Produced at RKO, Allegheny Uprising is like a B-movie version of John Ford's Drums Along the Mohawk featuring the stars of Ford's Stagecoach. Set in 1759, Jim Smith (Wayne) and his fellow settlers, return to the Conococheague region of Allegheny after helping the British fend off French forces only to realize that incompetent martinet British Captain Swanson (George Sanders) is both ineffectual and combative when unscrupulous trader Callender (Brian Donlevy) continues selling rum and arms to raiding Indians.

Tensions escalate between the colonials and the British when Callender, subverting British law, ingeniously smuggles his goods disguised as military supplies while Swanson is too pig-headed to allow the contraband to be searched and discovered. This leads to several pre-Revolutionary War skirmishes between the British and Americans, with Callender largely sitting on the sidelines watching over his illegal goods.

Produced on a relatively lavish budget of $696,000, Allegheny Uprising lacks Drums Along the Mohawk's carefully nurtured atmosphere and delicate pacing, but compensates somewhat with lively action set pieces that deliver the goods. Though less historically authentic than Ford's film, the battle scenes featuring several hundred costumed extras are excitingly realized, and the Santa Monica Mountains and Lake Sherwood locations are well used. This is somewhat surprising given the fact that the film's director, William A. Seiter, was heretofore best-known for comedies like Diplomaniacs, Sons of the Desert, and Room Service.

Wayne, second-billed after Stagecoach's Claire Trevor, is very good in this "Eastern," and Sanders and Donlevy are their usual sinister selves. Longtime character actor Ian Wolfe has a major supporting part as one of Donlevy's coconspirators, while Chill Wills shares screentime with Wayne that anticipates their work together on The Alamo 20 years later.

Much less successful is Trevor's badly conceived character, sort of a colonial Annie Oakley, whose wildcat antics (and anachronistically '30s hairstyle) are beneath the actress's abilities. Making matters worse is the outrageously broad stereotyping of her father, "Mac" MacDougall, played without restraint by Wilfred Lucas.

The film was not a success upon its release in late-1939, and singularly ill-timed, painting an unflattering portrait of the British military just as war was breaking out in Europe.

Reunion in France was primarily a vehicle for Joan Crawford at MGM, with her Michelle de la Becque a Parisian socialite blithely oblivious to the Nazi threat in the days before the German Army walked around France's supposedly impregnable Maginot Line. France's fall horrifies Mademoiselle de la Becque, especially after her fiance, French industrialist/inventor Robert Cortot (Philip Dorn), turns out to be a Nazi collaborator. Her growing resolve to fight France's occupiers is tested when downed American RAF pilot Pat Talbot (Wayne, whose first appearance comes 41 minutes into the picture) needs her help getting back to England.

By early-in-the-war Hollywood standards the film starts out well enough (it was shot during the summer of '42), with Crawford's socialite getting a rude awakening and, in early scenes, paying a kind of penance and earning a well-deserved comeuppance for having lived in ignorance of her country's peril. Unfortunately, after briefly flirting with the idea of standing by her man and his newfound German associates and then swallowing her pride by working at the high-priced dress shop she once patronized, the film becomes progressively silly. Though a Nazi dinner party sequence capped by an elaborate swastika-shaped dining table might be written off as standard wartime propaganda, Reunion in France's ideas about Nazi occupation are, in a word, quite hilarious.

For Mademoiselle de la Becque, the tragedy of war is epitomized in a scene where fat hausfraus with a singularly bad taste in clothes swarm her beloved dress shop, squeezing their flabby bodies into the latest Parisian fashions. The horror! (Natalie Schafer, long before she was Mrs. Howell on Gilligan's Island is however wonderfully nasty as the demanding wife of a German officer.) In another outrageously unbelievable scene, a Louis Armstrong clone sings "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead (You Rascal You)" to a fat German couple straight out of a Bavarian pretzel commercial.

The film is also an outrageous cheat, in a twist near the end this reviewer won't give away accept to say that it negates much of what had come before it, particularly the idea that some French enthusiastically collaborated with their Nazi occupiers in exchange for a little comfort. Adding to the unreality of it all is that everyone -- American Wayne, French Crawford, German John Carradine, etc. -- all speak English and no attempt is made at all to explain how everyone communicates with one another.

