RACHEL AND THE STRANGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 505, 25 February 1949, Page 24

RACHEL AND THE STRANGER

(RKO-Radio) ‘THIS is a surprisingly pleasant little \ comedy, considering its use of what looked at first sight like unpromising material. The setting this time is the good old frontier days when Americans wore coon-skin caps and deerskin jackets, when every turkey-gobbler calling in the woods might turn out to be a Shawnee on the warpath, and when ‘no one with an interest in his scalp went around without a musket and powder-horn slung over his shoulder. Rachel (Loretta Young) is a downtrodden bond-slave (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) (kinda dim, but not bad lookin’), who is bought for 22 dollars by Big Davey Harvey (William Holden), a pioneering farmer who lives one day’s march from the stockade and whose wife has died of the fever. After buying her he marries her, not for love, but, as he quizzically puts it, because "a man’s gotta keep up appearances no matter how deep he is in the wilderness." As the weeks pass Rachel has a pretty miserable time of it, partly because Big Davey is too busy breaking in his 200 acres of wilderness to bother much about her, and also because Big Davey’s seven-year-old son, Little Davey, abuses her as nothing more than someone to be bought or sold. Just when things have become so bad that she has started talking to herself for company, along comes a tall dark stranger who turns out to be none other than that famed buffalo hunter and Indian scalper Jim Fairways (Robert Mitchum), Jim, of course, soon’ sees what a pearl of great price Big Davey unknowingly has in his house, a woman who not only does all the chores about the place, but is also, as he puts it, "practical, patient, pure, and pretty." And as it happens, at this particular time Jim has got a little sick of hunting and is looking around for just such a woman to make him a wife. So notwithstanding the legal bond between Big Davey and Rachel, he hangs about for weeks casting calf eyes at her and singing little songs with his guitar, with the result that Rachel begins to blossom like a rose, and Big Davey, who is not so dumb after all, gets so mad that before long he and Jim are scrappin’ like a couple of fightin’ cocks. And if it hadn’t happened that some rampagin’ Shawnees had decided to attack the cabin just then, there’s no saying what murder might have been done. Although the cabin is burnt down in the ensuing battle, Big Davey, Rachel and Jim are saved because the Shawnees didn’t know about such things as cellars, and when Little Davey returns with a posse from the stockade, Rachél and Big, Davey fall into each other’s arms and vow to build a new life amid the ruins. Jim goes off with his musket and guitar after the Indians, and Little Davey decides that Rachel mightn’t make such a bad mother after all. A neat piece of direction by Norman Foster, helped by some _ poker-faced humour from William Holden, ‘has created a warm comedy which shows that people always had their domestic problems, event in the good old days.