Many Rivers to Cross

I have to admit that I'm not the biggest fan of Robert Taylor. But since he was under contract to MGM for 20-plus years, they put him in everything. For those who like the sort of movie that MGM made, they'll probably enjoy Taylor's comic turn in Many Rivers to Cross.

The setting is Kentucky around the time that it became a state in the late 1790s. Kentucky was still a relatively wild place, and it was the women on the frontier just as much as the men who helped make it a place where the white man could live. Among the men are Bushrod Genty (Robert Taylor), a trapper when a man could still make a living trapping in Kentucky. He's a concerned bachelor, which kind of ticks off some of the frontier women who would love to have him as a husband.

One such woman isn't about to let go when she meets Bushrod. That's Mary Cherne (Eleanor Parker), who is a tough woman of her own. She knows how to shoot a gun, mostly out of necessity since there are still Shawnee raiding those parts of Kentucky not near a fortified city. She saves Bushrod one day when he's attacked by the Shawnee, and brings him back to her place, which is really the family farm run by her father Cadmus (Victor McLaglan). Bushrod injured his arm in the attack, so he has to stay for a while to heal up, which gives Mary ample time to fall in love with him, much to the chagrin of Luke Radford (Alan Hale, Jr.), who has been pursuing Mary.

The rest of the movie deals with Mary's attempts to tame Bushrod and get her to marry her, which he actually does, although he also assaults the justice of the peace which gives him a short stint in jail. This gives him another chance to escape married life, but you know that in a movie like this, circumstances are going to intervene to give Mary and Bushrod another chance to meet up and fall back in love, this time against the backdrop of another Shawnee attack....

Many Rivers to Cross is the sort of movie that's imbued with all the gloss and charm MGM could give a picture. Even into the mid-1950s they still had high production values, which mostly show here. Once again, however, for some people, and I'd certainly include myself in this group, it's the sort of production values that aren't necessarily quite right for a movie set on the frontier.

Taylor and Parker both show themselves to be reasonably adept at the sort of light drama interspersed with comedy that the movie calls for, and it's easy to see why it would appeal to a certain segment of the movie-going public, both in the 1950s and even today amongst those who like classic movies. So once you know what you're getting into, if Robert Taylor is your sort of thing, then definitely give Many Rivers to Cross a try.