A Claudette Colbert road comedy with John Wayne just along for the ride, Without Reservations pales next to Colbert comedies like The Palm Beach Story, whose middle section aboard a cross-country train this resembles. She's the author of Here Is Tomorrow, an influential best-selling novel being adapted into movie, he's a marine flyer back from the war whom she wants cast in the leading role (after Cary Grant drops out). Problem is her novel's hero is a progressive, intellectual postwar man ready to take on the troubles of a postwar world, but Wayne's flyer thinks men and women should stop trying to analyze everything and get on with the Baby Boom.

The picture is amiable enough, and Colbert is like Wayne highly watchable in practically anything, but the particulars of the authoress' philosophies remain decidedly murky, and his proud-to-be-middle-brow resistance toward her muddles matters considerably. Also along for the ride is agreeable Don DeFore, but he's like a hole in the screen with the character functioning as little more than a chaperone to keep things within Production Code guidelines.

On the plus side is the film's early postwar atmosphere, a fantasy in its particulars but its overall mood seems honest enough. Other scenes satirizing Hollywood don't come off as well, with awkwardly inserted star cameos fun to watch but which otherwise add nothing to the film.

The Technicolor Tycoon was, at $3.2 million, RKO's most expensive production to date and, though popular, failed to earn back its negative cost. Wayne stars as Johnny Munroe, a railroad builder forging a tunnel deep in the Andes for stuffy tin magnate Frederick Alexander (Cedric Hardwicke). Wayne falls for Alexander's daughter, Maura (Laraine Day), whom he eventually marries against her father's wishes. Alexander responds by withholding much-needed supplies to Munroe's construction site, delaying construction of the tunnel by many months, and likewise refuses to sign off on a concrete lining for the tunnel, resulting in a series of cave-ins.

The battle of wills between Alexander and Munroe gradually turns the latter into a modern-day Ahab, alienating his new wife and pals Pop Matthews (James Gleason), Fog Harris (Grant Withers), Joe (Paul Fix), and Curly (Michael Harvey). (Mild Spoilers) Eventually, the tunnel is abandoned to construct a railroad bridge, but by now Munroe has become obsessed with getting the job done at any cost, so much so that he's willing to put his own men's lives at risk.

Critics of Tycoon point to the aborted casting of Maureen O'Hara in Day's role as the reason for the film's failure, that Wayne's natural chemistry with the raven-haired Irishwoman would have generated sparks that fail to materialize between Wayne and Day, though the bigger problem with the film is two-fold. For one thing Hardwicke, wearing a patently phony wig, is appropriately erudite but insufferably dull as Wayne's rival for Day's loyalty. He's a stiff, saddled with the kind of over-written dialogue Hollywood screenwriters think rich people say to one another when alone in their studies. His miscasting, far worse than Day's, is exemplified when late in the film he's asked to express some tenderness, but instead comes off just as cold and unemotional as he is in scenes where he's supposed to be aloof and intractable.

Another problem is that audiences weren't particularly keen to see Wayne's character change from a big-hearted idealist to a money-obsessed builder who turns a blind eye to his men's safety. Though the film ends happily, the pat climax doesn't ring true at all.

That said, the film's big-scale production impresses with its elaborate miniatures and flood climax, and Wayne's star power is almost enough to carry all the dull parlor scenes with Hardwicke, Anthony Quinn (as Hardwicke's nephew, sympathetic to Wayne's quandary) and Judith Anderson, the latter cast somewhat against type as a sympathetic chaperone.

HUAC agents are the unlikely heroes of Big Jim McLain, Wayne's personal offering to the Red Scare Menace genre of the late-1940s/early-'50s. But where Jet Pilot, Wayne's film for detail-obsessed anticommunist Howard Hughes is a laff riot, Big Jim McLain is notably short on action and more an interesting relic of its era than high camp. Big Jim McLain (Wayne) with partner Mal Baxter (Big James Arness, pre-Gunsmoke and a protegee of Wayne's) head to Hawaii to investigate a Communist conspiracy to paralyze international shipping.

