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Jacques Tourneur at work in color on Western terrain is something to behold—the credits roll over a matte of a damp Portland day (slanting rooftops, a ship's half-seen mast, boards on a muddy street) that's practically a Grafström. The nascent settlement in the wilderness would be Fordian, except that Dana Andrews' negation of piety ("A man can choose his own gods") and Andy Devine's acknowledgment of Indian rights ("We're on their land. They ain't likely to forget that") dispute Manifest Destiny. Overlapping triangles abound: Andrews-Susan Hayward-Brian Donlevy, Andrews-Hayward-Patricia Roc, Andrews-Roc-Victor Cutler, Hayward-Donlevy-Rose Hobart. Hoagy Carmichael with mandolin amid the builders is wastrel, commentator, mediator and voyeur ("...a little store and lots of time"). The cabin-rising sequence tips its hat to Hathaway's Trail of the Lonesome Pine, and was studied by Peter Weir. The wedding bash celebrates wholeness but these are forces in tenuous balance, Donlevy voices Tourneur's ambivalence ("The illusion of peace is upon it") moments before the Indians materialize via a single reverse shot that seems to introduce a parallel world. Another space-expanding reverse shot, this time embodying tensions from within rather than without, takes place before Andrews' brawl with Ward Bond, cutting from a medium-shot of the two at the tavern counter to another revealing the townspeople in the wings, eager for spectacle. (The ugly, brutal scuffle hinges on the image of the disoriented Bond smashing his fist into a wooden pole.) A film of "thin margins," the saloon doubles as hanging courtroom and the garden becomes an inferno. The dazed maiden in the woods comes from I Walked with a Zombie, and finds her way into Demme's Beloved. Stars in My Crown revisits the community with hope for harmony, though Stranger on Horseback and Wichita know better. With Fay Holden, Stanley Ridges, Lloyd Bridges, Onslow Stevens, Halliwell Hobbes, and Dorothy Peterson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |