Stars in My Crown (1950)
Stars in My Crown (1950)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
A lot of films involve people whose like you will never meet — imagine the crook Jimmy Cagney in White Heat, standing on the roof of a giant oil refinery about to blow sky high, crying out, in that Irish sneer of his, “Come on, copper! Come and get me!” Or, on the other side, Greer Garson as the brilliant scientist in Madame Curie (1943), addressing a congress of her fellows, as she is dying of the disease she contracted in her quest to discover the properties of radiation, saying, “It is by these small candles in our darkness that we see before us, little by little, the dim outline of that great plan that shapes the universe.” And we should sometimes confront the extremes of human courage, saintliness, and generosity, or of cowardice, wickedness, and selfishness. They are like imaginative pioneers of the possible, for good and bad, for man’s glory or his shame.
But sometimes those pioneers come from the ordinary places: saints are in the making in your own neighborhood, and though they may do nothing that makes the headlines, who knows but that when all truth has been revealed, we will see them as shining among the great ones? That is what we see, I think, in our Film of the Week, Stars in My Crown. It’s just after the Civil War, and a gentle-spoken but big-boned, clear-eyed and courageous preacher, Josiah Grey (Joel McCrea) has come to a little town in the south, to do the ordinary work of bringing people to God. But the people don’t all want to go. You’ve got, for example, a pleasant farmer (Alan Hale, the father of the Skipper of happy memory in Gilligan’s Island) who wants to work on the Sabbath, and a rabble-rouser who likes to have “fun” by bullying (Ed Begley, a great character actor, and the father of the rascal intern in St. Elsewhere), a young doctor (James Mitchell, the bad man in the soap opera All My Children) who scorns the church because he’s all for science, and — well, tempers that can flare. And it’s especially apt to happen when you’ve got fear and avarice in play. The fear comes when people start getting deathly sick, and nobody knows what has brought the plague among them; and the doctor and the preacher don’t see eye to eye. The avarice? There’s a mine, the owner wants to expand it, and guess what, an elderly black man, Uncle Famous (Juano Hernandez), owns the property that’s in the way.
At every step, we see that tragedy can strike in the most ordinary of places, just a little town anywhere, and people can die; they can even kill. But the goodness and the courage of one man of God can remind people of their duties, their sins, and the debts they owe to one another and to the Lord. Stars in My Crown isn’t a preachy movie — nothing with Joel McCrea in it can be that, because he’s the straightforward and slightly understated actor par excellence, and Jacques Tourneur, the director, knows very well who he’s got; he and McCrea were high school classmates! It’s a great human story, and it is full of terrific performances: McCrea, of course, but also Ellen Drew as his wife, and one of the two or three best child-actors Hollywood ever had, Dean Stockwell, as his nephew; and watch out for Connie Gilchrist as the matriarch of a Swedish immigrant family who support the preacher, including a very young Swedish American, James Arness. And wouldn’t you know, but there’s also the very young Amanda Blake, who would end up playing Miss Kitty opposite Arness’s Matt Dillon, in the long running Gunsmoke western. But special honors go to Juano Hernandez as Uncle Famous: his noble bearing, his deep sonorous voice, and his projection of simple integrity cannot be improved upon.
And don’t we all want a star or two in our crown? Not by our smarts or our natural virtue, but by the grace of God, who will set that crown of precious stones upon the head of his faithful one.
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Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber. Learn more about our subscription tiers by clicking the button below.
