Wild Heritage

A couple of people who would obtain stardom in the 60s, actor Troy Donahue and folksinger Rod McKuen are in the cast of this B western for Universal about a pair of families the Breslins and Bascombs who settle in the west. Will Rogers, Jr. is first billed in Wild Heritage but basically he doesn't do anything but watch over the pioneer families. Rogers is a judge but they have no courts and no sheriff and really no law.

Which is why a couple of outlaw brothers can shoot the Breslin family patriarch Paul Birch down and nothing done about it. Later on Stephen Ellsworth the head of the Bascombs is killed in a wagon accident. Which leaves widows Breslin and Bascomb played by Maureen O'Sullivan and Jeanette Nolan to carry on and homestead with their kids.

The kids who are Gigi Perreau, Rod McKuen, Gary Gray, and George Winslow for O'Sullivan and Troy Donahue and Judi Meredith for Nolan don't really get along for the most part. But pioneer life and the elements of nature and the common enemies of those two who shot down Birch make allies.

Wild Heritage is nothing spectacular, but it holds up well as a nice family film even for today.

In the late 1800s, the Breslin family is traveling west to start a new life and get some land. Unfortunately, when Mr. Breslin goes into a really craptastic town along the way, he's murdered by some local scum...and no one in the town seems to care. Most of the Breslins are for pushing west and fulfilling Mr. Breslin's dream...but what if the killers return?

The film has a huge problem....it's hard to like many of the main characters. In particular, the Breslin daughter is inexplicably nasty and selfish...to the point where she's very off-putting. The same can be said about another family the Breslins encounter...they just aren't that nice and rooting for the two families to work together to protect their land is tough.

It's a shame, as the basic idea of the story is interesting and could have been much better. With a bit of a polish on the script, it might have worked well...but it didn't.

This film benefited from the wonderful presence of Will Rogers, Jr and natural western beauty location; cinematography was competent; the character playing "Rusty" could have been Rogers' grandson & full of character. Yet, because of short runtime (78 minutes) there was little opportunity for the great American, Rogers, to develop his character -- the time was just sufficient to run through the plot: insufficient to its full potential. Some of the character choices were excellent, a few others medium. Another 45 minutes, or even 30, could have produced a superiour, rather than merely acceptable, Western; it was a disservice to Will Rogers, Jr and to us who could have had had the benefit of his genuine American wisdom & wit, of which there is pitiful little today. The fault must partly lie with Mr Rogers: his quietly powerful influence could have secured proper financing and meaningful scripting, instead of the superficiality of packing so much plot into so little time and expecting a leisurely development of frontier family life to boot; obviously there were too many people at the banquet and too little food. See it, though; but pack all you can into your experience quick!

Two pioneer families set up farms next to each other in this peculiar western.

Each of the families is headed by a mother -- for one, Maureen O'Sullivan, the other Jeanette Nolan; the focus is in Miss O'Sullivan's family. It's an episodic affair, well shot in standard, Los-Angeles-area sites, although the presence of Will Rogers Jr. Seems to imply it's Oklahoma.

Although the movie western was not quite dead on its feet, the many TV oaters made the pickings scarce. Writer-director Hugo Haas responded with the good landscape photography, and sense of sweeping themes -- the coming together of the two families, despite a rocky start. It's a good idea, but the start-and-stop nature of the scipting makes it seem tentative and unsure.

Okay, there's some nice scenery and the film is in color. And Will Rogers Jr. is in it, to some degree. That's the good stuff. All the rest is just bad. The story is weak and the characters are basically uninteresting and unlikeable. The worst tomatoes must be cast at Rod McKuen, who is so unappealing to look at or listen to, he's just got nothing positive going for him. Worse than that, if possible, is George Winslow as the youngest Breslin brother. I would have never guessed that a twelve-year-old growing up in wild territory could be so fat. Chances are in real life a kid in that situation would have been pretty stringy. Additionally, he's a terrible actor. His charm in his earlier days always escaped me and here he's even worse.

Don't waste your time. Maureen O'Sullivan sure picked a stinker here.