Stars in My Crown

I must admit that this movie took its time to grab me.It's a movie which grows on you.Some called it "western" but western fans won't get anything of it.It's rather a chronicle,sweet memories of a grown up who remembers his dear past with a marvelous preacher man and a loving auntie.

There is no plot but subplots for it is primarily the depiction of a city in the south.Around the minister,we find the "new generation" doctor who has his doubts and who doesn't believe that healing the soul is that much important;he comes into conflict with Gray .There's also a KKK side and their "methods" to do good old Uncle Famous Pril away from his valuable property.The scene which finally won me over was the reading of Pril's "last wills" .When you discover the truth,you won't believe your eyes!This scene alone raises the movie to greatness by recurrence.And what a tuneful canticle!

Yes this was a good film mostly on the strength of its ensemble cast. You really can't do much better than Ed Begley, Jim Arness, Arthur Hunnicutt and the great Alan Hale (Sr). The leads McCrea, Drew, and Stockwell are good also.

I didn't see the script as being particularly realistic. Maybe a preacher could talk a clan mob out extreme violence? This would not have happened in a film like "To Kill a Mockingbird" which came along about ten years later, also involving a child narrating the film as an adult like "Stars in my Crown."

But I liked the film's dealing with their health crises and the conflict between medicine --such as it was in that time period-- and the idea that prayer had a factor in the healing process.

Enjoyed this film. It portrayed a post-Civil War mid-west (so it appeared)community in a way that could make you nostalgic. Not that everything was perfect: the Ku Klux Klan harassing a freed black man (the distinguished Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez)primarily because they want his land. That preacher Joel McCrae manages to talk them out of it by appealing to their basic decency works without being cloying. Initially a muscular Christian, he here uses his brain to do the Lord's work. Also believable was the community's vulnerability to disease. They had no laboratory-testing facilities to see if that well-water was the source. McCrae's self doubt in the face of all this is believable.As for the cast, I'm pretty sure I spotted an uncredited Peter Graves as one of Alan Hale's offspring.

And they didn't get one.

"Stars in My Crown" was Joel McCrea's favorite film. He's cast against type here, playing the parson, Josiah Gray, who settles with his wife (Ellen Drew) and her nephew John (Dean Stockwell) in a small town.

At first he's accepted by the community, who help him build his church. However, not everyone is crazy about him, including Daniel Harris Jr. (James Mitchell) who has taken over his late father's practice.

There are some dark forces at work, including an attempt to take land owned by a black farmer (Juano Hernandez). The violence against him escalates, but he stands firm.

What was interesting to me about this film was that citizens of the town become infected with typhoid. The first one hit is John. When Josiah attempts to continue to work in the community with his flock, the doctor accuses him of spreading the disease as more and more people become ill. The family become pariahs.

This isn't the exact scenario with COVID, though some of the sentiments are the same as people play the blame game and deal with suffering and death in their families.

"Stars in My Crown" is family entertainment, a story of the power of prayer and the need for courage in the face of difficulties. It's a lovely film, and while some may think Joel McCrea was miscast, I don't. Tough, charismatic, and plain speaking, he makes Josiah the kind of pastor any community would be proud to have.

An almost plot less piece of Americana and one of Jacques Tourneur's very finest films, "Stars in My Crown" is set in a small American town in the aftermath of the Civil War and it follows the daily happenings in the lives of the townsfolk, principle of whom is Joel McCrea's parson, (it's a wonderful performance). Then there's the parson's wife, the young doctor, the school mistress and the boy, (Dean Stockwell), who as a man, (an unseen Marshall Thompson), narrates the film. They are all beautifully played as are Ed Begley's greedy storekeeper, Juano Hernandez's dirt farmer and Charles Kemper's magician.

It's a very simple piece, a series of scenes on which there hangs the thinest thread of a plot, in feeling and in structure not dissimilar to John Ford's "The Sun Shines Bright". It's also one of the few really good 'religious' pictures yet one in which religion isn't centre stage but something that's just there infusing every scene and it's not at all sentimental yet ultimately it's very moving. It's cult status is thoroughly justified.