Compared with the most hysterical of anticommunist films, My Son John, Red Planet Mars, and Invasion: USA (all also 1952) to name but three, Big Jim McLain lacks their value as high camp entertainment. Instead, the film's main asset is its early-'50s Hawaiian scenery: most of the film was shot on location there, so at least there are pretty pictures amidst all the dull espionage investigation footage. The film's only jaw-dropping moments come at the beginning and the very end, when the film's writers propose nothing less than repealing the Fifth Amendment from the Bill of Rights. As far as Big Jim is concerned, the haters of freedom are merely hiding behind this unfortunate addition to the Constitution to escape justice for their acts of sabotage.

Meanwhile, the filmmakers make the case that the Good Guys from HUAC are justified breaking into homes without a warrant, conducting illegal wiretaps, and beating up suspects (in a scene anticipating McLintock!'s famous "pilgrim...somebody oughta belt you in the mouth. But I won't, I won't. The hell I won't!"). In this sense the film plays like a preview, 50-years-ahead-of-its-time, of life under the Patriot Act.

In The West Point Story (1950), one of six films in Warner's James Cagney Signature Collection set, released just last month, Cagney plays a down-on-his-luck Broadway director given the chance to redeem himself by whipping into shape a group of amateur thespian-students at West Point. In Trouble Along the Way, John Wayne plays a down-on-his-luck football coach given the chance to redeem himself by whipping into shape a rag-tag football team at a small Catholic university. Both films ask their audiences to suspend a stadium-full of disbelief. In the case of the Wayne picture, his has-been coach innocently engages in a series of outrageous scams with far-reaching legal consequences impacting the entire university. He's not a man who thinks very far ahead.

Mainly, though, Trouble Along the Way is a syrupy domestic comedy-melodrama, with coach-turned-bookie Steve Williams (Wayne) battling to maintain custody of his 11-year-old daughter, Carole (Sherry Jackson), and out of the hands of his no-good ex-wife (Marie Windsor), who wants the child solely out of spite. A frumpy, misguided caseworker with an axe to grind, Alice Singleton (Donna Reed), initially sides with the ex-wife, but Alice's icy veneer gradually melts when it becomes clear that Steve's one swell pop.

Wayne, a former football player himself, might have been attracted to the film's setting and the atypical role it offered him, especially as several of his own kids were at the time about the same age as Sherry Jackson. Jackson, an excellent child actor (a dozen years away from her va-va-Voom! femme fatale run on '60s television) unfortunately is given very un-childlike, sardonic dialogue, though Jackson still comes through in several scenes.

Though Wayne is charming in his scenes with Jackson, the picture overflows with cliches. Charles Coburn plays a cuddly rector straight out of Going My Way, and Max Steiner's overemphatic score leaves no Catholic / college football musical stone unturned.

Video & Audio

The full frame transfers of all six films are impressive, with the '50s Warner Bros. titles coming off best, though even Without Reservations, the Technicolor Tycoon, and especially Allegheny Uprising quite eye-pleasing despite the generally sorry state of that particular library. The English mono audio is likewise fine, and optional French and English subtitles are included (on the features only).

Extra Features

Each disc includes two shorts, generally a one-reel comedy (Pete Smith, Joe McDoakes) and a Warner Bros. or MGM cartoon. These are all okay, though nothing stands out, and none of the material relates either to Wayne or the films they support. Personally, this reviewer would have preferred audio commentaries putting these films into historical perspective and in terms of Wayne's screen career. Big Jim McLain especially cries out for a film-length exploration. Half the titles include trailers, and the one for Trouble Along the Way references the Joe McDoakes series, with Wayne, not George O'Hanlon, turning up behind that big ol' eight-ball.

Parting Thoughts

Some John Wayne films (e.g., The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) are well-worth revisiting every few years, while others (Hatari!, Chisum) hold up well when stumbled upon while channel surfing or when the mood strikes you at the video store. The six films in The John Wayne Film Collection are for various reasons worth sitting through once, but it's unlikely you'll be in any hurry to watch them again anytime soon. Recommended.

Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel. His audio commentary for Invasion of Astro Monster is due out in June.