La belle écuyère

Boring story about a country bumpkin (Henry Fonda) and the girl (Linda Darnell) who loves him running off with a circus. Fonda's infatuated with bareback rider Dorothy Lamour but eventually realizes he was meant for the country girl. Darnell and Lamour look beautiful, especially in Technicolor. Really, the whole picture looks good. The problem is the story is dull and some of the acting is sub-par. Considering this cast, I expected better. Darnell's often spotty so I wasn't phased by her weak performance. But I was disappointed in Henry Fonda, whose rube routine was annoying. He reunites with his Grapes of Wrath costars John Carradine and Jane Darwell, both of whom are fine in this. Dorothy Lamour stands out the most. I wish I could recommend it but unless you're a Fonda, Lamour, or Darnell completist I wouldn't waste my time on it. Watchable but dull.

Henry Fonda plays an "aw shucks" country boy who falls in love with Albany Yates (Dorothy Lamour) in the circus... before later marrying Caroline (Linda Darnell), who has also joined the circus.

The movie was okay, not great. I've enjoyed Fonda more in other roles (e.g. 12 Angry Men), and I've been appreciating Linda Darnell more as I see more movies that feature her, but here her role was weaker (or it was just a poorly written script). I liked the Technicolor and got a kick out of Jane Darwell's role as a feisty fat lady. In one scene she stands holding a rifle, making a man promise that he won't bother the circus team again. He does. She then hits him over the head with the rifle, knocking him out, then says, "Now I believe him!"

This is basically the price Henry Fonda had to pay to star in "Grapes of Wrath". He had to agree to be a contract player at Fox and he occasionally got stuck with this kind of role in this kind of film. But he did make the most of it like the trooper he was.

The great director Henry King comes up with a most charming and unpretentious film about a circus full of generally likable characters soon to be joined by a young Henry Fonda who is completely fascinated by lovely temptress Dorothy Lamour... only to see her depart and join another circus.

That is not all, either: Lamour is in love with another guy, and so it comes to pass that the pendant Fonda wanted to give her lands up with another beautiful female, Linda Darnell. Therein lies an interesting twist in that you feel that Fonda's first love is Lamour, and only living the hardships of live - especially circus life - and Lamour's experience tell him that Darnell owns his heart.

Superb scenes with a lion and an elephant, the circus' entry into town, Darnell learning horseriding with suspender cables, all part of lovely cinematography by Ernest Palmer. Top notch acting across the board, with Jane Darwell and Guy Kibbee a particular standout as the Huguenine couple.

Thoughtful script.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I have!

Henry Fonda did his third and last big screen adaption of a Walter Edmonds story about upstate New York with Chad Hanna. The other two were his debut film The Farmer Takes A Wife and the John Ford classic Drums Along The Mohawk. Though Chad Hanna is the least of the three it's still an entertaining film and Fonda could play these rustic characters well, investing in them a sense of dignity and strength.

He's got the title role in Chad Hanna who's a farm boy who gets a yen to join the traveling circus after seeing a poster of Dorothy Lamour as a bareback rider. That's Hank's hormones talking there, but later on another runaway in the person of Linda Darnell and it's the two of them that are fated for each other

The circus business back in the day was one dangerous profession and I'm not just talking about under the big top. Guy Kibbee and Jane Darwell's show is plagued by the much bigger outfit that Ted North runs and he wants them out of business. North even steals Lamour away from Kibbee's show, but that only serves to give Darnell a break and making her the top bareback rider.

Just the names I've mentioned so far indicate that Chad Hanna has a cast of some colorful players and you can add John Carradine to that list as well as Kibbee's advance man. One thing I don't understand is why Kibbee thought Fonda would make a good ringmaster when Kibbee was injured in a fracas with North's show. He promoted the shy Fonda over Carradine who has one of the great voices in the English language. Go figure that one.

Despite that faux pas, Chad Hanna remains a fine film done in nice technicolor and does capture the flavor of rural western New York back in the next to last century.

Made in 1940 in Technicolor on the Twentieth-Century Fox lot in Hollywood, this film suffers from uninspired direction by old reliable staff director Henry King, a man who could direct almost anything efficiently, but rarely with much flair or enthusiasm. The visual possibilities of the one-ring circus travelling from town to town in Upstate New York, ideal atmosphere for a movie, are hardly exploited by King. Co-star Dorothy Lamour as the bad girl bareback rider is attractive, but seems miscast as a seductress, although she tries. Linda Darnell, then a teenager, is lovely and appealing as the good girl, and has some good believable boy-girl moments with Henry Fonda, then under Fox contract. He made this film the same year as GRAPES OF WRATH, and a year before Sturges' THE LADY EVE. As always he is perfectly natural, ideally cast as the innocent American boy, shy, romantic, full of feelings he tries to hide. The perfect film actor.

TRIVIA: his Daughter Jane was three years old when this film was made.