GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING (1956)

Jacques Tourneur's films are nearly always worth a look. I say nearly always because you'd be hard pushed to make a case for CITY UNDER THE SEA (War Gods of the Deep) which was a sad end to a pretty illustrious career. Luckily GREAT DAY IN THE MORNING is one of the interesting ones. A technicolor Western which has a decent script and because of this its characters have some depth. The cast is very good with Robert Stack doing well as the morally ambiguous hero and there is a nice portrait of villainy from Raymond Burr as the Elephant obsessed "Jumbo" - knowing Burr's constant weight problems I'm not sure that his physical size in this film was achieved by padding. The women who compete for Stack's attentions are good girl Rhonda Fleming and bad girl Ruth Roman. Stack can't make up his mind for most of the film and when he finally does it is too late because Ruth has paid the price for being a tart with a heart of gold in 1950's Hollywood. Set just before the American Civil War the plot concerns Southern sympathisers trying to smuggle gold down to Dixie for the coming war. The Union supporters (led by Burr who has his own agenda) are depicted very unsympathetically thanks mainly to the presence of the great Leo Gordon who almost before the opening credits are over is spitting out venom. Rating ***