't go wrong with "San Antonio."

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3 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :-
Minor western filmed in gorgeous Technicolor..., 30 May 2006
6/10
Author: Neil Doyle from U.S.A.

Once it was established that ERROL FLYNN could fit the mold of a western hero (even with his Australian/British accent), his studio wasted no time in putting him through the paces of several westerns, the best of which was DODGE CITY ('39). By the time he did SAN ANTONIO, all the western clichés were pretty well used up, so what we have here is a routine storyline that gives Flynn a chance to play another one of his suave western heroes who romances the local dance hall girl (ALEXIS SMITH) so we get a chance to hear a couple of pretty tunes along the way.

It's a shame that Warners had so little faith in Alexis' singing prowess that they dubbed her voice for the musical interludes. She went on to become an accomplished dancer/singer on Broadway in the years ahead. Nicest number is "Some Sunday Morning" which actually got an Oscar nomination as Best Song.

The usual cast of competent Warner contract players is evident once again: John Litel, S.Z. Sakall, Paul Kelly, Tom Tyler (wasted in a small role), Florence Bates and Victor Francen. Conspicuously missing is Alan Hale, who usually played Flynn's sidekick.

With a jaunty score by Max Steiner (who borrows his own title theme from DODGE CITY), this is the kind of western you've seen many times before, but enhanced by some of the nicest Technicolor and set decorations to be seen in any Warner film of this period.

Errol Flynn fans will enjoy it as one of his lesser excursions into the western genre. Fast moving and breezy entertainment.

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5 out of 8 people found the following comment useful :-
one of the high achievements of Warner, a still enjoyable western., 23 February 2003
8/10
Author: tmwest from S. Paulo, Brazil

When I first saw this film in a rerun at the early fifties I was impressed by the colors. Before this western only a few were made in color like "Dodge City", "Jesse James", and "Drums Along the Mohawk". There is a scene at the beginning where a young boy takes a telegram from one person to another passing through the town, and the scenery and colors of this scene never left my memory, it was breathtaking. When I saw this film recently on DVD, the colors looked great, but because of the higher definition, the painted scenery became very obvious. "San Antonio" is one of those high achievements of Warner, a western that has stagecoaches, shootouts, (one of them at the Alamo), a big saloon with music, Alexis Smith, and of course, Flynn. I lost the count of the times I have seen this movie and I keep on enjoying it.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
In The Alamo Ruins, 4 April 2009
8/10
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York

After a layoff of four years from the American west, Errol Flynn returns to the western genre in a stylish film about post Civil War Texas and a man looking for some justice for himself and his fellow cattle ranchers. Errol's been in exile in Mexico, but he's back now with the evidence against cattle rustling Paul Kelly who is the local boss of the San Antonio area.

Flynn makes it to San Antonio and in the process hooks up with entertainer Alexis Smith and her two retainers Florence Bates and S.Z. Sakall, a pair of the biggest scene stealers that the movies ever had. Smith is appearing at Kelly's saloon there, courtesy of his partner Victor Francen for whom she worked back in New Orleans. Francen's an ambitious sort and wants to cash in Kelly's other businesses besides the saloon. So we've got two villains working their own agendas at cross purposes whom Flynn has to deal with.

Errol Flynn did a total of eight westerns, but only San Antonio got any kind of recognition from the Academy. San Antonio was nominated for two Oscars, for Art&Set Decoration for a color film and for Best Song with Some Sunday Morning which Alexis Smith sings in a saloon scene. The song is a good one, Dick Haymes had a record of it that sold quite a bit back in the day.

All the cast had to keep on their toes with both Florence Bates and S.Z. Sakall in the cast. Especially 'Cuddles' Sakall. Part of the plot involves Sakall witnessing the murder of Flynn's friend and ally John Litel and being intimidated by the bad guys. With his eye rolling and fractured English, Sakall is at his best in San Antonio.

For the traditional western fan there's enough gunplay and fights to satisfy anyone. Flynn has a nice triangular shootout with both Kelly and Francen at the Alamo ruins, each man trying to get the other two for their own reasons. I say ruins because the chapel had not been restored yet as a historical monument as it is now in downtown San Antonio.

As for the film, San Antonio is a most satisfying western for both fans of the genre and Errol Flynn.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
San Antonio Blues, 12 September 2008
4/10
Author: srpwx from United States

Hard to believe this was Flynn's highest grossing film but war-weary patrons were looking for any form of escapism. Sharp Technicolor production, nice use of Warner's Calabasas Ranch plus razor sharp costumes for Alexis Smith make this film watchable but not much else. Flynn smiles his way through the proceedings but looks rather silly in the red bandanna and toy gun.

Nevertheless, his scenes with Alexis generate smiles. Was there anybody better than Flynn? I think not. His riding a horse then dismounting into the window of the stage is a nice touch. Unfortunately, this tepid movie plods along until the anti-climatic saloon fight scene. All stunts, prate-falls and special effects look so staged it's distracting. By the end you're left thinking: let's wrap this up! I'm a huge Flynn fan but San Antonio entertainment isn't as big as Texas. Dodge City, Virginia City and even Rocky Mountain are better bets.

Note: Some stunts done with Horses would never see the light of day now. One scene has Flynn chasing Paul Kelly across a bridge, Flynn jumps onto Kelly's white horse with both taking a big fall into the river. It's one of the more dramatic moments in the entire film. Speaking of Kelly, his personal life was almost as drama filled as Flynn's.

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4 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
Alexis Smith was GORGEOUS, 8 March 2007
6/10
Author: Casablanca3784 from 15th Row Orchestra

I noticed that "San Antonio" was nominated for two Oscars and won none.The first it deserved i.e. Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color. Yes indeed, that saloon bawdy house was done impeccably,rich and lavishly. The second nomination was unwarranted--Best Music, Original Song "Some Sunday Morning" Ray Heindorf (music), M.K. Jerome (music) & Ted Koehler (lyrics. You can go crazy from that song. Every time a stagecoach moved, it moved with it in the background. EVERY TIME. THE WHOLE PICTURE. Then what do you think Alexis Smith, the saloon chanteuse sings? Right--same thing. And after she's done, what does a male quartet sing? Right again. It's not a bad tune but OVER and OVER and OVER....Good Grief!

The film's about the wild wild west of the mid 1800s. So my question is this: Errol Flynn has an English accent; S.Z. Sakall has a Hungarian accent and villain Victor Francen has a French accent. Now don't get me wrong; I'm neither xenophobic nor bigoted because my own father was a European immigrant but he didn't wear a ten gallon hat and carry a Colt .45 either. What do Europeans have to do with a story of the rootin' tootin' shootin' wild west? Sorry but Mr. Flynn who speaks like someone out of Oxford doesn't belong with the tumbleweed crowd.

The plot is all about revenge as are so many films. There is a quasi-romantic angle of course because of the gorgeous Alexis Smith who was one of Hollywood's great natural beauties and quite surprisingly, a very good job is done by John Litel who is Flynn's best friend.

I rated the film a 6 because it's neither great nor rotten; has excellent color and holds your interest. One thing--they showed too many cattle and not enough Alexis Smith.

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