![]() It's an Old School yarn, to be sure, but its moralistic standpoint is cleverly skewed, and Hathaway makes sure to allow plenty of incident to tumble down the mountainside on the way to its poetically cathartic denouement. Somewhere along the way, a powder-keg has been lit and the resulting explosion will either tear the Tollivers apart or clear the air, once and for all. Pop (Fred Stone) just wants the family to stay together, ignorant of the staleness that his traditions have inflicted upon it. Ma (Beulah Bondi) wants the fighting to stop. June sees a chance to better herself and a weird sort of love triangle develops. When June falls for Jack's educated and practical charms, Dave's earthy demeanour and ill-fated blood-lust for his neighbours across the valley loses its mythical magic, and the family begins to come apart at the seams. As heroic engineer Jack Hale, MacMurray forms the backbone of a plot that sees Henry Fonda's taciturn Dave Tolliver love, lose, and love again his cousin June (a spirited Sylvia Sidney) and regain his honour and redemption through a catalogue of loss and regret, and Jack's own small-scale prejudices get turned on their head by the deeds and customs of these simple hill-folk. Based on the novel of the same name from John Fox Jnr, and adapted for the screen by Grover Jones, we have the bitter ongoing feud between two hill-dwelling families - the Tollivers and the Falins - and its violent escalation during a time of advancing civilisation in the form of Fred MacMurray's railroad company, who have set up camp smack-bang in-between the two warring clans. The story is a ripe melodrama mingling tough talk, comedy, knockabout fisticuffs and familial odyssey, all set against the majestic backdrop of the Kentucky mountains. With an excellent cast - his two leads were definitely on the up and up and the supporting roster was eminently reliable and just as colourful as the picture - he was able to conjure wilderness realism, strong characters and a narrative that joyfully see-sawed between jovial slapstick and rugged drama. Hathaway was already an accomplished director, with The Lives Of A Bengal Lancer and earlier mountain-movie, Man Of The Forest with Randolph Scott, to his credit, and his profoundly visual approach to movie-making was to enjoy its most splendid opportunity with this outdoors yarn of passion and treachery until he got into the saddle with John Wayne for the likes of The Sons Of Katie Elder and True Grit a lot later in his career. Somewhat overlooked these days and certainly over-shadowed by later Technicolor marvels such as Gone With The Wind, Quo Vadis and The Robe, this exuberant semi-Western is well worth discovering. The first time that this emblazoned colour approach had been utilised for a production outside of a studio set, The Trail Of The Lonesome Pine was the winner of a Special Recommendation at the 1936 Venice Film Festival, but although nominated for an Academy Award for its original music and songs, it lost out to George Stevens' Swing Time. Henry Hathaway's dazzling frontier drama from 1936 marks a bravura early performance from Henry Fonda, sumptuous three-strip Technicolor and a pretty vivid depiction of the trials and tribulations of America's pioneering days at the turn of the 20th Century. Right, let's get one thing clear - this film has nothing to do with Laurel And Hardy, okay?
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