The Rough Riders (film)
1927 film by Victor Fleming

The Rough Riders is a 1927 American silent drama film directed by Victor Fleming, released by Paramount Pictures, and starring Noah Beery, Sr., Charles Farrell, George Bancroft, and Mary Astor. Due to the public apathy towards silent films, a sound version was also prepared early in 1928. While the sound version has no audible dialog, it was released with a synchronized musical score with sound effects using both the sound-on-disc and sound-on-film process. The picture is fictional account of Theodore Roosevelt's military unit in Cuba. This film had an alternate release title, The Trumpet Call. The cinematography was by James Wong Howe and E. Burton Steene.
Plot
Cast
Noah Beery as Hell's Bells
Charles Farrell as Stuart Van Brunt
George Bancroft as Happy Joe
Charles Emmett Mack as Bert Henley
Mary Astor as Dolly
Frank Hopper as Theodore Roosevelt (some sources list him as Frank Hooper)
Fred Lindsay as Leonard Wood
Fred Kohler as Sgt. Stanton
Mark Hamilton as a soldier
Music
The sound version featured a theme song entitled “Goodbye Dolly Gray,” with lyrics by Will D. Cobb and music by Paul Barnes. Also featured was the song entitled “The Rough Riders”
which was composed by Hugo Riesenfeld.
Preservation
Incomplete or fragment prints of The Rough Riders are extant at the Museum of Modern Art and the Library of Congress.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Rough Riders (film)” is 1927 film by Victor Fleming. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Rough, Riders and film, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “1927 film by Victor Fleming” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 28, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7761607. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Rough Riders (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.