High, Wide and Handsome

HIGH HIDE AND HANDSOME is an big expensive Paramount musical directed by Rouben Mamoulian that tries to combine a MGMesque romantic musical production with a Cecil B. DeMille-sized dramatic epic with fairly successful results thanks to a lovely original Oscar Hammerstein III - Jerome Kern score and an excellent cast headed by Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, Dorothy Lamour, Elizabeth Patterson, Alan Hale, Charles Bickford, Ben Blue, Raymond Walburn, and William Frawley.

Irene Dunne stars as a singer/dancer who travels the country as part of pop Raymond Walburn's medicine show. When the medicine show wagon burns up during a stint in Pennslyvania, Dunne, Walburn, and faux Indian entertainer William Frawley are stranded and put up for the night by farmer Randolph Scott and his grandmother Elizabeth Patterson. The trio works their way into Scott and Patterson's heart and stay on as help to earn their keep until Walburn can rebuild an old wagon Scott has given him. Irene and Randolph fall in love and she encourages him with his dream as he drills for oil on the family homestead. When the wagon is built and it's now time to go, the sheepish Scott can't bring himself to propose to Irene but as the wagon leaves and encouraged by grandma, Scott rides off to meet them and fetch Irene back.

At their wedding, the oil well hits a gusher and Scott and the local farmers are ecstatic about their potential fortunes. Alas, evil railroad magnate Alan Hale is out to milk them of every penny of profit by excessive fees to ship the oil on his railroad, hoping to make them sellout to him. Scott gets a brainstorm to build a pipeline to move the oil which Hale repeatedly attempts to thwart with his gang. Meanwhile, the Scott-Dunne union is crumbling due to his excessive devotion to the oil wells and when Irene is seen by Randolph singing in a saloon along with her poor friend Dorothy Lamour, a former shanty boat singer whom Irene is trying to help land a job, they have a big fight and Irene leaves to join her father in his current position with a traveling circus. Meanwhile, Hale continues his dastardly plans to ruin Scott's pipe dreams.

Irene Dunne is excellent as Sally, the rather elegant medicine show entertainer and Randolph Scott more than holds his own in a superb performance as her dashing bucolic white knight. Irene has several beautiful numbers including the classic "The Folks Who Live on the Hill". Dorothy Lamour is also excellent as the saloon singer who at one point is run out of town by the prudish "good people" of the area and sings the very lovely "The Things I Want". Elizabeth Patterson is always an asset to a movie and has one of her larger film roles here as the tough but loving grandmother and terrific comic support is supplied by William Frawley (who has also has a good song number at the wedding) and Ben Blue.

HIGH WIDE AND HANDSOME appears to have been only a modest success at the box office and is one of the least seen Irene Dunne films, as of early 2011 I don't believe it's ever aired on a cable network nor has it ever been released on video or DVD. While not a classic and not without it's flaws (the oil saga with good guys fighting powerful villains has perhaps been done in too many old films and the surprise heroes of the final reel give a rather absurd touch to the climax) it deserves to be seen and it's excellent songs and performances and beautiful set design and cinematography make it a quite memorable movie musical.

HIGH, WIDE AND HANDSOME (Paramount, 1937), directed by Rouben Mamoulian, is an underrated musical-drama set in the great outdoors of old Pennsylvania, circa the 1850s. Done in elaborate style, it stars Irene Dunne, following her recent success to the 1936 screen version of SHOW BOAT (Universal). Currently riding high and wide with her brief cinematic period in movie musicals (1935-1938) before focusing more on comedy and dramas, Dunne is cast opposite the tall and rugged Randolph Scott for the second time, the first being ROBERTA (RKO Radio, 1935) opposite Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. With a handful of contemporary song and dance, college, and backstage musicals hitting the theaters during this period, HIGH, WIDE AND HANDSOME (is the title pertaining to Randolph Scott or the scenery of old Pennsylvania?) takes a different turn in locale, combining outdoorsy western scenery with songs that has been said to have been an inspiration to the highly popular Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway 1943 musical, OKLAHOMA, and others like it.

