Only the Brave will never be regarded as one of Gary Cooper's great films. His scenes with Cooper are very droll and are the best in the film. He's one reluctant rebel who's very happy not to be in battle as the rest of his company runs off to act on Cooper's false information. Personally I think the best performance in the film is from an actor named William Le Maire who plays the sentry guarding Cooper after he's been caught and courtmartialed. I think Red Skelton must have seen some of this for his later film, A Southern Yankee. It actually starts, only starts mind you, to get funny as Cooper is trying to be caught and Brian keeps saving him. And Coop's charm is such that Brian falls for him as well. Of course what happens is the plantation owner's lovely, crinolined, mushmouth drawling Mary Brian falls for Cooper, causing no small amount of jealousy with Phillips Holmes a most hot blooded southerner indeed. Of course the penalty then as now is execution. He's to ride to a certain plantation which is a local brigade headquarters and deliberately let himself by caught with maps showing false Union troop dispositions. He volunteers to go behind enemy lines disguised in Confederate gray as a staff officer to Robert E. Cooper is a Union Army officer who after being jilted by girlfriend, Virginia Bruce, volunteers on what could be a suicide mission.

It was dated for the Depression era audiences when the film first came out, let alone for today's audience. Only the Brave is the kind of Victorian melodrama that was popular on the stage during the latter half of the 19th century. Sad to say the results were not as good as The Virginian. After the success of Gary Cooper's first all talking film, The Virginian, he and his leading lady Mary Brian were teamed again in a Civil War story, Only the Brave.

Only the brave movie wiki