Well, this is the first film I've reviewed since the IMDb removed the message boards. I might have just gone to the CFB and ranted over there for a while about all the film's negatives.... if you think I'm being too critical here, you know who to blame. There's now no space for discussion, and I just can give you my initial reactions.
First of all, Dean Jagger is the worst possible casting choice to play Brigham Young. He has the sincerity -- too much of it -- but that's about it. I was affected viscerally, not so much by my distaste for Mormonism in general but just the way that he gave endless speeches that are all self-righteous and very flat. Jagger is earnest, and that's about his whole range of emotions. It's as if they had hired Alan Thicke to play Alexander the Great. Dean Jagger belongs as a frustrated dad on a sitcom, not as a religious visionary in an epic historical film. It sinks any possibility the film might have had.
Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell aren't given much of anything to work with either, and their sections of the film often slow the proceedings down even more than Jagger's endless speeches (there's a bonus feature showing a still from yet *another* Jagger speech, so Zanuck must have realized he had too much of a "good" thing on the editing table). John Carradine seems like he walked out of another movie, and he cuts a truly dashing figure with long braided hair, pulling his pistols out in the courtroom. But even his character is a disappointment since it feels like he's built up for an action scene that never happens.
I don't usually spend a lot of time criticizing a film for historical inaccuracy, but since what we're talking about here is a film that is essentially functioning as propaganda for the Church of LDS, I think that it would be irresponsible to let them get away with so many outright lies about Young. The film glosses over the issue of his multiple wives, only referring obliquely and only in the very last portions of the movie allowing any wives other than Mary Astor to be shown. There's even a few scenes, the one with Power and Carradine riding and joking about having 40,000 grandchildren (Carradine says, "I'm gonna do my part for the population" hardy harr harr), and another scene where Jagger's Young makes an analogy of women to having a huge chunk of tobacco -- is it too much for me to chew? These are terrible, offensive scenes that try to downplay and normalize the Mormons' awful patriarchy (women weren't allowed to marry 40 men, let's put it that way).
Just as offensive is the way that the film tries to gloss over the violent relationship between Brigham Young, his Mormons, and the Native American inhabitants who he displaced and often murdered when he settled Utah. In the film, Young refers to the Great Basin Valley as a place "nobody would want to live" (actually many Native people were displaced when they moved there), and the film also shows a group of Native Americans welcoming the Mormons, and Brigham Young comparing himself as a refugee to the flight of Native Americans. This puts Young on the side of the victims, against the colonizers, when in fact he was a colonizer himself and a hardcore white supremacist.
But the fact is, the movie stinks either way. The director, Henry Hathaway, has shot so much coverage that the film lacks any focus from that standpoint, and the whole thing just drags and drags on. The only parts of the movie that really have any punch are the very beginning with the mobs raiding the Mormon settlers, and the ending with the cricket swarm. The whole thing is basically, Cecil B. DeMille-lite. If it was a DeMille movie, at least it would have some internal movement. But this is a lot of dead weight hung around the skeleton of an epic.
oh yeah one more complaint -- definitely not enough Vincent Price in this movie! Why didn't they cast Price as Brigham Young? Jagger is just exceptionally awful.
First of all, Dean Jagger is the worst possible casting choice to play Brigham Young. He has the sincerity -- too much of it -- but that's about it. I was affected viscerally, not so much by my distaste for Mormonism in general but just the way that he gave endless speeches that are all self-righteous and very flat. Jagger is earnest, and that's about his whole range of emotions. It's as if they had hired Alan Thicke to play Alexander the Great. Dean Jagger belongs as a frustrated dad on a sitcom, not as a religious visionary in an epic historical film. It sinks any possibility the film might have had.
Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell aren't given much of anything to work with either, and their sections of the film often slow the proceedings down even more than Jagger's endless speeches (there's a bonus feature showing a still from yet *another* Jagger speech, so Zanuck must have realized he had too much of a "good" thing on the editing table). John Carradine seems like he walked out of another movie, and he cuts a truly dashing figure with long braided hair, pulling his pistols out in the courtroom. But even his character is a disappointment since it feels like he's built up for an action scene that never happens.
I don't usually spend a lot of time criticizing a film for historical inaccuracy, but since what we're talking about here is a film that is essentially functioning as propaganda for the Church of LDS, I think that it would be irresponsible to let them get away with so many outright lies about Young. The film glosses over the issue of his multiple wives, only referring obliquely and only in the very last portions of the movie allowing any wives other than Mary Astor to be shown. There's even a few scenes, the one with Power and Carradine riding and joking about having 40,000 grandchildren (Carradine says, "I'm gonna do my part for the population" hardy harr harr), and another scene where Jagger's Young makes an analogy of women to having a huge chunk of tobacco -- is it too much for me to chew? These are terrible, offensive scenes that try to downplay and normalize the Mormons' awful patriarchy (women weren't allowed to marry 40 men, let's put it that way).
Just as offensive is the way that the film tries to gloss over the violent relationship between Brigham Young, his Mormons, and the Native American inhabitants who he displaced and often murdered when he settled Utah. In the film, Young refers to the Great Basin Valley as a place "nobody would want to live" (actually many Native people were displaced when they moved there), and the film also shows a group of Native Americans welcoming the Mormons, and Brigham Young comparing himself as a refugee to the flight of Native Americans. This puts Young on the side of the victims, against the colonizers, when in fact he was a colonizer himself and a hardcore white supremacist.
But the fact is, the movie stinks either way. The director, Henry Hathaway, has shot so much coverage that the film lacks any focus from that standpoint, and the whole thing just drags and drags on. The only parts of the movie that really have any punch are the very beginning with the mobs raiding the Mormon settlers, and the ending with the cricket swarm. The whole thing is basically, Cecil B. DeMille-lite. If it was a DeMille movie, at least it would have some internal movement. But this is a lot of dead weight hung around the skeleton of an epic.
oh yeah one more complaint -- definitely not enough Vincent Price in this movie! Why didn't they cast Price as Brigham Young? Jagger is just exceptionally awful.