The story begins with Sally Watterson (Irene Dunne), a young girl traveling with her medicine sideshow father named "Doc" (Raymond Walburn), singing the title song as they settle in a western Pennsylvania town. As "Doc" tries selling some medicine bottles to his patrons, which proves to be a fraud by spectator Peter Cortlandt (Randolph Scott), a fight ensues amongst the crowd, damaging their wagon. Being given the hospitality of her home by Peter's grandmother (Elizabeth Patterson), the stranded Sally earns her keep by helping with the farm animals, and soon gets to know and love Peter, a rugged oil prospector, whom she eventually marries. Their marriage, at first, is a happy union, until Peter neglects his wife in favor of keeping his promise with the neighboring farmers by banding together in laying oil pipelines in order to prevent Red Scanlon (Charles Bickford), a corrupt railroad president, from monopolizing the industry. After Sally is found entertaining on top of the table in the barroom with Molly (Dorothy Lamour), a saloon girl she and Peter had earlier rescued from a lynch mob, the couple find themselves in an argument which sends Sally to leave her husband and return to life entertaining in the passing circus show and to her father, while Peter tries to fulfill his pipeline dream, which, at the present time, proves to be more important than trying to find Sally and resolve matters. The elaborate and well staged sequence with thousands of prospectors racing against time to get the gigantic oil pipeline finished on schedule is almost similar to King Vidor's conclusion of OUR DAILY BREAD (1934) where the farmhands are seen rushing to ditch a waterway in order to save their dying crops, but with this production, an added bonus of rugged fighting scenes and one near miss scene adding to the suspense in which the unconscious Scott is nearly crushed by a falling pipe that lands inches from his head. Whew!

Almost forgotten today and rarely seen in recent years, HIGH, WIDE AND HANDSOME has its share of good tunes, with music and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, including: "High, Wide and Handsome," "The Simple Maiden," "Can I Forget You?" (all sung by Irene Dunne); "Will You Marry Me Tomorrow, Maria?" (sung by William Frawley); "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" (sung by Irene Dunne); "The Things I Want" (sung by Dorothy Lamour); "Allegheny Al" (sung by Dunne and Lamour) and "Can I Forget You?" (reprise by Dunne). Of the songs, "The Folks Who Live on the Hill," sung by Irene Dunne wearing her old-fashioned wedding gown, comes off best and memorably, as she sings it to her new husband, Peter (Scott) after showing her the dwelling they are to live. Another memorable moment is seeing William Frawley (years before his "I Love Lucy" TV series days in the 1950s) in full voice singing "Will You Marry Me Tomorrow" during a ceremony. While Irene Dunne is no Jeanette MacDonald or Grace Moore when it comes to vocalizing, many forget how well she singing delivery is, and she does it quite well, but unfortunately, on the whole, the songs did not become as immortal as the other Hammerstein and Kern scores.

In the supporting cast are Alan Hale as Walt Brennan, the head of the transportation syndicate; Akim Tamiroff as the foreign gambler, Joe Varese; Irving Pichel as Mr. Stark; Lucien Littlefield, Purnell B. Pratt, and some light "comedy relief" supplied by Ben Blue playing Zeke, a hired hand. Raymond Walburn, a fine character actor appearing here as Irene Dunne's father, performs his task well, almost as if this role were intended with W.C. Fields in mind, especially with similarities in his medicine show man who tries to defraud his public with phony medicine bottles, etc.

Running ten minutes short of two hours, HIGH, WIDE AND HANDSOME is entertaining, quite original for its time, but sadly, a neglected item. A lot of effort went into this nostalgic production, and it shows. The only thing missing, and a real oversight, is Technicolor. Around this time, Paramount produced some fine Technicolor outdoors films, notably THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE (1936) with Sylvia Sidney, and EBB TIDE (1937) with Frances Farmer. How cinematic this handsome film would have looked in color. But overlooking this minor flaw, it's a movie worth seeing through once, and after its THE END title and list of actors and their roles (and underscoring to "The Folks Who Live on the Hill") before the final fadeout, it may make one wonder why this is among the rarely-seen western-type musicals gems (even with Turner Classic Movies showing August 16, 2019) from the "golden age of Hollywood" period. (***1/2)

Without all the unnecessary singing, I'd score this on a 7 or possibly an 8...as I really did enjoy the plot. But the singing was a distraction...and what's worse is that it wasn't very good. I love Irene Dunne as an actress but as a singer...well, she was a fine actress.

