The Howards of Virginia * (1940, Cary Grant, Martha Scott, Cedric Hardwicke, Alan Marshal, Richard Carlson) – Classic Movie Review 5714

Producer-director Frank Lloyd’s 1940 Columbia Pictures epic historical romantic drama is set during the American War of Independence. It is astonishing that an American film studio would set about to attack the British people at their peak of wartime distress of 1940. What were Columbia Pictures thinking? Oh, that’s right, they weren’t thinking.

Cary Grant stars in one of his least remembered roles as American Southern gentleman Matt Howard, who fights the good fight against the nasty British. How did Bristol-born Grant feel about playing this role at this time?

Grant rightly considered he was miscast and, after the film flopped, he refused any other period roles, except for The Pride and the Passion (1957), which he did to work with Sophia Loren and Frank Sinatra, but it also flopped.

Sidney Buchman’s indigestible, sprawling screenplay, insecurely based on the vastly long novel The Tree of Liberty by Elizabeth Page, produces a one-dimensional and over-extended movie, running a tedious seeming 120 minutes. There are just too few points of interest and there is simply too little entertainment. And the usually effortless Grant is for once looking obviously awkward and uncomfortable. He justly earned some of the worst reviews of his career.

Grant blamed Columbia Pictures studio head Harry Cohn for talking him into starring in the film. Cohn apparently simply saw it as a ‘patriotic picture’ suitable at a time when Americans felt that they were going to join the war soon.

But Grant also had personal reasons as he wanted to become an American citizen and believed starring in this film would help Americans accept him. He realised the British public would be angered by him becoming a naturalised citizen during a time of war and thought the film would help bide his time until America entered the war on the UK side. Not thinking clearly, Grant had made a mess, and this movie shows it all for ever.

The inexperienced Martha Scott (replacing Joan Fontaine who needed abdominal surgery) hesitantly plays Jane Peyton-Howard, a beautiful young Virginian aristocrat who marries down-to-earth surveyor Matt, who joins the Colonial forces battling England for freedom.

It also stars Cedric Hardwicke as Fleetwood Peyton, Alan Marshal as Roger Peyton, Richard Carlson as Thomas Jefferson.

Also in the cast are Paul Kelly, Irving Bacon, Elisabeth Risdon, Anne Revere, Tom Drake, Phil Taylor, Richard Gaines, Libby Taylor, Rita Quigley, George Houston as George Washington, Virginia Sale, Dickie Jones as the 12-year-old Matt, Ralph Byrd (replacing Forrest Tucker as James Howard) and James Westerfield (in his film debut).

It must have been a hard sell in the UK, where they retitled it The Tree of Liberty.

It is shot in black and white by Bert Glennon and scored by Richard Hageman.

John D Rockefeller Jr had recently restored Williamsburg, Virginia, as a model colonial town and granted Columbia cost-cutting rights to film exterior scenes there. Other sequences were shot on location in Northern California.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5714

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