Review of So Big!

Selena Peake a young girl without a mother. Her father loves her very much but he is a bit childish, and a gambler. She is about ten when the movie opens, then is sent to boarding school. Ten years later, he is shot dead over a poker game. Selena is sent to High Prairie, outside Chicago, as a schoolteacher in a Dutch community. She lives with the Pool family, which consists of Klass and Marrtje, their son Roelf, two annoying daughters who do nothing but skulk about and giggle in a dreadful high-pitched tone, plus two other creepy guys that I take to be farm hands. Selena is relegated to the top floor attic but is treated fairly enough, even if everyone pokes fun at her expense. The entire community is rather plain and simple, but Roelf Pool is a very intelligent--if truculent-- young man. He has a crush on his new schoolteacher and enjoys reading books she lends to him. So the era is the 1890s and at that point everything ran around the doings of the church. Selena goes to a Sunday sermon and a big hulking man there, Pervus DeJonge, catches her eye. The wealthy and widowed Mrs. Paarlenberg has her sights set on Pervus but once he meets Selena, he is smitten. At a box lunch charity supper to buy a new organ for the church, he bids nothing on the widow's steamer-trunk sized lunch but bids a crazy amount ($10, which is about $300 in today's dollars!) on Selena's tiny one. He has a nice large farm but he's uneducated. Selena starts to tutor him and the next thing you know, they're married. They seem like such a mismatched couple. She's bright and witty and he's dull and stolid. Still, a single woman on the prairie would know she'd have to marry quickly and as good as she could, and Pervus is, if nothing else, a good hard worker. She'd once eaten asparagus with her father at a fancy hotel when she was a girl and she thinks that would be a fine crop, but Pervus disagrees. He's not much for changes. As quickly as they are wed, they have a child named Dirk. His nickname is "So Big" dating back to a game she played with him. Around this time, Mrs. Pool dies and Mr. Pool takes up with the Widow Paarlenberg. Roelf comes to see Selena, tells her is taking off for parts unknown. The widow doesn't like him and he feels there's more out there. Then Pervus dies and the care of the farm is left to Selena. At first it is hard going but once she starts growing newfangled asparagus, she becomes quite wealthy. Dirk grows up and after college he becomes an architect. He's having a dalliance with an older married woman who talks him into trying to sell bonds. He does and he is a natural at it, become very wealthy in a short time. Selena is upset by this, as she feels it is beneath him. He hires an illustrator to do an ad for him and in sashays Bette Davis, in that fabulous persona she had even back then before she became huge. He makes his interest known, she's stand-offish. They go out to visit his mother (the old age makeup on Barbara Stanwyck was almost ghoulish) and who should show up but Roelf Pool, back from Europe, where he is a famous and wealthy sculptor. I was a little confused by the ending, as it seemed as if old Roelf and Selena were eyeing each other rather romantically. Then again, there's probably only about six years age difference (he was 12 or so to her 18 or so when she came to High Prairie) He seemed to be still fostering the same crush on her as he did all those years ago. Another disconnect was that this was supposed to be High Prairie in Illinois, 'outside Chicago' but in the final outdoor scenes there are definitely mountains in the background. . .



I want you to realize that this whole thing called Life is just a grand adventure. The trick is to act in it and look out at the same time. And remember: no matter what happens - good or bad - it's just so much velvet.