‘The Shepherd of the Hills’: Of Mothers and Fathers

NR | 1h 38m | Drama | 1941

If you’re looking for a typical John Wayne Western action-flick, look elsewhere. Wayne is at his most reflective in “The Shepherd of the Hills.”

Missouri’s 19th-century Ozark Mountains harbor a dark secret. The Matthews family of moonshiners believe they’re cursed. The clan includes cantankerous Aunt Mollie (Beulah Bondi); her husband, Old Matt (James Barton); and their dimwitted son, Pete (Marc Lawrence).

There’s also Mollie’s orphaned nephew, Young Matt (John Wayne). Apparently, the curse flows from their long-abandoned land nearby—Moanin’ Meadows.

Desperate to shed that curse, Mollie sells Moanin’ Meadows to the first man asking for it, stranger Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey). Mollie’s neighbor, Sammy Lane (Betty Field), makes the introductions to thank Howitt for nursing her widowed, wounded father back to health.

Gradually, Howitt ends up nursing others back to health and happiness, too. His resolve to set up a home in such hostile hills rallies almost everyone around him. Almost.

Young Matt has sworn to kill his father for abandoning his mother, Sarah, leaving her to die, sick and lonely. Upon discovering that Howitt, this “shepherd of the hills,” is his father, Matt’s livid. He figures he must fulfil his blood–oath, even against the pleas of his sweetheart, Sammy. So, he walks out to the land, where Sarah’s buried, with one aim: to kill Howitt.

Through sensitive framing, cinematographers Charles Lang Jr. and W. Howard Greene allow the film’s characters to come alive. You feel their longings, their pain, their gentleness, and their strength, which are both hidden and revealed.

Field’s tomboyish, often skittish Sammy is the perfect foil for Carey’s assured, shepherdly Howitt. Expertly, Wayne uses his eyes and open-mouthed silences here to convey feelings the script can’t express.

Barton’s brilliant as Mollie’s long-suffering husband; he’s burdened by having known both the gentle young woman she was and the bitter old hag she’s become.

Loss of Gentleness

Screenwriters Grover Jones and Stuart Anthony superbly adapted Harold Bell Wright’s novel of the same name to tell a story about the making and unmaking of women and men. The film shows how some girls lose their gentleness on attaining womanhood and how some boys mistake bravado for strength on attaining manhood.

Like sheep, all children exude goodness in childhood. It’s up to parents, shepherds of a sort, to help them carry that goodness into adulthood.

Director Henry Hathaway frames love as a freedom that nurtures sight. He shows stifling control, which masquerades as love, as an enslavement that exacerbates blindness. Watch for a stirring scene involving “blind-born” Granny Becky (Marjorie Main).

Are women like Mollie so domineering that their husbands and sons don’t flourish? When Pete so much as gestures, everyone in Mollie’s household mimics her to say, “Shut up!” That’s even before he speaks. Barton, for his part, laments the spine he hasn’t grown.

Masculine assertiveness, even aggression, needs tempering only when harmful. Laughingly, Sammy runs circles around Mollie’s ferocious dog, just so his dangerously long leash tightens itself around the pole.

Equally, as Howitt demonstrates, masculine violence in a righteous cause isn’t always bad. Sometimes, it preserves more lives than performative peace.

Responsible Man

Of Matt, Howitt tells Sammy: “He’s my son. If dyin’ for him would help, that would be easy. But I know that if he kills me, he loses himself and you.”

Howitt sees beyond the adult Matt’s swaggering machismo to the restrained boy he once was, recognizing the responsible man he can still become.

Matt needed and received his mother’s love. He also needed, but was denied, his father’s caring example.

Once, infuriated that Matt doesn’t sense that his feelings for her are mutual, Sammy mutters at him beneath her breath, “You see plumb fancy with your eyes shut tight.” Gradually, she develops a more mature, more sensitive warmth toward Matt.

When Sammy inadvertently sits in what was once Sarah’s rocking chair, she spies a tinier chair nearby, which once was occupied by little Matt. Wordlessly, she senses the power Sarah had as a mother to shape the kind of man her boy Matt would become.

Silently, she also senses her own feminine power as a prospective wife and her maternal power as a would-be mother; this is a power she can either use as Sarah did or abuse as Mollie did.

Howitt just wants to make up for time he lost as a father. It’s Sammy who senses that first. She tells Matt that she warned Howitt about Moanin’ Meadows: “I told him it was an unhappy land. All he said was, ‘Maybe it just needs a-carin’ for, like unhappy folks.’”

You can watch “The Shepherd of the Hills” on Prime Video, Apple TV, and YouTube.

‘The Shepherd of the Hills’
Director: Henry Hathaway
Starring: John Wayne, Betty Field, Harry Carey
Not Rated
Running Time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Release Date: July 18, 1941
Rated: 4 stars out of 5

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