Belle Starr *** (1941, Randolph Scott, Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews) – Classic Movie Review 7494

Director Irving Cummings’s entertaining 1941 Western Belle Starr casts Gene Tierney as the most wanted woman gunslinger in the wild West in this 20th Century Fox studio Western, set at the end of the Civil War.

The glamorous, gentle-looking, city-gal Tierney is a strange choice for Belle Starr. It is not Tierney’s fault, then, that the rugged men (Randolph Scott, Dana Andrews, Chill Wills, Shepperd Strudwick) seem more at home on the range here.

The invented, unhistorical plot, based on a story by Niven Busch, Cameron Rogers, in which Southern beauty Belle Shirley (Tierney) loses her land to the Yankees, weds Confederate guerrilla leader Sam Starr (Scott) and becomes the West’s most notorious female outlaw, only occasionally ignites into bursts of action, but Ernest Palmer’s Technicolor cinematography is splendid.

It was supposedly 20th Century Fox’s answer to Gone with the Wind, if so a short one at only 87 minutes.

Also in the cast are Elizabeth Patterson, Louise Beavers, Olin Howland, Paul Burns, Joseph Sawyer, Joseph Downing, Howard Hickman, Charles Trowbridge, James Flavin and Charles Middleton.

It was remade for TV in 1980 with Elizabeth Montgomery.

A sequel, Belle Starr’s Daughter, followed in 1948 with Ruth Roman.

Alfred Newman’s re-used title music was composed for John Ford’s Young Mr Lincoln (1939).

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7494

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