GOOOD-BYE, MY LADY (1956)

One more Boy and his Dog story, at once effective and inadequate.  Brandon De Wilde, on the cusp of adolescence, living a backwoods bayou life with toothless/illiterate Uncle Walter Brennan, traps and trains a dog like no one’s ever seen before.  No mongrel, the dog turns into an outstanding bird-dog, attracting enough local attention to be found out.  Keep the companion of a lifetime or send it home?  What’s the right thing to do?  (SPOILER title!)  Loaded with lovely unusual things (nicely caught in impressionistic monochrome by William Clothier), if only director William Wellman in a late effort showed some sensitivity in his cinematic DNA, pushing too hard at all the wrong times and unable to keep Brennan and General Store owner Phil Harris from coming off as HUCK FINN Road Company Duke and The Dauphin.  They’re good in their way, but it’s the wrong way.  The project needs tact, and a touch poetry; Wellman can’t even get the dog to sound right.  (The breed ‘laughs’ instead of barks, but the audio is so poorly done it briefly stops the film cold.  And that folksy guitar strumming score also no help.*)  Far better, indeed shockingly fine, is that farming family across the creek.  A Black household who, for a change, get the nicely maintained home while our While leads live in something nearer a shack with a porch than a proper house.  And yes, that’s Sidney Poitier in fine support as the owner (something of a father surrogate to De Wilde), freed from having to play a symbol or be a progressive guide into racial issues.  Not ‘colorblind casting,’ BTW, just a Black neighbor with a solid working life & family.  How long before Poitier got this sort of part again?  Very much worth overlooking problems here, and young De Wilde was some kind of special film kid.

DOUBLE-BILL: See what’s missing here, fresh eyes/poetic tone, in De Wilde’s outstanding debut under Fred Zinnemann in THE MEMBER OF THE WEDDING/’52.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2010/03/member-of-wedding-1952.html   OR: More Boy(s) and a Dog from novelist James Street, THE BISCUIT EATER/’ 40.  Also boasting pretty advanced race relations for the period. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-biscuit-eater-1940.html

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Singing the title track, that’s an unmistakable if uncredited Howard Keel.