Community’s an active process, only clear in the rearview mirror of one’s memories. So is the concern of Jacques Tourneur’s 1950 masterpiece Stars in My Crown, a film taking place in the reminiscence of a now-grown child about the days that his father, the local parson, kept the fictional town of Walesburg together in the humid climate of Reconstruction.
The train rolls off the station, the camera cranes up, and Joel McCrea strides into the saloon like some Western hero. Not a gunfighter, but a preacher. McCrea’s Parson Josiah Gray is a man of pious gumption, guided by an unflappable sense of principle, one who beats the apparent godlessness of Walesburg and establishes a church—but that’s all glossed over by Tourneur, merely a prologue to the film’s real action. Stars in My Crown concerns three main relationships: that of the reminiscing adopted son (played by a pre-teen Dean Stockwell) and his adoptive father in Gray; that of Doctors Harris Sr. and Jr. (Lewis Stone and James Mitchell, respectively); and that of the freed slave Uncle Famous (Juano Hernandez) and the mine owner Lon Backett (Ed Begley).
The fathers and sons act as foils to each other. While John (Stockwell) looks back in the frame of the film at adoptive parents with nostalgic wonderment, Dr. Harris Jr. is trapped in the shadow of his own father. The dying, folksy old-timer Dr. Harris Sr.’s style—and that of the rural town—don’t jive with Jr.’s more cold, academic approach to medicine, with his own father likening him more to a detective than a doctor. This has a time and place, but his insecurities find him clashing with the Parson, who sees himself as a healer of souls as much as Harris is one of bodies. This conflict reaches a nadir when Harris blames a typhoid outbreak as spreading from the church, causing Gray to shutter its doors and leaves the whole community as isolated from one another.
Meanwhile, Uncle Famous is harassed with increasing violence to get off his land. At first, Backett offers Uncle Famous a reasonable price per acre so that he can keep his nearby mine in operation, but Famous turns him down on account of not wanting much of anything the money could buy him besides what he already has—his land is his life. This doesn’t matter to Backett. All that matters is getting Famous’ property. Backett whips up his out-of-work miners to shred up Famous’ crops and run off his livestock. Backett returns with a worse offer, one he pitches as generous because Famous’ land’s now in ruin, but Famous still refuses. He’s old, not keen on change and steadfast. The next time Backett returns, he and his goon are wearing white robes and bearing torches, telling him to be off the land by the next day or face a lynching.
The Parson had tried talking Backett’s boys down before, but now he’s got to put his body on the line to help Uncle Famous. Gray stands alone, but unlike Gary Cooper in High Noon (1952), it’s by choice: some others offer their guns, but the Parson refuses, saying that he’s got to stop them his own way. When confronted with white-sheeted lynch mob, the Parson reads a will he did up with Uncle Famous earlier in the day. The will’s made out to many in the hooded crowd: fishing poles to a man who was once a boy who love to go to Famous’ stream, the watermelon patch to one of the men who used to snatch the fruit when he was young, the livestock to another man who loved Famous’ barbeque so that he too may share food with his friends and family, and so on. The men’s hatred is broken by the realization of the true extremities of their social relations, of all that people—even disparate, seemingly unrelated people—give to each other to build community. It’s a spiritual wealth that they discover they already have cultivated, rather than the strictly material wealth Backett wants to extract from the ground and use as a wedge against the people.
There’s a moral drive to Stars in My Crown and its parson hero, but that’s not to say that Tourneur’s film is moralistic. There’s a drive by through Tourneur’s storytelling for the audience to work through the film’s quandaries and land together on a conclusion about the glue of community. It’s a view arrived upon rather than imposed, which is often the case. To give a modern example: Anora (2024) concludes by switching perspective (via a direct-address shot) from the film’s ostensible protagonist Ani (Mikey Madison) to that of her former captor Igor (Yura Borisov). This shift reveals that the film isn’t about the titular character per se, but how we are to judge her. It’s a paternalistic and patronizing approach, both with regards to how it treats the character and the audience who are meant to analyze her—the rug-pull of perspective betrays the film’s initial formal identification and supplants it with its more judgmental intent. That’s a moralizing cinema, the kind which is endemic in popular culture. Stars in My Crown is demonstrative of a more affective type of cinematic communication, one which trusts the audience to run along with its journey, as if inviting them, too, to enter into the Parson’s church at the end with all the other townsfolk who have come to share the same light.