The Missouri Traveler

Gary Merrill and Lee Marvin

Jerry Hopper's The Missouri Traveler is an amiable and lackluster slice of Americana released in 1958. Brandon De Wilde stars as a circa 1900 runaway named Biarn who finds a home in Delphi, Missouri. He is mentored by two men, a kindly newspaper man played by Gary Merrill and a cruel planter played by Lee Marvin in his first starring role. Marvin has a love/hate relationship with the flower of the local gentry played by Mary Hosford. Ms. Hosford's presence is due to the fact that she was about to be married to the head of the production company responsible for the film, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. She is a truly dreadful actress and her appearances are kept to a minimum. Fortunately, she appears in no other films and seems to have found her calling as a bride of rich men (Mr. Hosford was the John Deere heir) and a breeder of thoroughbreds.

The Missouri Traveler is kind of a horse picture aimed at adolescents, Biarn being a horse whisperer of sorts. The picture was released by Disney's distribution company, but sank without a trace upon release. Biarn trains Merrill's horse, named Twister, to be a harness racer and the film culminates in a head to head competition with De Wilde and Marvin riding the sulkies. There are only about a dozen or so American films featuring harness  racing, but what stood out to me about this film is its undeniable status as a imitation John Ford flick. It was produced by Ford's son, Patrick, and features his son in law, the always welcome Ken Curtis. The role Curtis plays is not much different than the cornpone role he played for Ford in The Searchers which had also been produced by C. V. Whitney. The Missouri Traveler's cinematographer was Winton C. Hoch who also lensed She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, and The Searchers. The Technicolor images look marvelous and are, next to Marvin's performance, the film's chief asset. The Missouri Traveler has many of the hallmarks of a Ford film and may have been concocted with him in mind: there are donnybrooks, tempestuous lovers, political meetings in saloons, fisticuffs as a rite of manhood, Yanks and Rebs living in harmony, jibes against Temperance, and parade floats.

Unfortunately, Jerry Hopper is a journeyman director soon to find a haven on television. As with Andrew V. McLaglen, Ford's most obvious imitator, a quick comparison to the master demonstrates the verve and snap of Ford's style. The action scenes in The Missouri Traveler, specifically fisticuffs and Marvin beating Twister, are poorly handled and lend no sense of danger or excitement to the proceedings. Hopper does milk his cast for all they are worth. The supporting players boast such familiar faces as Paul Ford, Frank Cady, and Mary Field, all doing yeoman work. Gary Merrill is in better shape than usual and the role of the avuncular editor suits him. 

I had heard of Brandon De Wilde before I ever saw him in a film. On long car trips or during a break in the evening, my parents would reminisce about the films they saw when courting. Soon they would be imitating little Brandon De Wilde and calling out to Alan Ladd, "Shane, Shane, come back Shane!" I could sense a glimpsing of a myth that was both powerful and ridiculous. One I would investigate in the future. Because of his premature death, an aura of tragedy has clouded De Wilde's career. The Missouri Traveler was made six years after Shane and showed that his aura of innocent vulnerability remained as he matured. This passive image would not help him become an adult star, but it augured years of character roles. He would have looked equally angelic and helpless even if he lived to eighty.

Marvin was thirty three during the filming of The Missouri Traveler and starting to emerge as a lead. After excelling in a batch of compelling supporting roles, mostly in Westerns or action films, he lends the flick the shot of sadistic villainy it sorely needs. His way with a whip makes this a dry run for Liberty Valence, his first A lead role. The Missouri Traveler is a tepid B picture, but it has moments that save it from me consigning it to obscurity, chiefly every second of Marvin's menace.