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"I'd love to show you a trick... a trick with a story." In Raoul Walsh's Far from the Madding Crowd, Bathsheba is a California forest nymph (Joan Bennett) first seen standing on a sequoia's mighty roots. (One wondrous sight follows another, as bear cubs scuttle up towering trunks.) The girl is vivacious and no-nonsense, when crowded by a lecher inside the stagecoach she leaps out of the moving vehicle, sprints after it and climbs on to the top next to the affable driver (Eugene Pallette). "The leading citizen of this community" (Morgan Wallace) is her suitor, he's also a political candidate and head of the Purity League and a hypocritical skunk with unfinished business with the mysterious Virginian (Charles Farrell). Cardsharp (Ralph Bellamy) and rancher (Irving Pichel) are also in the courting game, sorted out via mistaken identities and casual shootings and hangings. "I like trees better than men. They're straight..." Bret Harte source, Western conflict and hard-boiled comedy mingled, just the thing for this junction of The Big Trail and Me and My Gal. The storybook structure suits Walsh's unusual technique, the characters introduce themselves as album portraits in the opening credits and page-flipping wipes are prevalent. Pallette's impression of a spooked mare, Minna Gombell's wicked cackle as the camera tilts up from the sanctimonious corpse on the saloon floor to the madam he'd tormented, a dollop of redwoods philosophy: "A feller only got three friends in this here world—a silver dollar, an old yeller dawg, and his Ma." Then the vigilante posse catches up, and suddenly it's The Ox-Bow Incident. Certainly a film seen by the Renoir of Swamp Water and The Southerner. With Willard Robertson, Sarah Padden, Louise Beavers, and Stanley Blystone. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |