National Board of Review Magazine (Jan 1939 - Jan 1942)

October, 1940 Screen and History THE American screen has been turning with surer foot to x\merican history for its subjects. We've always had, and surely always shall have, the outdoors and close-to-pioneering of Westerns, wnich are so certain of their public that they can go on 3'ear after year using the same old plot. But within a fairly short time a lot of the so-called big pictures have gone into important American beginnings for sturdy stories and stirring action, with more and more attention to true portraiture of time and character and to some sort of interpretation to link with what came after. Americanism, if we have to use that word in contrast to other isms, isn't something for campaign speeches alone, and where is the rough and heart) spirit of it better to be expounded than in tales about the early settling of the country ? This fall we have BrigJiam Young and T'lr Hozvards of Virginia, one a big emigration into the wilderness in flight from savage intolerance, the other the revolt of the colonies against England. Both are about big beginnings. Brighaui Young is essentially another Covered W agon, including the wagons. The early story of the J^lormons is a somewhat ticklish subject for the screen, since it has to be treated in school-book fashion if it isn't to arouse some of the same feelings that pursued the disciples of Joseph Smith across the country a hundred years ago. Joseph's revelations, the writing of his Book of Mormon, and especially his teachings and practices about wives, would be hard to take sympathetically, so we have only some of his communal ideas about industriousness and sharing the fruits of labor, expressed with a sort of Emersonian dignity, and his martyr-like death before Brigham Young stepped into the leadership of his followers. Then we get a fine parade of courage and determination pushing westward, over rivers, across plains, through mountains, overcoming hardships, disloyalty, fears, dissension, to the final desert stopping place, which was to be made blooming and prosperous in the years to come. It is a stirring business, with lift and excitement to it, and at the end a beautifully executed 13 miracle (with authentic historical foundation) to save the desperate band from starvation. In spite of the ads there's little sign and little mention (and that mostly in a comic vein) of polygam)'. And there's a mild and routine little love-story. Tlic Ho7cards of Virginia is a section of Elizabeth Page's long and carefully historical novel of the beginnings of the American nation, "The Tree of Liberty." Great personages moved and talked through that novel, which carried the \''irginia conflict i)etween tidewater tories and back-country pioneers on through the Revolution and the more national conflict between the principles of Tefi^erson and those of Alexander Hamilton. In the picture, as in the novel, that conflict is personified in Matt Howard and his wife and sons, but it goes only so far as the imminent surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. ]Many of the scenes were made in \\^illiamsburgh. It is bv far the best big picture that has been made of the American Revolution, done with meticulous heed to setting and dress, and once the revolt of the colonies is started many a glimpse of important happenings. Events in Boston, and among the Continental soldiers, are swiftly and vividly pictured in some of Mr. Vorkapich's best montage style, and there are stirring scenes in the Virginia House of Burgesses, with Patrick Henry making his two ringing speeches against tyranny. The picture is slow in getting started, taking a long and not too enlightening time to get ]\Iatt Howard married to the fine lady of the tidewater who was to make his conflict between domesticity and patriotism so thorn}'. It is only when Matt's sons grow up enough to take sides that the family life of the Howards becomes really moving. Most of the characters, in fact, are stereotyped and superficial, like figures at a costume part3^ but there is splendid sweep and action to the events in which these characters lose themselves as individuals and become merely a part of a great movement. As history, so far as it attempts to go, the picture is accurate and illuminating, far beyond what most films of its kind have managed to be before. It's not often, now, that many people hark back regretfully to the days of silent films, but these two pictures do arouse a feeling of