The completed product of Brigham Young was not the film Darryl F. Zanuck envisioned. Originally the film was to have been an actual Hollywood biography of Brigham Young starring Walter Huston. Huston would have been grand casting in the role. But he backed out and Zanuck was stuck without a leading man. He decided to use Dean Jagger who he had under contract, but who was not a leading man. Zanuck then had the roles of the young farmer and his gentile sweetheart upgraded and cast Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell in them who had done so well in several films and built those parts up.
Several LDS reviewers have pointed out the glaring inaccuracies of the story so I won't repeat them. Nevertheless Henry Hathaway does a fine job making this motion picture move. He certainly captures the grit and determination of the early Mormon settlers in Utah after they are run out of Illinois.
Two of the minor characters in the film that I liked are Marc Lawrence as the prosecuting attorney of Joseph Smith and John Carradine as Mormon scout Porter Rockwell. Though Joseph Smith was not tried for anything before he was murdered, Lawrence's attorney is quite typical of the demagogic politician who made the Mormon residency of wherever they settled so much grist for their propaganda mill.
As for Carradine, part frontier scout and part religious zealot, he fits the conception I have always had of Rockwell. A truly colorful character, he was as well known as Brigham Young himself in his day. He'd be a good subject for a biographical film himself.
One of the great enigmas of the last two centuries coming down to this one is the fact that there still has never been one shred of archaeological evidence to prove the existence of that western hemisphere civilization that the Book of Mormon speaks of. Yet for a people that built their faith on a myth there is no denying the civilization they created in Utah. And in the climax when those seagulls came and ate the locusts destroying the crop the Saints planted that first year. No seagulls have ever been in the state of Utah before or since. That was indeed something of a miracle.
And from the LDS reviewers here I see they are well pleased with this film.
Several LDS reviewers have pointed out the glaring inaccuracies of the story so I won't repeat them. Nevertheless Henry Hathaway does a fine job making this motion picture move. He certainly captures the grit and determination of the early Mormon settlers in Utah after they are run out of Illinois.
Two of the minor characters in the film that I liked are Marc Lawrence as the prosecuting attorney of Joseph Smith and John Carradine as Mormon scout Porter Rockwell. Though Joseph Smith was not tried for anything before he was murdered, Lawrence's attorney is quite typical of the demagogic politician who made the Mormon residency of wherever they settled so much grist for their propaganda mill.
As for Carradine, part frontier scout and part religious zealot, he fits the conception I have always had of Rockwell. A truly colorful character, he was as well known as Brigham Young himself in his day. He'd be a good subject for a biographical film himself.
One of the great enigmas of the last two centuries coming down to this one is the fact that there still has never been one shred of archaeological evidence to prove the existence of that western hemisphere civilization that the Book of Mormon speaks of. Yet for a people that built their faith on a myth there is no denying the civilization they created in Utah. And in the climax when those seagulls came and ate the locusts destroying the crop the Saints planted that first year. No seagulls have ever been in the state of Utah before or since. That was indeed something of a miracle.
And from the LDS reviewers here I see they are well pleased with this film.