Il grande tormento

The Henry Hathaway-directed 1941 Shepherd Of the Hills is worth seeing if for nothing else its color, which is as glorious and gorgeous as one will find in a film. Each outdoor shot is like a landscape painting. Along with Gone With the Wind and The Four Feathers, this is the finest use of color I have seen in a movie, and it should be used as a textbook on how to shoot a film in color. Otherwise, the picture is just a pleasing and old-fashioned revenge tale, adapted from a now forgotten novel, and set in the Ozark Mountains at about the turn of the twentieth century. It is nicely written in the idiom of the mountain folk, and features John Wayne in an early, rare non-western role, which he handles proficiently. Betty Field is his spunky love interest in what would now be an Amy Madigan part. Miss Field is lovely in a non-conventional way; she shines as never before or since. The combination of her quiet, almost mousy beauty in an otherwise talky, assertive role is fascinating to watch. Also on hand are Beulah Bondi, Ward Bond, Marc Lawrence, who gives an amazing performance, and Harry Carey, whose pleasantness and plainness I find tiring, though I suppose he's well-cast. There's a ritualistic feeling to the film, with its clearly defined notions of good and evil, the almost formally informal dialect the characters use, the leisurely, strolling pace by which the story unfolds, all contribute to its pastoral quality. The chief problem is that there's no suspense. One senses early on how the thing is going to end, and the characters behave as one would expect.