Stars in My Crown is directed by Jacques Tourneur and written by Joe David Brown and Margaret Fitts. It stars Joel McCrea, Ellen Drew, Dean Stockwell, Alan Hale, Lewis Stone, James Mitchell, Amanda Blake and Juano Hernandez. Music is by Adolph Deutsch and cinematography by Charles Schoenbaum.It's post the American Civil War and we are in the Southern town of Walsburg. Preacher Josiah Gray (McCrea) arrives in town and promptly settles down to become an important part of the community. Soon he will come face to face with two killer diseases, that of typhoid and racial hatred.First off it should be noted that some plot synopsis' and poster art are off base, McCrea's preacher is not a gun toting dude willing to use guns to further his causes, it's a brief scene flecked with humour. Also note that the Ku Klux Klan is not mentioned in this, the gang at the centre of the race hatred here are called The Night Riders (Nightriders perhaps?). A veer from what we know as the norm for a Tourneur movie, this only really suffers from being a little too precious and naturally dated in its depictions of small town church life and racial bigotry. But that said, it's such a warm involving picture that is performed and directed with skill, it's almost impossible not to feel good about things come the closure of the play.Story thrives on community strengths and weakness, delicately blending both to show optimism on offer in spite of human fallibilities. The battle between faith and medicine in nicely played, refusing to force feed one or the other, whilst the key scene as the racial hatred reached its vilest peak is potent and hits all the right notes.Cliches and stereotypes are within, perhaps unsurprisingly for the era of film making, while Hernandez's black character is written as far too passive to be utterly comfortable. It also would have been nice to have had more of Charles Kemper's ebullient medicine show host, but complaints are small here and Stars in My Crown is a worthy and comfort food kinda picture. 7/10

Stars in My Crown (1950)A period drama, though and through. The time is the end of the 1800s in rural America. The small town has all the expected types, especially the kindly preacher (who leads the story through his adopted nephew, a charming and energetic boy). There is the the greedy capitalist, the skeptical doctor, the hardy Swedish family, the pretty wife and the pretty girlfriend, and the old black farmer. The acting is sincere, and the writing honest and filled with homespun wisdom.So this should be a good movie and it is. It's also very "old-fashioned" (that's the first word that came to mind. I have figured out what that means—not that it's filled with good people striving to do well and be happy in simple times, though that is true. It's more that it feels simple. This makes for a lack of complication, and surprise, and tension.The worst part of this is that everyone is who they appear to be, without development or complication. Even when the final huge crisis sweeps the town and people are forced to step outside their usual roles, they do so predicatably. It's all very sweet but a bit of a bore—or to be nicer about it, a bit less exciting than the movie had the potential to be.One last final note—leading man (pastor) Joel McCrea has a mixed role as leading man. Here he is cast perfectly, and he fits the part and holds it up, and holds up his end of the movie. Nice to see him at his best.

A man recalls memories of his childhood growing up as the adopted son (Dean Stockwell) of a parson (Joel McCrea) and the parson's wife (Ellen Drew) in a southern town in the years after the Civil War. A wholesome family image undermined by latent violence, it's a pretty interesting portrayal of the times from director Jacques Tourneur.The title of the film is also the title of Christian hymn that gets repeated a few times. McCrea fits the part of the parson well, saving the town from sliding into darker impulses, represented by menacing Jack Lambert as Perry Lokey, especially in a scene where he's snapping off a few cracks of his bull whip, and Ed Begley as a greedy landowner out to cheat Juano Hernandez out of his land. It's kind of a family movie, but with Tourneur (Cat People, Out of the Past) at the helm, it's darker than most.

A country parson (who's packin' heat!) arrives by train in small Whalesburg to take charge of the religious duties, and does so not with violence but with prayer, patience, common sense, and love for his fellow man. Joel McCrea is just about perfect in the lead: with his low-keyed preciseness and enunciation, he's like the country cousin to Henry Fonda (and, even more appealing than Fonda, McCrea has some aw-shucks sex appeal which understandably draws choir-singer Ellen Drew to him). Drew snares him, marries him, but right away starts nagging at him (good-naturedly, of course) and calling him Mr. Gray. It's too bad the screenplay (based on the book by Joe David Brown, who also wrote "Addie Pray", a.k.a. "Paper Moon") doesn't concentrate more on the courtship of the parson and his girl, or even on his unusual blend of crackle-barrel wisdom, Scripture reading and take-no-prisoners approach. Instead, the focus is more on the townspeople and their highs and lows: a black sharecropper is nearly run off his land by the Knightriders (in sheets and hoods), Typhoid fever runs rampant through the school (causing the preacher some self-doubt), and the new doctor in town, while romancing the schoolteacher, must overcome his lack of faith. This is the kind of folksy Hollywood story wherein a man and a woman can't be together in the same room without falling in love. It's sweet all right, and humanized by a good cast and a fine director (the talented Jacques Tourneur), but too often the sentiment turns cloying, slowing the pace down. Lots of now-famous faces from television turn up, including Dean Stockwell, James Mitchell, "Gunsmoke" alumni Amanda Blake and James Arness, and the Skipper's father, Alan Hale, in his final film. **1/2 from ****