El hombre de Kentucky

BURT LANCASTER stars as THE KENTUCKIAN who has a yearning to go where the grass is greener and wants to leave Kentucky for a new life in Texas with his young son in tow. DIANA LYNN is a pretty schoolteacher at the schoolhouse cabin and DIANNE FOSTER is the other female lead, an indentured servant, with a yen for Lancaster.

Good supporting roles for WALTER MATTHAU (making his screen debut) and JOHN CARRADINE. JOHN LITEL makes a welcome appearance as a riverboat man, but the story lacks a strong enough plot to maintain interest in the rather pedestrian proceedings. Filmed in widescreen color and CinemaScope, it looks as though a lavish budget has been expended on a tiresome script.

Fortunately, the film picks up interest toward the last fifteen minutes when Lancaster and his son have to defend themselves against badman Matthau and his cohorts. There's also a confrontational bullwhip scene with Matthau and Lancaster that is well staged and effective.

But the story is rather trite and there's nothing special about Lancaster's performance or his direction. I would have preferred a more appealing youngster for Young Eli than DONALD MacDONALD who walks through his role without ever inhabiting it.

Burt Lancaster starred in, and directed, this story of a well meaning traveller ("Big Eli") and his young son "Little Eli" (Donald MacDonald) heading to Texas hoping to make a decent living for him and his son. Along the way he encounters (and buys) an indentured slave "Susie" (Diana Lynn) who only complicates their already interesting journey as he fights his own demons with women, booze and a particularly nasty Walter Matthau ("Bodine"). It's a beautifully shot piece of cinema, this, and the mischievous charm of the star is writ large. It's too long, though - frequently sagging as the romantic elements go quickly from humorously hostile to schmaltzy just a bit too quickly. Matthau and his whip are the stuff of cinema legend though, and the young MacDomald plays his part well. Fans of Burt will love this, but I found I was bored by the half way mark as what pace it does have it doesn't really sustain.

In the first of two films Burt Lancaster directs as well as stars, he plays the title role of Eli Wakefield who is The Kentuckian. The part of the frontiersman in the James Monroe presidency fits Lancaster's robust personality perfectly. He's very much a combination of both the William Holden and Robert Mitchum characters in Rachel and the Stranger, taking the best aspects of both for his portrayal. Like Mitchum he's got 'woodsy' ways and like Holden he aims to see his son grows out of those ways.

Just where and how little David McDonald does grow up does concern Lancaster and he does during the course of The Kentuckian reexamine just what it is he wants for himself and his son. He's also got a real problem in the shape of a pair of inbred mountain people called Fromes whose family has feuded with the Wakefields for a couple of generations.

Burt's moving west with his boy to get away from the mountain feud so his kid has a chance to grow up and their destination is Texas which the Mexicans had opened up for Yankee settlers eventually to their regret. But he helps a lady in distress in the person of bond servant Dianne Foster and spends his 'Texas' money buying out her contract from Will Wright.

So a planned visit with brother John McIntire and sister-in-law Una Merkel is going to be longer than he thought especially with McIntire wanting to remake Lancaster into a merchant like himself. McIntire also has a wife picked out for him in the person of school teacher Diana Lynn.

The film was shot in Owensboro, Kentucky and presumably in 1955 there was still enough 'woodsy' territory that it still looked like 1820 frontier America. Director Lancaster got good performances out of his cast which included Walter Matthau making his motion picture debut. Matthau plays a tavern owner and town bully, a mean man with a bull-whip who goes after an unarmed Lancaster with one. That scene is really the climax of the film.

However the two to watch for here are the Fromes brothers, Paul Wexler and Douglas Spencer. They are a pair of evil looking dudes, no doubt ancestors of those guys from Deliverance.

In a recent biography of Burt Lancaster, because of some disparaging comments Lancaster made about directors, the Director's Guild first refused to let him direct his own film. Eventually the production company, Hecht-Hill-Lancaster got a waiver from the Guild. I think they wanted to Burt to sweat a little. For him though directing turned out not to be something he wanted to do, he got through the film with some difficulty and it was no accident that while he was on the production end, Lancaster only directed one other film in his career, Midnight Man.

The Kentuckian is a good film, perfectly suited to Burt Lancaster's athleticism and charisma, a must for his fans.

This was a decently put together film. Not too heavy but not too lightweight either, (the bullwhip fight with Matthau is almost worth the price of admission). It is a basic decent family film that doesn't get saccharine or soggy. The white indentured servant angle is one that I haven't seen a lot of and it plays well here. Burt is robust as usual and kickin' a lot of frontier butt. Its kinda unusual(for me) to see him play a rube.

Burt Lancaster remains one of my all-time favorite American actors, but I do not think his decision to direct THE KENTUCKIAN was his wisest.

Clearly, Burt was concerned with his image from the start, his hair always neatly coiffured despite tackling dense forest in the Kentuckyan wilds, and he wastes no time highlighting his own athleticism, good looks, healthy teeth, and blue eyes.

As Elias Wakefield, he also plays the part of a caring father to a poor Little Eli who suffers abuse at school, but is such a pure, natural child that you overlook how different Little Eli's facial features are from his progenitor's. Elias Sr. also allows himself to beaten up to a pulp before he subdues nasty Bodine (played by Matthau), and at the end he runs out the evil Fromes in great style.

John McIntire plays a solid supporting role as Elias Sr.'s older brother, who seems to care for him as much as he wants him to stay in place and do all the hard work, thereby making poor Elias Sr. the target of brotherly exploitation.

The cherry on this self-enhancing effort is Burt's capacity to have two women swooning over him. First, he is interested in Diane Foster (who is even willing to work to pay his move to Texas) but stops short of giving her the unequivocal nod, which obviously frustrates her; then, without much ado, he kisses and plans to marry Diana Lynn, and to stay in Kentucky; but, at movie's end, he listens to Little Eli and his desire to move to Texas and his preference for Diane Foster (I suppose Elias Sr. was well ahead of his time, listening to his son and acting like a late 20th Century father).

There are some brief and eye-catching sideshows like the river boat, and a band of black musicians who play a delightful tune, and - again - seem to belong more in the 1950s than in the 19th Century.

At the river boat, Elias Sr. achieves another feather for his cap, as a card greenhorn who actually cleans out the house. Attaboy, Burt!

In the end, THE KENTUCKIAN is a kind-hearted movie but I felt that I was never to lose sight of the fact that Burt was pulling all the strings... which, from my standpoint, lowers the film's quality, and gives the wrong impression about the thoughtful, humane, and intelligent human being that Burt Lancaster actually was. 6/10