If you asked the average filmgoer whether they’ve ever seen or heard of Jacques Tourneur’s 1950 Western Stars in My Crown, they would probably reply, “Who’s Jacques Tourneur?” But even those who do know who Tourneur is might still be shocked to hear he made a Western. After all, the French-born auteur was best known for his low-budget, atmospheric horror films like Cat People (1942) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). But, in 1950, Tourneur stepped out of his comfort zone and made a rather sentimental Western film about a preacher (played by Western veteran Joel McCrea) in the fictional Southern town of Walesburg in the aftermath of the Civil War.
But this film is not like the countless Westerns that pervaded the silver screen in the 1940s and 1950s. It doesn’t feature any epic gunfights or sweeping vistas of the American frontier. Its characters don’t have any grandiose ambitions to go West to carve out their own destinies or become wealthy. Instead, it’s a fairly quaint film, its scope limited to a single small town where everyone is (mostly) content with their place in life. Its hero is far softer and kinder than the gruff and aggressively macho men embodied by the likes of John Wayne. But underneath this unassuming aesthetic is a surprisingly powerful exploration of themes that couldn’t be more relevant today.
A Western About an Infectious Disease Outbreak
The first major test faced by Parson Gray in the film occurs when his young nephew and surrogate son, John (Dean Stockwell), comes down with typhoid fever. The town’s non-religious doctor, Daniel Harris Jr. (James Mitchell), warns Gray to shelter in place so as not to spread the boy’s illness. However, Gray disregards the doctor’s advice and gives a sermon at the local school, after which several of the schoolchildren and their teacher (Amanda Blake), with whom Dr. Harris is in love, end up contracting typhoid themselves. This outbreak forces the school to close down, and a guilt-ridden Gray later decides to close down his church as well, his faith shaken.
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Despite taking place on a much smaller scale, this storyline eerily predicts the COVID-19 pandemic that would ravage the world 70 years later. Like the typhoid outbreak in the film, the spread of COVID-19 would also result in the closure of schools and churches alike. (However, unlike COVID-19, an airborne virus, typhoid is a bacterial illness spread by touching contaminated food and surfaces.)
Furthermore, the conflict between Parson Gray and Dr. Harris foreshadows how religion and science would later come into conflict during the pandemic, with some religious individuals and institutions opposing lockdowns, vaccines, and other preventative measures to catastrophic results. Indeed, although the film ultimately exonerates Gray of responsibility for causing the typhoid outbreak, it still comes off as a rather prescient warning about the dangers of ignoring scientific and medical experts in times of crisis. As the film shows, even people with the best intentions — like Gray — can still make dangerous mistakes.
‘Stars in My Crown’ Is a Western Response to Jim Crow
Speaking of watershed sociopolitical events from 2020, the film also resonates to some degree with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (among others) that year and the widespread protests that followed. In a rare move for a classic Hollywood Western, Stars in My Crown features a Black character in a prominent role, Uncle Famous Prill (played by Puerto Rican actor Juano Hernandez).
Uncle Famous is a formerly enslaved man who refuses to give up his land to a greedy mine owner (Ed Begley), prompting the furious owner and his soon-to-be-laid-off workers to attack the property at night in hopes of intimidating Uncle Famous into giving it up. The film culminates with a harrowing sequence in which the mine workers show up at Uncle Famous’s property in KKK-like hoods and threaten to lynch him, with an unarmed Gray as his only protection, while young John watches.
Released 10 years before the publication of Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Stars in My Crown covers similar themes of racist violence in a small town as seen through the eyes of a white child. It also shares many similarities with the 1948 film adaptation of William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust, which also stars Hernandez as a wrongly victimized Black man who befriends a white child.
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But what sets Stars in My Crown apart from these other works is its status as a Western, a genre often accused of promoting, rather than critiquing, racism, particularly against Native Americans. While Stars in My Crown doesn’t feature any Native American characters, the fact that its principal antagonist is a white man trying to steal a non-white man’s land through violence and intimidation for his own selfish gain nevertheless makes it far more progressive on this issue than many other Westerns from its time period.
Furthermore, although the film arguably plays into white savior tropes by relying on a noble white Christian man to save a Black man from lynching, it also deserves credit for frankly depicting and condemning lynching at a time when it was still widely perpetrated across the American South. In addition, the film’s inclusion of not just a Black character, but a self-sufficient land-owning Black character living in the South during Reconstruction, also sets the film apart from its cinematic contemporaries, which typically featured Black characters only as servants or porters with little to no speaking lines.
‘Stars in My Crown’ Shines Brightly
Stars in My Crown
- Release Date
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May 11, 1950
- Runtime
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90 minutes
- Director
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Jacques Tourneur
- Writers
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Margaret Fitts
- Producers
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William H. Wright
Cast
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Joel McCrea
Josiah Doziah Gray
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Dean Stockwell
John Kenyon
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On the one hand, it’s easy to see why this film has been largely forgotten over the last 75 years. It was directed by a relatively unknown (and foreign-born) filmmaker associated more with the horror genre than with Westerns. Perhaps most importantly, its themes of racism and the conflict between science and faith are simply not the kinds of topics a filmgoing audience would have expected or wanted to see in a Western.
Yet, it is for precisely those reasons that Stars in My Crown deserves more attention — it goes out of its way to distinguish itself within a largely homogeneous and traditionalist genre. While it may be a product of its time in some respects, it’s far ahead of its time in many others. Stars in My Crown is currently available to stream on Max.
