Stars in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955)

When Parisian Jacques Tourneur exercised the Western, his understanding of the genre’s significance to the American mentality and spirit left 1950s films that feel trenchant and contemporary even now. 

Stars in My Crown (1950) and Wichita (1955) both star Joel McCrae as the American ideal, a man with the outlaw’s power and skills but committed to the values of civilization. The McCrae hero thus embodies the solution to the American Western’s essential dilemma: civilization in order to survive needs the gunman’s gun (e.g., Shane, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the Republican hawks ever since). Enforcing the law may require an outlaw or outlaw actions. But here that tension is resolved. In his very presence the McCrae hero exerts a quiet but constant moral authority, proven by his every deed. 

In the former his Parson Gray gives his first sermon in a saloon with his guns a silent but eloquent authority laid on the bar. He wields an efficient bullwhip to save the town victim Chloroform from a bully. 

In Wichita McCrea is the nascent hero Wyatt Earp, forced by conscience and situation to abandon his business plan and to become sheriff. For all the weight of his hefty six-gun this Earp can outdraw and outshoot any villain, even when half asleep. Both McCrea heroes are moral figures of potential force.

Incidentally, McCrae drew on this persona in Peckinpah’s classic Ride the High Country (1962). There he is the moral constant opposed to the Randolph Scott character who briefly forgets his essential moral compass (as developed in his Budd Boetticher films).  

Both Tourneur films trace the Western’s usual extension of civilization into the wild frontier. In Stars the parson introduces religion to a community riven by greed and racism. Arriving as a loner, Parson Gray soon marries a local beauty and they adopt a young orphan boy (who as adult narrates the memory). As Gray thus extends the spirit of the family, the religion he brings heightens the town’s sense of community, which leads to the collective construction of the first church. Wichita depicts the arrival of law and order to a burgeoning railroad town. It mobilizes not just the mythic Earp brothers but also young newspaperman Bat Masterson. 

While it’s hard — alas — to suggest a real modern equivalent to the McCrea hero here, the films’ villains are easily related to our world. 

In Stars there are two threats to the community. A typhoid epidemic begins with the adopted boy then shatters the town. It drives the parson into self-imposed isolation, which only ends when he realizes the fever’s source (the school well). This test draws the fragmented community closer than ever. It also leads the opposing forces of science (the young doctor) and religion (the parson) to realize the other’s value. The debate between science and superstition has of course resurfaced on the issue of inoculation, inter alia. 

The human evil is the greedy mine-owner Backett. His mica lode exhausted, Backett tries to force the old negro Uncle Famous to sell him his paltry but adjacent homestead. When token financial offers are rejected Backett has henchmen destroy the old man’s crops and animals. This failing, Backett deploys a full-blown Klan attack to lynch him if he doesn’t sell. 

  The Klan attack is a dramatic shift from the film’s — and the genre’s — usual tones of evil. Uncle Famous stands firm against it. The unarmed Parson Gray turns back the attack by purporting to read the black old man’s will. It cites past exchanges with the masked marauders, services rendered them, pleasures shared, even the bequest of the land to Backett. Touched by the old man’s bequests and memories, the Klansmen disperse sheepishly. 

But the Parson has not been reading Uncle Famous’s will. In his voice, as if from his experience, the Parson has been “reading” from a blank page — God’s will. 

Tourneur provides a balance to the Klan in the Isbell family, good-hearted people whose friendly relations with the parson stop short of attending. They are the self-sufficient but moral non-religious. They rally to Uncle Famous’s defence first by restoring his lost seed and animals, then arriving armed to fight off the Klan — if necessary. Awed by the Parson’s moral stratagem they turn churchgoer. American citizenry may include the violent bigotry of the Klan but it also includes its contrary, salt-of-the-earth moral militance. 

Significantly, the narrator’s overall story attributes his development to two major figures, Uncle Famous with his natural savvy and the moral strength of the Parson. Their shaping of the nascent John Kenyon is the serious version of healing and magical transformation, the process parodied in the comical snake-oil salesman. 

If the lowly Uncle Famous’s name is ironic, Chloroform Wiggins has a direct connection to his name. He bears the cause of his congenital deficiency. As a case of arrested development he contrasts to the young doctor who learns to fit in and to serve his father’s medical practice and the parson who survives his crisis of faith. As for the vicious Klansmen, Tourneur leaves open whether the Parson’s address to their humanity transformed them too — or left them in the arrested humanity of their racism. 

The evil in Wichita remains as current a threat as the violent bigotry in Stars. The town fathers persuade Earp to become sheriff because they want to secure the citizens from the cattlemen’s wildness. But when he bans guns from the town they fear the cattlemen will abandon the Wichita economy. In the officials’ greed and self-service and in their opposition to gun control those villains reflect issues still very much alive in America. 

The worst of the bunch is Doc Black, who purports to serve the town while secretly serving the outlaws. Earp’s father-in-law McCoy is  among the officials who reject the ban — until his wife is killed. The nexus of business interest and resistance to gun control, of course, continues.  
     Tourneur’s sense of the bedrock issues in American society extended beyond his westerns. His Easy Living (1949) seems still current in tracing the dilemma of a football star imperilled by a brain injury, torn between the trophy wife he loves but is losing and the more genuinely committed working girl. The respective women provide contrary examples of the modern career girl, too. As Tourneur seems always to remind us, living properly just isn’t easy, whatever the appealing but morally compromising allures may be, now as then.