Another of those movies with a title I'd seen show up on TCM on several occasions, but had never actually watched, was Jalna. Once again, with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it. Having finally watched it, I can see why it doesn't show up more often.
Jalna is subtitled "A Drama of Canadian Life", and is based on a series of novels that were apparently incredibly popular back in the day. Jalna is the name of a farm somewhere in Ontario, one of those farms that in an old Hollywood western movie would be the big ranch whose proprietor is the big man in the region. In this case, it's three generations of the Whiteoak family, led by matriarch Granny (Jessie Ralph) who's about to turn 100 and who does not get to have a death scene as a dramatic plot point; instead her centenary is the coda to the action of the movie. The family is about to sit down to Sunday dinner: Gran, Uncles Nicholas (C. Aubrey Smith) and Ernest (Halliwell Hobbes), and adult kids Renny (Ian Hunter), Eden (David Manners), Piers (Theodore Newton), and Meg (Peggy Wood). There's one other adult who doesn't get much to do, and a bratty child who has an incredibly obnoxious scene where he plays evil pranks on pretty much everyone else in the house.
Renny is the son who's more or less managing the farm now. Piers is late to dinner because, as the little kid reveals, he's down at the next farm over seeing Pheasant Vaughan (Molly Lamont), daughter of owner Maurice Vaughan (Nigel Bruce). This pisses Meg off to no end: apparently 20 years ago Meg was set to marry Maurice in what was supposed to be a marriage that would unite the two farms and be a big deal. But then it turned out that Maurice had fathered Pheasant by another woman some time back and Pheasant was dropped off there; who knows what happened to Pheasant's mother? Meg suffered a broken heart that she's still nursing, and doesn't want any other Whiteoak to have anything to do with any Vaughan.
And then there's Eden, who doesn't want to be a farmer at all, but a poet. It should go without saying that poetry isn't exactly a lucrative occupation unless you can write things that can be used as popular song lyrics, which isn't what Eden is doing. But he gets word from a publisher in New York that they're accepting one of his books! So the family raises the money for him to go to New York, never mind the internal squabbling about this. There, Eden meets Alayne (Kay Johnson), the reader who read Eden's manuscript and got the publisher to approve it. They meet and immediately fall in love and marry, shocking the rest of the Whiteoak family. But they plan to come back to Jalna.
Equally shocking is that on the day Eden and Alayne come back, Piers has decided that he's going to go elope with Pheasant, and bring her back to Jalna too as his bride. Naturally, as you might guess, this causes certain members of the family to go ballistic. Things get worse as Eden can't really come up with a second volume of poetry, while Renny finds himself falling in love with Alayne, which is a big no-no. There's a whole lot more melodrama to come, even though the movie is only 78 minutes.
I found myself laughing at Jalna quite a few times, which is not a good thing since, for the most part, Jalna is not supposed to be a comedy. (The one exception is Gran's cantankerousness and her parrot.) The family dynamic is ridiculously dysfuctional, to the point that you wonder how they've stayed together so long. There are other questions, like why Renny never got married, and why none of them ever think of getting some sort of white collar job to make ends meet. The Whiteoaks, after all, seem closer to gentry farmers than, say the families in As the Earth Turns which is also a farming saga but looks much more at the more difficult side of farming.
I guess I can see why the original book might have pleased audiences in the 1920s when it was released. But the film adaptation didn't work for me.
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