The directorial career of Irving Pichel (pronounced peekl) ran from the Cooper-and-Schoedsack specials The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and She (1935) to a couple of religious productions in 1953-54; it peaked with the wartime dramas The Pied Piper (1942) and The Moon Is Down (1943). Pichel also kept busy as a character actor (e.g., the towering manservant Sandor in Dracula's Daughter). But his most indelible cinematic contributions went uncredited: it is Pichel's carillon of a voice that narrates the John Ford classics How Green Was My Valley (1941) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon(1949).
That voice is heard at the beginning of Pichel's own Santa Fe, seeking to graft Ford-style allegory onto a formulaic tale of post-Civil War animosities and railroad-building. Randolph Scott (hero of She 25 years earlier) plays a former Confederate officer who, in a charmingly daft moment, lurches onto a rolling flatcar while fleeing vindictive Union veterans and finds himself recruited by the Santa Fe Railroad. His three brothers, refusing to "work for Yankees," desert him and turn more or less accidental outlaws. Scott is supposed to be torn between loyalty to his blood kin and loyalty to his employer (Warner Anderson, later of TV's The Line-Up)--also his rival for the affections of the war widow (Janis Carter) whose Union-officer husband was killed in a battle with Scott's Rebs. But the script is piecemeal and the individual scenes flatfooted. Sole exception: an out-of-the-blue fiddling contest (!) in a mountain pass, which both exacerbates and helps resolve a desperate crisis for Scott. --Richard T. Jameson More...
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