The story is an unusual one because it's about the nation's first oil wells which were created in Western Pennsylvania in 1859. It begins just before this and a medicine show arrives in town. After a freak fire breaks out and leaves the show stranded, some of the locals take in the medicine show folk. One of them is Sally (Irene Dunne) and soon she is in love with the son of the old lady who took her into her home. As for Peter (Randolph Scott), he looks like a perfect catch for Sally...but little does she know that he's about to strike oil and the oil business would dominate their marrage and sour it as well.

In many ways, this reminded me of the later MGM film "Boom Town", as it's also about the oil business as well as its negative impact on a new marriage. Both are worth seeing, but I'd prefer "Boom Town" simply because it lacks the pointless songs of "High, Wide and Handsome"....none of which are memorable and just seem unnecessary.

Overall, worth seeing IF you don't mind the songs. The finale is pretty neat and the acting quite good.

Irene Dunne had the good fortune in her singing films to have one of the greatest of American composers writing for her. In her career she did the lead roles in such Jerome Kern classics as Showboat, Roberta, and Sweet Adeline. And also she Kern write songs for the screen for her in Joy of Living and this film High Wide and Handsome. She was for a while known as the Jerome Kern girl of the screen.

For reasons I don't understand, except for Showboat she was not given a singing leading man. The story lines were rewritten to give her all the good songs and the leading man none. Not that Donald Woods in Sweet Adeline or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Joy of Living or Randolph Scott in Roberta and High Wide and Handsome had any ambitions to sing, but it might have been nice to have her teamed with someone like Allan Jones again as she was in Showboat.

High Wide and Handsome is set in western Pennsylvania just after Edwin L. Drake invented the first practical oil derrick to drill for the stuff. Up to that time oil was considered a nuisance at best, a positive calamity at worst for some poor farmer who had the stuff oozing through to his soil. Randolph Scott is such a farmer who has the idea of marketing for heating fuel.

Others agree with him including Alan Hale who is in a part normally reserved for Edward Arnold. He's the boss of the railroad and who would be shipping the stuff and at the rate he determines, but him only.

Not beaten Scott conceives the idea of the first oil pipeline and then its a fight to the finish with the Hale and the railroad. By the way in real life this is how John D. Rockefeller cornered the oil market and gave the Rockefeller family the wealth it enjoys today.

Irene Dunne is in a medicine show that breaks down and she, Raymond Walburn and William Frawley are given shelter by Scott and his grandmother Elizabeth Patterson. Of course the usual boy/girl stuff happens.

Scott's an earnest of guy, but a bit of a prude as well. Later on when Dunne aids another entertainer in trouble, Dorothy Lamour, Scott and she break up when he finds the two of them trying to put over an act in a saloon to get her hired.

Two very big songs for Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, II came out of High Wide and Handsome both sung by Dunne, Can I Forget You and The Folks Who Live On The Hill. Again this was a case of one hand washing the other as Paramount no doubt convinced the leading singer in America who by no coincidence was a Paramount contact player to record them and plug them on his radio show. Bing Crosby's records of them are classic and they sold a few platters back in the day. In fact why didn't they have Bing in this film? It certainly had more of a budget than the musicals Paramount was giving him.

Other villains in High Wide and Handsome are Charles Bickford and Irving Pichel. Bickford is just a plug ugly who does Hale's dirty work and probably would pay Hale to do it for him as he and Scott hate each other and that's made clear right at the beginning of the film. Irving Pichel plays a strange Puritan type individual, self appointed keeper of the community morals. His was a strangely underdeveloped character in the script that Oscar Hammerstein, II wrote.

Rouben Mamoulian who directed his fair share of musicals on screen and on the stage did a good job with his cast. And you can never go wrong listening and singing Jerome Kern's wonderful songs.

No objections against Rouben Mamoulian's expert directing, not against Irene Dunne with her reliable singing and acting either, but Randolph Scott never qualifies as an A-actor, he always appears as rather inferior to those he plays against, and here also the intrigue is rather mellow. His girl Irene Dunne is only good for acting and singing with her circus in musicals, while Randolph's only interest is his ambition for oil and money. How could they possibly go well together without skirmishes? Naturally, Randolph gets enemies for his ambitions, and his great project gets constantly sabotaged by brute force used in foul play by his enemies, leading to one disaster after the other. The finale is grandiose in its final battle, but this is no film for those interestd in human psychology and depth of intrigue. It is a very superficial story of ambition and success, and not even the music is very good - Jerome Kern certainly could do better, and you miss the charm of "Love Me Tonight" and its gorgeous spirituality with a dominating sense of everything important missing.