Three Faces West *** (1940, John Wayne, Sigrid Gurie, Charles Coburn) – Classic Movie Review 7463

‘GUILTY…OF DARING TO LOVE AND LIVE! ‘ Three Faces West is directed in 1940 by New York City-born film-maker Bernard Vorhaus, a graduate of Harvard University, for Republic Pictures, where contract player John Wayne had finally become a big star thanks to Stagecoach. The original screenplay is by F Hugh Herbert, Joseph Moncure March, Samuel Ornitz and Doris Anderson.

It is an out-of-the-rut movie as a most intriguing wartime combination of action adventure, romance and anti-Nazi propaganda, with Wayne playing John Phillips, who is in charge of fleeing Austrians who are resettling in a small town in North Dakota as refugees from Hitler. It is the dust bowl era, and Phillips leads the townsfolk to greener pastures in Oregon and falls for Leni just about the time she hears that her old flame she thought dead is still alive.

Wayne is in his element and it helps that there are sincere performances from offbeat Brooklyn-born heroine Sigrid Gurie (though she had been promoted by producer Samuel Goldwyn as Norwegian and ‘The Norwegian Garbo’, since her family originally came from Norway) and from Charles Coburn, who play Viennese surgeon Dr Karl Braun and his romantically inclined (to Wayne of course) daughter Leni and represent the courage of Europe faced with adversity.

Roland Varno plays Dr Eric Von Scherer, Gurie’s supposedly dead old flame from the old country, who helped her and her father escape from the Third Reich and inconveniently turns up – now the proverbial bad Nazi penny (or pfennig).

Also in the cast are Spencer Charters, Sonny Bupp, Russell Simpson, Trevor Bardette, Helen MacKellar, Wade Boteler, Charles Waldron and Dewey Robinson.

Vorhaus was one of those named to the House Un-American Activities Committee by director Edward Dmytryk in the 1950s. The accusation ended his US film career. After being blacklisted, Vorhaus relocated to England, where he lived with his Welsh-born wife until his death on 23 November 2000, aged 95. Ironically, Vorhaus was one of the very people targeted by Wayne in his anti-communist activities.

There was a sensation in the early 1940s when the press found out Sigrid Gurie was born in Brooklyn and not in Norway. So much for ‘The Norwegian Garbo’.

Sigrid Gurie Haukelid’s twin brother Knut Haukelid gained fame as a war hero as a leader of the Norwegian Resistance during World War Two. His story is told in The Heroes of Telemark (1965), in which he is played by Richard Harris (as Knut Straud).

The same year brought The Grapes of Wrath, the classic film about the dust bowl.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7463

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