Crown around my stars

Another of the movies that I finally got around to watching recently because it's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Stars in My Crown.

Marshall Thompson narrates, playing the voice of the elder John Kenyon (played as a child by Dean Stockwell). Kenyon grew up in the southern town of Walesburg, remembering it fondly as well as many of the people who were adults when he was a child and who have long since passed on, the sort of stuff you could expect from John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts. But we have a real story to get to, sort of, since in may ways this is a slice-of-life movie.

Coming to town after having served in the Civil War and now wishing to turn to non-violence is Parson Josiah Gray (Joel McCrea). He wants to be parson even though the town doesn't have a church. He meets one of the town's leading citizens, Dr. Harris Sr. (Lewis Stone), a man who knows he's about to die, leaving the medical practice to his more officious and inexperienced son Harris Jr. (James Mitchell). Parson Gray falls in love with Harriet (Ellen Drew) and marries her, taking in John as a foster son. Elsewhere in town is the Isbell family, led by patriarch Jed (Alan Hale) who is most definitely not a churchgoer, and his farming neighbor Uncle Famous Prill (Juano Hernandez).

Prill forms the basis of one of the main sub-plots in the film. He's obviously a freed slave who got the little bit of land he owns, and that's all he wants out of life, being happy to live out the remainder of his days in peace and quiet. But another neighbor, Lon Bacektt (Ed Begley), has discovered mica on his property, and that the valuable seam continues on to Famous' land. Unfortunately, the only way to get at the mica is through strip-mining, so Backett wants to buy the land, at an obviously unfair price since Famous is black. And Backett will stop at nothing, including violence and the threat of sending a Klan-like organization to kill Famous if need be, to get that land.

The other main sub-plot involves John. During the summer, he's playing like a normal boy, stopping to take a drink from the well at the one-room schoolhouse. Nobody realizes that somehow, the well has become contaminated with typhus. John gets sick and nearly dies, and when the school year starts, the kids start coming down with the sickness too. The doctor thinks it's not the well at the school since John got sick before the school year (Dr. Harris doesn't know John did in fact drink there), and wants to force the parson into lockdown, being as ignorant and panicky as many of today's politicians have been during the coronavirus outbreak.

Stars in My Crown is the sort of movie that MGM put out as a programmer in the early 1950s, and I find a lot of these to be much more interesting than the prestige movies. Stars in My Crown is one of the best of them, thanks to a fine performance from McCrea as well as many of the supporting actors. If the movie has one flaw, it's that the story is a little too neat and tidy at times, and the climax with the attempted lynching feels a lot more antiseptic than if it had been done over at Warner Bros. (and indeed, Warner Bros. did it in Storm Warning a year later).

If you want a nice, gentle movie, than I can definitely recommend Stars in My Crown.