OVP: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)

Film: The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936)

Stars: Fred MacMurray, Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Fred Stone, Beulah Bondi

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Original Song-"A Melody from the Sky")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Sylvia Sidney-click here to learn more about Ms. Sidney (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I've mentioned a few times in this series, Sylvia Sidney's time as a major player in Hollywood was quite short, even if her career lasted many decades.  So we are now entering the third of our three 1936 films starring Sidney during the peak of her career (our last one will be in 1937), and the only one of the films this month we'll watch that was filmed in color, Technicolor in fact (the process had just started to happen in feature-length films less than a year before the movie's release with 1935's Becky Sharp).  Trail of the Lonesome Pine was a hit, and a big deal for Sidney, but despite three big name stars, I have to admit that this movie has a sentimental place for me because it was the favorite film of my grandfather.  A man who was not short on opinions, but rarely talked about the movies he liked (though he did go to the movies every year on his anniversary), this was the first movie he remembered seeing as a teenager, and oh how he would wax on about The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.  So while I was thinking of Ms. Sidney, my first thought for this movie kept being "this is the movie I would hear about so much in my childhood" & am excited to finally put a film with a name.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is a love triangle between June (Sidney), her cousin Dave (Fonda), and Jack Hale (MacMurray).  June & Dave live in the backwoods of Kentucky, where their family the Tollivers have a longstanding feud with the Falins, but are content with the way things are.  When Jack comes into town, he offers both the Falins & the Tollivers enormous sums of money to mine their land, but in the process June begins to fall for Jack.  Dave, in his anger, attacks a Falin, and this sets off the feud between the two, which culminates in two Tolliver deaths: June's younger brother Buddie (played by Our Gang regular Spanky McFarland), and then eventually Dave, who is shot in the back & afterward ends the feud.  Some synopses of the movie indicate that Jack & June then engaged, but either I have a scene missing on my DVD or I totally missed a plot point (or, more likely, people who have read the book interpreted the ending was the same as the novel even though the movie has more ambiguity), as while it's obvious that's what is likely going to happen, the movie ends rather somberly with Dave's death.

The picture itself is sluggish & a bit saccharine (with due respect to my grandpa, he tended to like saccharine films/television-he was not an "edgy" man by any stretch-and so I get why he enjoyed the movie).  It's beautiful, of course.  The color cinematography, though in its infancy (it doesn't really utilize it to its full effects with rather drab costuming), is glorious, particularly the shots of the old mill, but that doesn't make up for a so-so storyline, and under-performances from MacMurray & Fonda, both of whom I generally like.  Sidney, our star of the month, once again doesn't necessarily give us a great performance, but she firmly establishes she has star presence.  Her gigantic eyes & kewpie doll face are magnetic, and I kept rooting for her throughout.

The film won one Oscar nomination, but it was weirdly not for Cinematography (they didn't give nominations to color films then, and a different movie won the special prize), but for Best Original Song.  The movie has two original songs, and for some reason the Academy went with the one that has almost no bearing on the film itself, "A Melody from the Sky," sung briefly about halfway through the film by a side character with no real connection to the movie.  Meanwhile, "Twilight on the Trail" is a much catchier number that shows up repeatedly through the film, including at both the funeral scenes, and would go on to be a huge hit.  I...don't have an explanation here-"Twilight on the Trail" is the better number, better-used, & is far more famous today, and yet they went with the other song.  It's proof that the Music Branch has always done its own thing.