COME NEXT SPRING (1956)

With their bread & butter Westerns (budget features; Saturday matinee serials) sinking as tv took over the market, Republic Pictures tried quality.  Then, either didn’t know what to do with it or didn’t recognize it when they’d made one.  So a fine, gently effective mid-lister, like this slice of late ‘20s Americana from Western specialist R.G. Springsteen, made in Republic's own TruColor process, went largely missing, and is still little known.  Pity.  A prodigal husband story with Steve Cochran (a natural screen tough guy who longed to play more complicated characters - even going to Italy to work for Antonioni) returns home after a five year bender (and three more sober), to the family farm now run by embittered wife Ann Sheridan.  He also finds an eight-yr-old son he didn’t know he had, and a traumatized, mute twelve yr-old daughter.  No big surprises here, but all the boxes intelligently ticked.  (Other than de rigueur alcohol relapse, which isn’t so much gone as finessed.)   Not without melodrama, there’s a cyclone to get thru and a missing-person-in-jeopardy  finale to resolve the last few issues, but generally mostly believable steps to redemption/reclamation.  And while other directors might have made more of this, Springsteen’s plainness has a quiet charm and works a sense of inevitability that’s very appealing.*  Plus, you get to see Walter Brennan and Edgar Buchanan at the same time instead of wondering if Buchanan only got his part because Brennan was busy elsewhere.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *At their respective studios, FOX’s Henry King and Clarence Brown at M-G-M handled the rural Americana line with a special grace.  They tend to be underappreciated mostly because their respective studios were always tapping them to take on genres they didn’t excel at.   For King, try DEEP WATERS/’48; for Brown INTRUDER IN THE DUST/’49.  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2017/06/deep-waters-1948.html  https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2025/06/intruder-in-dust-1949.html