In looking through the offerings on Tubi to see what was available, I came across a movie I had never heard of with a halfway prominent cast and a premise that sounded interesting enough. At the very least, there was one member of the cast who would go on to win an Oscar some years later in the form of Lee Marvin. That movie was The Missouri Traveler.
Unfortunately, the print that Tubi ran had washed-out color and was panned-and-scanned from the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio down to 4:3, since the movie has apparently fallen into the public domain and got lots of video releases in the days before TVs went to 16:9. Brandon De Wilde is the nominal star here, and he too seemed destined to go onto big things before the car accident that killed him at the age of 30. De Wilde plays Biarn Turner, who as the movie opens is walking through rural Missouri circa 1911. He's picked up at the side of the road by Tobias Brown (Lee Marvin), a local farmer with a lot of land. Biarn, it turns out, is an orphan who claims to want to get to Florida, but goes to the town of Delphi instead because there's no marshall to capture him and return him to the reform school or wherever he came from.
In town, Tobias shows himself to be not particularly popular, as he parks his carriage next to the statue of the town's founding father and that brings out seemingly everybody in town, played by a whole bunch of character actors, with a couple of exceptions. One is Doyle Magee (Garry Merrill), who publishes the local newspaper and has a past of his own that we're going to learn about as the movie goes on. The other is local socialite and granddaughter of the town's founder, Anne Price. She's played by Mary Hosford, who didn't go on to become a successful actress but instead married extremely well and became Marylou Whitney, the eventual doyenne of the Saratoga racing scene. These two are going to be somewhat against Tobias for the rest of the movie, and try to give Biarn a better shot at life.
Not that Biarn wants their help that much. He wants to be independent and self-sufficient, and figures that the only way he can do it is to become a farmer, just like Tobias is. However, Biarn doesn't have any money of his own to get a start, or any land. He wants to learn from Tobias, but Tobias isn't exactly going to be generous. At least, not in the way one normally thinks of when one thinks generosity. Tobias is one of those tough people who knows how tough life can be and figures Biarn is going to need to learn that lesson. As an example, one of the running plot points in the movie is how Biarn should always make certain to get everything in writing.
Over a series of episodes, Biarn learns to plow land, is allowed to raise crops on it by Tobias, and then eventually wins the town's hearts over in the run-up to the big finale set on the Fourth of July. The Missouri Traveler is another of those movies where I can see why the people who made it would have wanted to make it. However, it's also another of those movies that comes across as less than the sum of its parts. The movie was distributed by Buena Vista, a company set up by Disney in the early 1950s to distribute live-action movies. As such, the movie comes across very much like a lot of the other Disney family-friendly movies of that era, both for good and bad. Families of today with younger children, especially boys, may still enjoy it. But The Missouri Traveler comes across as awfully saccharine too.
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