After leaving Warners, home studio for nearly three decades, and struggling to find his old compositional dynamism in the new WideScreen formats just as he hit his 70s, director Michael Curtiz had largely returned to form by the time he made this heartwarming family drama. Long available in horrific cropped editions, with mistimed color and grainy texture obliterating Ted McCord’s panoramic lensing, it’s now out in a fine remastering. (Streaming free via KANOPY thru many libraries.) Alan Ladd (at his most Gary Cooper-ish) is quietly compelling in this post-Civil War story as a Southern soldier gone North in hopes of finding treatment for his boy (played by David Ladd), unable to speak from war trauma. But Ladd gets into trouble passing thru one town when sheep baron Dean Jaggar tries to steal the boy’s dog (a natural sheep herder of championship caliber) and only keeps out of jail when Olivia de Havilland, a single farm woman feuding with Jaggar & his sons over land, covers the thirty dollar fine. She gets Ladd as hired hand for her trouble, but it’s the boy who first grabs her attention. The rest plays out as expected, but lovingly so, with a real emotional kick to it. Here’s the great, if unsung Curtiz, Hollywood’s ultimate pro, working full out after looking somewhat hobbled for a few years. Back with a generous use of shadows, silhouettes, camera movement, and showing a new feel for landscape & scale away from studio confines. Listen up for Jerome Moross’s stunning score, kissin’ cousin/precursor to his masterpiece, THE BIG COUNTRY/’58 which came out next.
DOUBLE-BILL: No doubt, echoes of Ladd’s SHANE/’53 weren’t unintentional. But like so much George Stevens work, there’s a detrimental sense of self-regard to it's myth-making. Curtiz, far more instinctual & spontaneous than the ever dutiful Stevens.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: De Havilland first worked for Curtiz in CAPTAIN BLOOD back in 1935 when she was 19 yrs-old. Now 42, and without a speck of makeup, still the lovely ingenue.
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