rbr2

I just saw the movie Brigham Young (1940) at a screening at Brigham Young University. I found the movie to be entertaining and worthwhile as a film, although the historicity is basically a skeleton on which Hollywood drapes their story--which is what Hollywood did all the time anyway. At least it is a positive portrayal.

It may interest readers to know what Heber J. Grant, President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1918 to 1945 had to say about the movie. This is taken from the LDS Conference Report, Sunday October 6, 1940, page 96.

"I am thankful beyond expression for the very wonderful and splendid moving picture that has been made of Brigham Young. I have heard some little criticism of it, but we cannot expect the people who do not know that Brigham Young was in very deed the representative of God upon this earth, who do not know his wonderful character, to tell the story as we would tell it. We know that he was a prophet of the living God and the representative of the Lord here upon the earth. There is nothing in the picture that reflects in any way against our people. It is a very marvelous and wonderful thing, considering how people generally have treated us and what they have thought of us. Of course there are many things in the picture that are not strictly correct, and that is announced in the picture itself. It is of course a picture and we could not hope that they would make a picture at their expense, running into a couple of million dollars, to be just as we would like it. We know that Brigham Young was a powerful and wonderful man, the greatest man of his day, and one of the great things about Brigham Young was that he always gave credit to Joseph Smith for everything that he did. He claimed that he was simply building upon the foundation laid by the prophet of God, who had seen God and conversed with Jesus Christ. He never doubted for one minute the final triumph of the people here in Utah. He was a man of God, and the people thought the world and all of him."

Overall, I felt it was a good movie, especially for being the first entry in its field and its limited budget. There were some things that didn't seem appropriate at first, but when seen in the context of the whole movie, make sense. And that's the way it is with the plan of salvation. Not everything makes sense or even seems appropriate, or OK at first, but in the big picture it all works out. Perhaps it would have helped if the actors really knew what their characters portrayed--since only about ten percent of the cast were members of the Church. Some things can't be acted. However, the film was well done and watchable. The story was not just the eye candy which only allows two or three viewings as is the case in many of today's pictures, but a real story with many subtle points which would make it viewable many times. Kudos to Richard Dutcher. This is what real cinema is about.