4/24/2023 0 Comments The shepherd of the hills castIn a magnificent scene whose funereal tone matches that of Matt’s gravestone respites, Howitt takes stock of the abandoned old cabin in Moaning Meadow, meditating upon the objects left in the living room, all of them inscribed with Matt’s mother’s name. At first his generosity seems purely a matter of disposition, though gradually and with great subtlety, Hathaway hints at Howitt’s personal connection to the land. In this town of scrupulously heeded rituals, however, Howitt is greeted by all but Sammy as an unwelcome outsider, a perception that only starts to break down as he embarks on a series of good Samaritan gestures that include funding the medical treatment of a blind dowager, Granny Becky (Marjorie Main). Opposite Wayne, and bringing an unadorned directness to his role, is an aging Harry Carey as the enigmatic Daniel Howitt, a man of unknown origin and impressive means who arrives in this small backwoods community hoping to settle down there. Even as the film’s script identifies this fixation with a past trauma as a handicap on Matt’s heart, Hathaway betrays a deep compassion for the gravity of his situation in a number of scenes in which the boy visits his mother’s gravestone, located on one Moaning Meadow, a plot of land the family refuses to sell lest it cease to be the symbolic site of their accumulated grief. The pride of the family is Matt (John Wayne), a cerebral, stubborn boy whose better qualities-including his love for good-natured local girl Sammy Lane (Betty Field)-are jeopardized by the bitterness he harbors toward the father who abandoned his family years earlier, leaving his mother to die while stunting him with an unsatiated hunger for revenge. Setting itself apart from other early Technicolor films that privileged pops of vibrant primary color, The Shepherd of the Hills is painted in delicate, earthy tones, giving the impression that we’re viewing its images through one of the bottles of illicit moonshine produced by its cantankerous central family, the Matthews clan. Filmed 7,000 feet above sea level in the forests around Big Bear Lake (roughly 4,000 feet higher than the altitude of the film’s southern Missouri setting), this adaptation of a bestselling Harold Bell Wright novel is a startlingly gorgeous paean to the golden meadows, dense pine canopies, and steep vistas of the San Bernardino Mountains-all of it bathed in the honeyed warmth of the California sun. Ostensibly about the bond between an Ozark mountain community and its land, Henry Hathaway’s 1941 Technicolor drama The Shepherd of the Hills reveals as much, if not more, about the love of a director toward the natural beauty of his home state.
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