malcolmgsw
The plot summary gives you the impression that this is a Western.Unfortunately this is not the case.Instead we have got what can only be described as a moralizing preaching drama.There is very little drama and a truly bizarre climax where McCrea persuaded the vigilantes not to lynch the afro America n as they will be willed his possessions.Whowver wrote this should have had his head examined.
CabbageCustard
I would so love to give this movie a much higher rating. I really wanted to like it. I didn't dislike it. I just didn't love it. In some ways, this movie is a poor man's 'To Kill a Mockingbird', although it predates that movie by more than a decade. Unfortunately, this movie fails to create any tension even in those scenes which are clearly meant to do so. It also fails to get us to invest into the life of these characters or feel any emotion towards them. They're nice enough people, I just didn't come to really care about them or what happened to them. Perhaps, the short running time is to blame. It just wasn't enough to fully develop the characters and draw us into their lives. This certainly isn't a bad movie.It isn't a boring movie. It's just a disappointing one.
alexandre michel liberman (tmwest)
Seeing the names of Joel McCrea and the director Jacques Tourneur(together they made the excellent "Wichita"), I thought this would be a western. As a matter of fact there is one western scene where the parson (Joel McCRea) draws his two guns when they don't want to hear his sermon at the saloon. But mostly the film follows the style of those made for the whole family to see at a Sunday matinée. It is not that there is no sadness. Some people die from an epidemic fever, there is even an attack from a white hooded clan. But the conflicts are solved too fast to be really believable, in a hurry to give a positive feeling. But apart from that, this is a pleasant film to see, among its qualities a certain Mark Twain touch and the beautiful smile of Ellen Drew.
chaos-rampant
This, the second of director Jacques Tourneur's westerns after CANYON PASSAGE and one of several collaborations with actor Joel McCrea, finds him at least at first sight as far removed from the ambiguous psychological Gothic horror films he became famous through a couple years back for Val Lewton's RKO horror unit, yet once we scratch the surface, peel back the layers of faith-restoring sentimentality which lies at the film's core, we'll find this can be a pretty dark film.Not only because the life of a small rural town in the post-Civil War South has to face a typhoid epidemic and Klan racism because the 'family' nature of the film ensures these are merely obstacles to be overcome, each of them a lesson learned in Christian love and brotherhood not only for the characters but also for the audience, but mostly because of the way Tourneur shoots the major set-pieces that revolve around them. Going back to what he learnt next to Val Lewton at RKO, Tourneur gives an otherwise saccharine film a dark underbelly, Klansmen pinning threatening notes on negros in front of burning crosses et al.Yet STARS IN MY CROWN never feels like a film whose message and theme is beneath the director. Tourneur approaches the story in earnest. The truth is that it takes a while for things to get going. That the film is a bit too episodic and scattershot to really register until the final 15 minutes when parson Joel McCrea has to face off alone with a mob of Klansmen to save the life of a negro. That the small vignettes scattered throughout the film push the two major plots (smalltown biggotry and typhoid epidemic) a bit too far apart, the result making the first half a pretty meandering anemic affair. But the denouement, for all its saccharine 'everybody gets together to sing hymns in the church' quality, feels honest and I find it hard to fault such a film. Building something as emotionally earnest and unassuming as this is harder than tearing it down with cynicism.
AD
