**/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B+
starring Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Brian Donlevy, Dean Jagger
screenplay by Lamar Trotti, based on a story by Louis Bromfield
directed by Henry Hathaway
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover I was hoping, prior to watching Brigham Young, that the film would be a twisted smash-up of subject matter and Hollywood convention. I was sure that the touchy matter of Mormon ritual would send the movie in all directions at once, trying to salvage a normal film but twisting itself through ever more bizarre hoops. But while it does indeed get the production team scrambling to deal with that pesky polygamy issue, Brigham Young is mostly just a dull problem-picture crossed with a boring western, with no real surprises to offer anyone who was born a little before yesterday.
The film adopts two narratives in order to tell the story of the Mormon settlement of Salt Lake City. Thread one details the trials of Brigham Young (Dean Jagger), who carries the church's torch after the mob-led murder of founder Joseph Smith (a surprisingly effective Vincent Price); thread two involves the tortured romance between Mormon Jonathan Kent (Tyrone Power) and "outsider" Zina Webb (Linda Darnell) as the latter struggles with both her own people's intolerance and the new church's constant hard luck. Driven out of Illinois and deprived of the spiritual leader of the church, both Young and Webb will have their work cut out for them justifying their decision to lead the flock and stick with it, respectively, as they move first towards Californian gold and then stick in an apparently uninhabitable stretch of land in Utah.
Alas, the two-tiered narrative is all the novelty this production has. The rest of the film is painfully discrete in its depiction of Mormon hardship–determined to shield you from both the realities of the church and the cruelty of their trek, it makes sure that all of the truly unpleasant and/or controversial things happen off camera. Thus the practice of polygamy is mentioned but seldom depicted, with even Brigham Young himself given only one of his wives to interact with while the rest of them languish off-screen. And the appalling cost of the drive to Utah is treated as the equivalent of stubbing one's toe: we never really see the massive casualty rate of the settlers, only its mention by third parties to an ever-more desperate Young. The same year's The Grapes of Wrath at least managed to express the suffering of another sort of besieged migrant; here everything is so cleaned up it barely registers, which is hardly the way to pay tribute to the settlers' memory.
Ask a boy to do a man's job, and you wind up with these problems. Andrew Sarris described Brigham Young's director Henry Hathaway as "without complexes or neuroses even when his material is saturated with [them]," and Hathaway's listless, subtext-free direction here proves this point decisively. A real director would have gone to town with the pictorial possibilities of the long drive to the Salt Lake, fraught as it is with varying terrain, and thus, variety, but the visuals here are obsequious, monotonous, and just plain dull. And he fumbles the interiority of Brigham Young's mission as well: he's a man who has to convince not only his people but also himself of his divine mission, but the film is so outside of him that his trials seem like the same triumph-over-adversity found in a million other settler pictures. Glossing over the peculiarity of Young's mission, Hathaway reduces his film to one more liberal western, shaping some potentially fascinating subject matter with the Hollywood cookie-cutter we've all come to fear.
THE DVD
Fox has issued the film on DVD in a creditable, if not outright spectacular, full-frame transfer. Unlike many B-list classic titles (such as Fox's own The Big Trail), here the source print is completely free of defects, and the b&w tones are lustrous and well-defined. Sound, remixed inoffensively in stereo, is equally good. For a film with as low a profile as Brigham Young, Fox has assembled a curiously wide array of supplementary material. Chief amongst this is a commentary track by James D'Arc (of Brigham Young University), who gives background on history both Mormon and Hollywood. While clearly happy with the film, he is quick to point out the differences between it and historical record: a scene in which Joseph Smith is tried and convicted was tricked up to provide exposition, for example, and the subplot involving Californian gold glosses over the fact that the Gold Rush happened sometime after the settlement of Salt Lake City. He's also very good at filling the details involving Darryl F. Zanuck and various members of the production, as when he reveals screenwriter Lamar Trotti's bitterness at having a key relationship reversed without his permission. While D'Arc is at times a bit pedantic, his is a welcome relief from a sea of unperceptive yakkers, and there's no denying his erudition and attention to detail.
Did I say attention to detail? The rest of the platter is devoted to Brigham Young as a fetish object, a fate for which far better films go wanting. An awesome collection of stills litters the disc under several sub-headings and includes shots from the production, special effects, and the premiere, as well as one of a deleted scene. There are also script fragments (in case you were dying for intimations of how Tyrone Power altered the dialogue), an astounding array of promotional materials (American, English and Italian), a Movietone newsreel on the film's gala Salt Lake City premiere (it played in seven theatres) and a highly uninformative letter from Vincent Price to D'Arc. Most bizarre, in a section marked "Beyond the Movie", is a photographic comparison between Dean Jagger and the real Brigham Young, inviting us to notice the resemblance. Duly noted.
112 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo), French DD 2.0 (Mono); CC; English, Spanish subtitles; Region One; DVD-9; Fox
