Belle Starr
Director: Irving Cummings Year: 1941 Rating: 3.0
Three stars for the many many close-ups
of Gene Tierney. Those remarkable dreamy blue-green eyes. The overbite.
I know film biographies of famous people tend to take many liberties, but
not like this. Other than the fact that there was a Belle Shirley from Missouri
and that she married Sam Starr, everything else in this film is pure fiction.
From start to finish. What makes it really strange though is that they turn
this into a pro-Confederate anti-Yankee film. It is like this was sponsored
by the KKK. They probably show it in history class in the South. I am surprised
they don't have statues of her. But it is all made up. Of course when I was
growing up romanticizing the Confederacy was par for the course. In films,
TV, books. I recall reading sympathetic biographies of Lee and Stonewall
Jackson as a teenager. I think I had a Confederate cap that I wore as a young
boy. Johnny Reb. Thankfully there are no pictures of that or I would be cancelled.
How times have changed and watching this film today was painful - on two
levels. The subject matter and also the film is just dreadful even if the
story had been true. It survives on Tierney's beauty. The rest is rubbish.
In the film - her father was murdered by the damn Yankees and Belle and her
black Mammy (Louise Beavers) are running the plantation. Tierney with her
best Scarlet O'Hara accent and Mammy doing her best Hattie McDaniel impersonation.
Her brother Ed returns from the war giving her the sad news that the south
has surrendered and they have to accept it. She refuses to. They go into
town where all the carpetbaggers have swarmed like locusts and are telling
the ex-slaves that they will get land and the blacks have put on their best
finery and are dancing in the streets. She notices a wanted poster for Sam
Starr - who has formed a band of Raiders that plan to take Missouri back.
She says fine words about him and that night he shows up at her home - played
by Randolph Scott. A Yankee captain is after him played by Dana Andrews.
They of course both soon love her.
When the Yankees burn her house down for sheltering him, she decides to join
the band and they start plundering and driving out the carpetbaggers and
blacks who have taken over land. When the Cole brothers join though they
begin stealing from everyone and Belle takes offense at that. We only used
to steal from the Yankees. In the film she is killed in the end - I hate
spoilers but that didn't happen and it pisses me off that they made her into
a southern martyr. I think Belle would have gone, what the hell is this crap.
Even Chill Wills can't save this clunker.
The real Belle Starr obviously looked nothing like Gene Tierney. She grew
up hanging around the Younger brothers and the James brothers. Her brother
was killed before the war was over for being a thief. In the film he keeps
trying to tell a joke about a "darkie" and you wish he had been killed before
the film. Of course Sam calls Mammie an Ethiopian. After the war she married
Jim Reed and had two children with him. He too was a thief and was killed
in 1874. In 1880 she married a Cherokee named Sam Starr and she organized
a gang of crooks. In 1883 she was arrested by the legendary Bass Reeves for
horse stealing and spent some time in jail. In 1886 Sam was in a gunfight
and was killed. In 1889 at the age of 41 Belle was riding home and was ambushed
and murdered. They never found the killers. So just slightly different from
the film. Not the stuff of a great romance. She was basically a petty thief
and white trash though with her two guns and cartridges across her chest
and a plumed hat she was easy to make into a legend. And this is America
and we like making heroes out of our killers and dime novels began to be
written about her exploits and she became a legend. All made up.
Belle Starr's Daughter
Director: Lesley Selander Year: 1948 Rating: 5.0 I thought maybe this one might be a little more
historically accurate than Belle Starr (1941) was. Just a tad was all I wanted.
In real life Belle's daughter became a prostitute and than an owner of several
bordellos all the way up to WWI. That would be pretty interesting - an American
make good story. From the daughter of a criminal to a successful entrepreneur.
It didn't go quite like that though she does in fact become a robber.
It begins in the 1880s and Belle (Lynn Jewel) is still alive which must have
come as a surprise to those who saw Belle Starr. She has a gang but they
have a truce with the local law Marshall Jackson (George Montgomery). Her
men stay out of town and the law won't come after them. But two of her men
Bob (Rod Cameron) and Yuma (William Phipps) go into town and have an encounter
with a lawman and kill him. With the truce broken the law comes after them.
Belle wants to hand over the two responsible men to the Marshall but they
kill her. Her daughter Rose (Ruth Roman) - later Cimarron Rose - believes
it was the Marshall. She has to go into town to work and she and the Marshall
become cozy - she believes him when he says Belle was already dead when he
found them. Later Bob and Yuma show up and convince her that it was the Marshall
and she joins them in their robbing ways - but retains her virginity with
a gun under her blanket. Poor Bob. No wonder he is so irritable. At one point
she is about to allow him to kiss her and who shows up right then but the
Hay's Office disguised as the Marshall.
This is mid-budget, shot in black and white and is of middling interest.
It was written by the great W.R. Burnett one of the truly great scriptwriters
in Hollywood. You will find credits for Little Caesar (the novel), This Gun
for Hire, High Sierra, The Asphalt Jungle (novel), The Great Escape and a
ton of others. This is probably not one he wanted mentioned in his eulogy.
The bordello angle would have been better.
