The Grass Sea

Katharine Hepburn was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. One of the movies they showed that I hadn't blogged about before was The Sea of Grass. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

Hepburn plays Lutie Cameron, a woman of marriageable age living with her family in St. Louis in 1880. Some time back, cattleman Col. Jim Brewton (Spencer Tracy) had visited St. Louis and fallen in love with Lutie, with the intention of marrying her; indeed, the movie opens up on Lutie's wedding day. Except that Lutie gts a telegram from Jim that his work in the New Mexico territory has kept him there, and she's going to have to take the train out to New Mexico to marry him. Not a very auspicious start.

But Lutie must have really loved Jim, since she gets on that train more or less alone for the journey to Salt Fork, NM. She makes a friend on the train, Selina Hall (Ruth Nelson), who is married to a homesteader out in New Mexico. Now, if you know your westerns, you know that one theme that shows up commonly is that of the struggle between the ranchers who feel they need an open range to graze their cattle, and the farmers who are settling on 40-acre plots of land. Those plots will obviously require fencing off, so you can see why the cattlemen are not too pleased about it.

The train gets in early, so Jim isn't at the station. In going through town, Lutie winds up at the hotel, where she meets Brice Chamberlain (Melvyn Douglas), a lawyer who is definitely on the side of the homesteaders in this new land. In fact, he'd eventually like to get a federal court in this district so that the homesteaders will have the law on their side. Unsurprisingly, too, because of the nature of Hollywood movies, Brice falls in love with Lutie so that there's going to be a romantic conflict throughout the movie.

Lutie eventually makes it out to the Brewton ranch, where she's the only woman. It's not long before they can make the marriage official, and not long after that before Lutie gets pregnant with the first of two kids, a daughter and then a son. But Lutie is still good friends with Selina, and has a lot of sympathy towards the farmers. She's particularly irritated with the idea that the ranchers feel OK about resorting to violence to keep the range open.

Jim is single-minded about keeping the range open for his cattle, and since Lutie isn't backing him 110% there's some fairly obvious tension there, to the point that Jim sends Lutie off to Denver, the biggest city around, to do some "shopping", which is really a euphemism for deciding whether or not she wants to stay in New Mexico. She goes back the first time, but then there's a second time when Jim's violence causes Selina to have a miscarriage that ultimately leads to Lutie's leaving. This even though she's not going to be able to get custody of the children.

Lutie goes off to St. Louis but finds out that her father died and wasn't able to leave her much of an inheritance. Worse, she's got kids she hasn't seen in years, who aren't going to remember her. They grow up into good girl Sara Beth (Phyllis Thaxter) and roué Brock (Robert Walker), both of whom are only seen in the last half hour of the movie. Jim has been a bad father to Brock, much like Spencer Tracy's character in the movie Edward, My Son, and it's only when Brock gets himself into trouble he can't get out of that Jim might finally reform. It's also what brings Lutie back to New Mexico....

The Sea of Grass is another of those movies that has a maddening script. Oh boy are these unsympathetic characters, at least among the leads, with Melvyn Douglas playing the only one I didn't want to shake some sense into. Apparently, it was also a troubled shoot, with a lot of it being done on the back lots and MGM's western village out in the Alabama Hills or wherever they had it. There was also apparently some tension between Elia Kazan on the one hand, and Tracy and Hepburn on the other. To be fair to everybody, however, they're all professional, and The Sea of Grass is a studio-era movie in which everybody does the best they can with a subpar script. Certainly competent, but not the first movie I'd think of recommending for people who want to see the work of anybody involved.