|
"The city of our youth," churches and horses and buggies, 19th-century Americana as a studio evocation à la Ford or Welles. The parson (Joel McCrea) arrives at the saloon with Bible and pistol and barely has to raise his voice afterward, even the bully with the whip takes his kick to the pants with a guffaw. The pillar of the community has a spirited wife (Ellen Drew) and an adopted son (Dean Stockwell) whose divine wish is for "just summer, all the time." The former slave "on close terms with catfish" (Juano Hernandez), the hearty farmer with no time for sermons (Alan Hale), the traveling conjurer bursting with tricks and patter (Charles Kemper), fond sketches all. The dying doctor (Lewis Stone) passes the baton to his son (James Mitchell) just in time for a typhoid outbreak. "I reckon it's kind of like the sow thistle in the field, just bound to crop up every now and then." Jacques Tourneur's ghostly utopia, balanced frames for a harmony easily broken. Faith and science don't need each other but the town needs both, the physician tends to the sick and the preacher stays home with his doubt and then they trade places, the recovery of the schoolteacher (Amanda Blake) rests between them. (Dreyer in Ordet recalls her smile on the pillow.) The mine owner (Ed Begley) wants the Black codger's land and unleashes a slew of depredations culminating in a near-lynching, an adjustment of the reading of the will from The Ox-Bow Incident leads to the image of the Klan hood nodding in shame. "There is hope," reads the sign on the saltimbanque's wagon. Much of the material is revised by Tourneur in Stranger on Horseback and Wichita, and reflected by Ray in Distant Thunder. With Connie Gilchrist, Arthur Hunnicutt, and Jack Lambert. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |