Follow the Sun

Another movie that's been on FXM for a few months now is Follow the Sun. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 6:00AM, and again next week.

The movie starts off with narration by Anne Baxter, who plays grown-up Valerie, mentioning that she grew up in Fort Worth, which is where she ran into Ben one day while their families were coming out of their respective churches. They meet again since they live close by, and eventually become friends, fall in love, and get married. But we're gettin ahead of ourselves here.

Ben is Ben Hogan, who of course would go on to become one of the best known golfers before the rise of Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus, but since the story begins before Hogan becomes a top golfer, we see him as a child being a caddy at the local country club who gets in what practice he can after the patrons' rounds, using clubs that probably aren't the right size for him.

Ben has dreams of becoming a professional golfer, but that's not going to come right away because he doesn't have the money to go on tour, so we see adult Ben (Glenn Ford) working as an auto mechanic while saving up the money to be able to join the PGA tour. Eventually he does save up enough where he figures he can try to make foney on the tour for a year, and if it doesn't work out he can always go back to his old job. Valerie joins him, mostly for support and not to have to keep two households. (You'd think she could get secretarial work or something.)

Life on the tour isn't easy. Ben meets professional Chuck Williams (not a real golfer but a made-up character played by Dennis O'Keefe), one of the top guys on tour who is also a bit of an entertainer out on the course. He befriends Ben, although Ben is most definitely not an entertainer, taking the game dead seriously. This causes conflict with one of the sportswriters, Jay Dexter (Larry Keating). As for Valerie, she spends time with the other golfers' wives, who all understand what it's like for young Valerie since they've been through this themselves.

It's a tough life since the prize money in those days was quite low and it's not uncommon to finish out of the money. Eventually, however, Ben starts doing better, even finishing in the top 10, and it's looking like he'll be able to stay on tour. As for Chuck, he marries Norma (June Havoc) and drinks way to much, which is eventually going to derail his career.

Ben's career gets derailed, too, when he's driving from one tournament to the next on a foggy road and runs into a bus. Valerie os OK, but Ben is seriously injured, and there's a question of whether he'll ever even be able to walk again, let alone play golf since the pros have to walk the course instead of riding golf carts. But, we know in real life what happened.

I'm not a golfer, so Follow the Sun is a movie I went into without any particular interest in the subject material. It's not terrible, but it's also certainly not the best in either Ford's or Baxter's careers. Part of the problem is that it's a formulaic Hollywood sanitized biopic. The other problem is the Chuck character, whom I found to be a bit unlikeable. Golf fans, on the other hand, will probably enjoy that in the last act, a couple of big-name golfers from that era have cameos as themselves, as does sportswriter Grantland Rice.

Follow the Sun has gotten a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme.