Only a
Western in the same way that Friendly Persuasion
is a Western, Stars in My Crown is saved
by the performance of Joel McCrea, just as Friendly
Persuasion was salvaged by Gary Cooper. Otherwise, spectators would have
drowned in a sea of treacle.
Not a Western though
Joel McCrea
was so good in Westerns, proper Westerns. He had established a nation-building
stage line in Wells Fargo and a
railroad in Union Pacific; he had roamed
the Plains as Buffalo Bill and The Virginian; in excellent smaller
pictures he had run a ranch in Ramrod
and robbed banks (politely) in both Four Faces West
and Colorado Territory. That’s an
impressive list. Stars in My Crown was
really a poor choice of part, even if he was superb in it.
Towering
Paris-born
Jacques Tourneur, who had gone to Hollywood with his father in 1913 aged 9, was
a talented director. He made (classy) horror movies for RKO such as Cat People but graduated to various
interesting projects in different genres. In the 1950s he was to direct McCrea
in Wichita, a true Western and a fine
picture, and four years before Stars
he had directed Dana Andrews in the first-class Canyon Passage, an unusual but high-quality Western. I suppose he did OK with Stars but only if you like mawkishly sentimental
pictures which paint a chocolate-box picture of a past that never was.
Wholesome family entertainment (aka treacle)
The producers
of the DVD cover and poster could really be had up for an infringement of trade
description. It shows a frock-coated McCrea in a smoky saloon with two drawn
guns below the slogan Take your choice …
Either I speak or my pistols do! This is a reference to the opening scene
of the movie where McCrea’s ex-soldier Josiah Doziah Gray (stupid name) arrives
in town after the Civil War (in cavalry breeches of a faded color to match his
name) to set up as a preacher and gives his first sermon at pistol-point in a
saloon. It is the only truly Western episode in the movie and it lasts thirty
seconds.
Misleading DVD cover
Otherwise,
bucolic is the word, I’m afraid. We may be in a Western town in the 1870s but it’s
just a wholesome 1950 black & white family film about a cute community with
a parson and a doctor and how they cope with a typhoid epidemic. Think Driftwood or Intruder in the Dust. Not my cup of tea, though I do admit to falling
victim to the sentiment here and there, dammit.
The hymn of the same name is used by Adolph Deutsch to bolster the community spirit that Josiah Doziah is trying to instil, and is soupy.
The film is more a series of episodic vignettes than an extended narrative.
The hymn of the same name is used by Adolph Deutsch to bolster the community spirit that Josiah Doziah is trying to instil, and is soupy.
The film is more a series of episodic vignettes than an extended narrative.
Children
loom large and the picture is aimed at them as well as their (undemanding)
parents. The story is narrated (voiceover by Marshall Thompson who was in
Anthony Mann’s Devil’s Doorway the
same year) by a grown-up John Kenyon, played as a boy by then child star Dean
Stockwell, 14. This was already the actor’s sixteenth movie so he was a
hardened veteran. The following year he starred again with McCrea in an equally
family film but much closer to a true Western, Cattle Drive. In Stars
Dean is a likeable curly-headed village lad, an orphan adopted by the parson
and his wife Harriet (Ellen Drew). He is pals with one of the blond brood of boisterous
Isbell brothers, played by actors who look just like siblings but weren’t. One
of them was a young James Arness. There are other kids.
Stockwell
Pa Isbell,
Jed, a wartime buddy of the parson’s, is well played by the excellent Alan Hale,
hearty, brim-full of life. It’s a memorable act. There’s an old and dying doc (Lewis
Stone) and his unpopular but able son who will take over (James Mitchell). The
new young doc is an atheist (though of course the word itself could not be
pronounced in a 1950s family film) who sees the parson as an intrusion and a
nuisance but who comes round to respect and understanding of the clergyman. Where
medical science has failed, prayer succeeds in saving the life of the school
teacher (a teenage Amanda Blake, Miss Kitty of Gunsmoke). The young doc winds
up in church on the arm of the schoolma’am. Audiences probably found these
scenes heartwarming. I found them trite and sickly.
James Mitchell as the sour Doc and a teenage Miss Kitty as the schoolma'am
There’s
one of those endearing ‘Negro’ old men, Uncle Famous, grizzled, decent,
bible-readin’ and law-abidin’, the kind Hollywood loved (Juano Hernandez).
Uncle Famous (not Tom)
He
befriends the boy John and the parson protects him from the unscrupulous greed
of townsman Ed Begley, who is after the old man’s small plot of land, and
Begley’s hooded henchmen, KKK kowards komplete with fiery kross and noose. Honest
Jed and his sons arrive with guns to save the old fellow but Parson McCrea
doesn’t fight the white-trash thugs; he shames them into submission.
The kowards of the KKK
At least the picture is decently anti-racist and may have had a good influence on its young audience.
Arthur
Hunnicutt plays the village simpleton. Always great to see Arthur. The man is
named Chloroform Wiggins because his mother hadn’t heard of chloroform when he
was born but was so impressed by its efficacy that she named the newborn babe
after it. Fair enough.
One good
thing: you know how fond I am of nineteenth-century gadgets in Westerns. Well,
Ellen Drew’s apple-peeler is a wiz (wish I had one), as is the fan gizmo she
has to keep flies off the cake (groovy) and she also has a natty device for
winding wool (I am less covetous).
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