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A little gag points up Henry Hathaway's pugnacity under the tasteful pictorialism, a yellow butterfly flutters by and gets pinned to the wall by a hillbilly's hurled knife. Feuding clans in mountainous Kentucky, the opening crawl takes a diplomatic view ("Hatred is their patriotism") but the weary matriarch (Beulah Bondi) is more blunt: "They don't understand nothin' but shootin' and killin'!" The maiden born amid gunfire (Sylvia Sidney) develops a taste for education courtesy of the big-city engineer (Fred MacMurray), much to the dismay of the cousin she's expected to marry (Henry Fonda). Progress comes slowly and perilously to such zones, laborers and machines at work on the sun-dappled landscape give way to a darkened interior where lead is cast into bullets. "You shouldn't mess in old troubles." Technicolor on location means a watercolor gloss over Tol'able David, the naturalistic flip side to the stylization of Becky Sharp, pretty "like a budding sapling without even a room for a robin to sit." (Natural light gradations reign, as befits a tale hopeful for harmony over discord.) Arboreal hues splintered by strife, greens and browns reflected on placid waters before clashing with the frenzied oranges of a camp set ablaze. A glimpse of a grasshopper against browning foliage is illustrative of the minuteness of the technique, a monochromatic portrait of Sidney framed by color pencils might be a joke about skin tones on celluloid. "Walkin' phonograph" Fuzzy Knight warbles and quips, cf. Tourneur's Canyon Passage, and smashes his guitar over a vicious rube's noggin when needed. "We ones is funny people," at least until a child's coffin is brought to bear on the absurdity of violence. Hathaway's own Shepherd of the Hills is a splendid companion piece. With Fred Stone, Nigel Bruce, Robert Barrat, Spanky McFarland, Otto Fries, Samuel S. Hinds, and Alan Baxter.
--- Fernando F. Croce |