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Stars in My Crown (1950)
Oct. 9th, 2007 01:42 pmSo another movie I watched over the weekend that I've been thinking about ever since is Jacques Tourneur's Stars in My Crown. I'm a huge fan of Tourneur's films, as I've written before, particularly Out of the Past (1947), I Walked with a Zombie (1943) and, as of recently, Canyon Passage (1946). These are all dark, dreamy, pictorially beautiful movies straight from the heart of the Hollywood studio system. (Well, perhaps from just off to the side of the heart, but still pretty close.) Tourneur claimed he was a craftsman, not an artist, and that he never turned down a script. He made movies in a lot of different genres, some from pretty crappy scripts. I've now seen eleven of them, and in some ways Stars in My Crown is the weirdest of all. Weird because it's so goddamned wholesome compared to the others.
We're talking wholesome as in Invite-the-Parson-to-Sunday-Dinner-and-a-Movie wholesome. In fact, it's about a parson (played by the great Joel McCrea) in a small southern town just after the Civil War. It reminds me a little of A Christmas Story (which is also very, very wholesome) in that it's narrated by someone looking back at his childhood during the events of the story, when he was an orphan boy adopted by the parson and his wife. There are two different conflicts in the story, both of which are actually fairly typical in Tourneur's movies, although not always so prominent. The first is the conflict between faith and reason, which is at the heart of all his horror films, particularly The Night of the Demon (1957). It's embodied here in the conflict between the parson and a young doctor when the town is struck by typhoid fever. The doctor blames the parson for spreading it, and the parson comes to doubt himself.
The other conflict is more interesting to me, probably because it's much less wholesome. Some of the neighborly, church-going white people in town want the land that belongs to a freed black slave, Uncle Famous, but he doesn't want to sell. They terrorize him, but he gets support from the parson and one other white family. What's interesting about this is that it comes before the Civil Rights movement and thus long before Hollywood had begun to examine its own racial attitudes very seriously. Tourneur was a Frenchman, and maybe he was able to deal with American racism more clearly as an outsider. None of his movies has the cringe-inducing black characters typical of so many other Hollywood features of the era. In fact, I Walked with a Zombie is notable for its critical subtext regarding colonialism in the Caribbean and for filming a voodoo ceremony in almost documentary terms (although also exploiting voodoo for its more Hollywood-mythological values as well).
So while the MGM-wholesomeness of Stars in My Crown was irritating to me, I need to give this film another shot. The first conflict was resolved in a way that I thought totally spoiled Tourneur's usual ambiguity about the supernatural, but Chris Fujiwara argues, in his excellent book on Tourneur, that he actually films it in such a way as to leave no room for God. I'll have to give that another look, because it sure was too subtle for me. The second conflict is also resolved in a very wholesome way (what, no bloodbath?! fuck!!!), but inasmuch as it involves a confrontation between the parson and the torch-wielding Ku Klux Klan, it's still a very exciting scene. Take that, D.W. Griffith! However, it seems more than a bit of a whitewash when compared to real history, or at least what I know of it.
Tourneur claimed that this was one of his favorite of his own movies, but I'll need some convincing. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see him approaching the same concerns that he explores in his noirs and horror films but from a completely different angle. Meanwhile, I watched his Great Day in the Morning (1956) last night, which is a color film that takes place in Denver right before the Civil War. You see, this gambler from North Carolina is looking for some gold miners who are exploiting a motherlode so they can buy weapons for the South for the war everyone knows is coming ...
We're talking wholesome as in Invite-the-Parson-to-Sunday-Dinner-and-a-Movie wholesome. In fact, it's about a parson (played by the great Joel McCrea) in a small southern town just after the Civil War. It reminds me a little of A Christmas Story (which is also very, very wholesome) in that it's narrated by someone looking back at his childhood during the events of the story, when he was an orphan boy adopted by the parson and his wife. There are two different conflicts in the story, both of which are actually fairly typical in Tourneur's movies, although not always so prominent. The first is the conflict between faith and reason, which is at the heart of all his horror films, particularly The Night of the Demon (1957). It's embodied here in the conflict between the parson and a young doctor when the town is struck by typhoid fever. The doctor blames the parson for spreading it, and the parson comes to doubt himself.
The other conflict is more interesting to me, probably because it's much less wholesome. Some of the neighborly, church-going white people in town want the land that belongs to a freed black slave, Uncle Famous, but he doesn't want to sell. They terrorize him, but he gets support from the parson and one other white family. What's interesting about this is that it comes before the Civil Rights movement and thus long before Hollywood had begun to examine its own racial attitudes very seriously. Tourneur was a Frenchman, and maybe he was able to deal with American racism more clearly as an outsider. None of his movies has the cringe-inducing black characters typical of so many other Hollywood features of the era. In fact, I Walked with a Zombie is notable for its critical subtext regarding colonialism in the Caribbean and for filming a voodoo ceremony in almost documentary terms (although also exploiting voodoo for its more Hollywood-mythological values as well).
So while the MGM-wholesomeness of Stars in My Crown was irritating to me, I need to give this film another shot. The first conflict was resolved in a way that I thought totally spoiled Tourneur's usual ambiguity about the supernatural, but Chris Fujiwara argues, in his excellent book on Tourneur, that he actually films it in such a way as to leave no room for God. I'll have to give that another look, because it sure was too subtle for me. The second conflict is also resolved in a very wholesome way (what, no bloodbath?! fuck!!!), but inasmuch as it involves a confrontation between the parson and the torch-wielding Ku Klux Klan, it's still a very exciting scene. Take that, D.W. Griffith! However, it seems more than a bit of a whitewash when compared to real history, or at least what I know of it.
Tourneur claimed that this was one of his favorite of his own movies, but I'll need some convincing. Nonetheless, it's interesting to see him approaching the same concerns that he explores in his noirs and horror films but from a completely different angle. Meanwhile, I watched his Great Day in the Morning (1956) last night, which is a color film that takes place in Denver right before the Civil War. You see, this gambler from North Carolina is looking for some gold miners who are exploiting a motherlode so they can buy weapons for the South for the war everyone knows is coming ...
