The Foxes of Harrow

FXM recently took The Foxes of Harrow out of the vault and has been running it into the ground. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow morning at 9:20 AM and is available on DVD from Fox's MOD scheme.

Rex Harrison plays Stephen Fox who was born in Ireland in the late 1790s. The only thing is, he was born out of wedlock to one of the daughters of a wealthy landowner of an estate named Harrow, and there was no way the owner was going to let his daughter keep the child. Eventually, it's off to America for the orphan to make his way in the world. Fast forward to 1827 Louisiana. Stephen is being forcibly removed from a riverboat for cheating at gambling, and one of the lovely young ladies on the boat comments about his being left on a sandbar in the middle of the Mississippi. As if you couldn't tell their paths will cross again.

Stephen is rescued by pigboat captain Farrell (Victor McLaglen), who eventually becomes a working-class friend of the would-be wealthy Stephen, something which is going to cause friction later. Stephen, in New Orleans, helps out Andre (Richard Haydn), and Richard repays the kindness by letting Stephen stay at his house for a time. It's also what gives Stephen the idea to crash the charity ball being held by the D'Arceneaux family, father Henri (Gene Lockhart) and daughters Odalie (Maureen O'Hara) and Aurore (Vanessa Brown).

Stephen meets Odalie at the ball, and is shocked to discover that she's the woman he met when he was getting thrown off the boat. Actually, Odalie is even more shocked. Stphen vows to win Odalie's heart, while Odalie vows never to see Stephen again.

To try to win Odalie's heart, Stephen wins a run-down estate in a card game, and builds a new Harrow for Odalie. He's able to convince Odalie that he's changed, but he's so driven that in some ways it turns her off. It doesn't help that he's got a mistress on the side. They have sex once, though, because nine months after their wedding day a son is born unto them. But the son dies tragically amid the Panic of 1837, threatening Stephen and Harrow....

In addition to the Fox musicals of the 1940s, they were also making a lot of period piece literary adaptations. The Foxes of Harrow is to my mind one of the weaker of these, in part because I didn't care for either of the main characters. Stephen comes across as more of a self-centered jerk than somebody with an iron determination to rise up from difficult circumstances, the way Joan Crawford's Mildred Pierce for one did. It's easy to see why Odalie wouldn't like him, but then she turns on a dime at multiple points in the movie without good motivation. There's also no real antagonist. Finally, I found the score overbearing.

Still, I always like to point out when I pan a movie that one should judge for oneself.