In the clip above, I discuss “Stars in My Crown,” the drama, set in the Reconstruction-era South, that Jacques Tourneur made in 1950. In his book on Tourneur, a French-born director who made his career in Hollywood, Chris Fujiwara relates a remarkable anecdote about the film:
Studio executives told him that it was a B-movie and that it would be directed by a low-salaried director. Tourneur volunteered to do it for free. He ended up getting paid scale, and found himself bumped down to a lower salary bracket for the rest of his feature-film career.
Tourneur was an ace of many genres, including Westerns and films noirs. He began his career in France in 1931; went to Hollywood in the mid-thirties, where he made twenty-four features between 1942 and 1959; and got started with television in the mid-fifties, directing episodes for many series, including “Bonanza” and “The Twilight Zone.” His most heralded early work was the pair of films he made for Val Lewton’s remarkable little studio, “The Cat People” and “I Walked with a Zombie,” and it is the latter film in particular, with its metaphysical dimension and its look at race relations, that foreshadows this great 1950 drama. Made at a time when the struggle for civil rights was very much an uphill battle and segregation was still widely and violently enforced, “Stars in My Crown” is one of the bravest and most daring Hollywood movies about race relations I’ve ever seen.
From the very beginning of this sketch-like film, set in a small Southern town, Tourneur shows black people and white people living side by side. The plot concerns the attempt by the biggest local businessman (Ed Begley) to displace an elderly black farmer (Juano Hernandez) for access to a mica deposit. Thwarted by the modest farmer’s tenacity, the businessman rounds up a posse to lay waste to his harvest, and then gathers the thugs again, as hooded “night riders”—the KKK—who arrive to lynch him and steal the land.
The film’s central character, Reverend J. D. Gray (McCrea), is, of course, the steadfast soul of morality—which he asserts by standing up to the white mob (in a saloon, with a pair of six-guns) as soon as he arrives in town. The Reverend is also the voice of humane and practical reason, but one that’s based on the sublime irrationality of faith, to which Tourneur doesn’t merely give homiletic lip service but dramatizes with an exquisitely calm and direct audacity that places him alongside Carl Theodor Dreyer in his ability to depict, persuasively, a miracle.
