Maryland

Maryland is about a woman (Fay Bainter) who loves horses, raises horses, rides horses, races horses, and when she get's her husband involved and he's thrown to his death - hates horses. She orders the horse involved killed and all her other horses sold. But she can't keep her son from learning to ride, and racing when he's grown up, played by John Payne (Miracle on 34th Street), though she tries. Walter Brennan, winner of numerous Academy Awards, is the horse trainer who continues to encourage Payne even years after being fired, and Charles Ruggles (Papa's Delicate Condition) is Payne's uncle. Not just a good horse story with great technicolor; some hilarious comedy sequences and a nice plot twist make Maryland a winner for all audiences.

JOHN PAYNE is the man who became a Fox star but here he takes fourth place in the billing behind top-billed WALTER BRENNAN, who once again plays a crusty horse trainer at odds with Payne's mother, Fay Bainter. Bainter plays a woman whose husband was killed during a hunting ride and forbids her son to follow in his footsteps. Walter Brennan and Fay Bainter carry most of the movie and justify their top billing.

The plot is a slow-moving one that is purely routine but helped by some gorgeous technicolor photography. Brenda Joyce is the feminine love interest for Payne and Hattie McDaniel is the sassy servant once again stealing every scene she's in. The irrelevant comic subplot involving a black servant (Ben Carter) is tedious and comes across as padding to inject some humor into the proceedings.

The theme of a woman refusing to let her son ride because of a tragic accident in the past has been done many times before and here the presentation is standard, at best, amid sumptuous settings. Fay Bainter is convincing as the bitter and stubborn mother who refuses to let her son ride and John Payne does well enough in a sympathetic but underwritten role. Joyce can't do much with her pallid role as his romantic interest.

Summing up: notable only for its color photography and as an interesting showcase for the early promise of John Payne who was about to become a popular Fox star after this one.

In 1938 Walter Brennan won his Best Supporting Actor Award playing the cantankerous old horse trainer and unreconstructed civil war rebel for Kentucky. 20th Century Fox gave Brennan a chance at top billing in the same kind of role. Still cantankerous, but reconciled to the end of the Civil War in Maryland.

Brennan works for genteel horse people Sidney Blackmer and Fay Bainter who have a son who grows up to be John Payne. When during a fox hunt Blackmer falls from a horse and is killed, Bainter develops a monomania about horses whom she loved. She orders them off her place and the mare that threw her husband destroyed. She also dispenses with Brennan's services and he and granddaughter who grows up to be Brenda Joyce move off the place.

15 years pass and of course true love takes its course as Payne and Joyce meet. Brennan's developed himself quite a steeplechase horse and is entering him in the Maryland Cup.

Bainter has forbidden Payne to ride with the memory of Blackmer's death still fresh. But given where he grew up that was going to be impossible. As for the rest let's say a lot of hidden history is spilled and learned before the film concludes.

Bainter also was an Oscar winner from 1938, she was Best Supporting Actress that year for Jezebel. So the Best Supporting Actor and Actress for that year wound up top billed for Maryland. In fact it's Bainter's obsession to keep Payne away from horses and attached to her skirts is what drives the movie.

This was also John Payne's film debut with 20th Century Fox where I am convinced he was signed because he looked so much like Tyrone Power and could sing as well. Power's favorite director Henry King was in charge here and Maryland is blessed with some lush cinematography of the rural countryside where the horses are raised and raced. Payne's part looks absolutely like one that was originally written with Power in mind.

A lot of black players got roles more substantial than usual and while some stereotyping is here, the parts have some depth to them. Hattie McDaniel for instance has nearly as much depth as her Oscar winner as Mammy in Gone With The Wind the year before. Her man Ben Carter has a good heart and a nasty problem with dice. Seems like he can't pass a crap game without participating. He's also the keeper of a large amount of secrets on which the plot turns.

Maryland holds up well after over 70 years. Still a nice film for those who like horses.

MARYLAND (1940) is a 20th Century Fox horse-racing drama shot in three-strip Technicolor and set in the title state. Its first scenes take place after WWI, but about a third of the way in, it shifts to 1940, the time it was made, when one of the protagonists is first seen as an adult. It's a follow-up of sorts to KENTUCKY (1938), another Technicolor racing story made by Fox, which had far more action and drama and a spectacular Kentucky Derby finale. Walter Brennan plays crusty old horse experts in both films. None of the white characters in MARYLAND have recognizable southern accents, while the black characters all speak in an exaggerated black dialect as if this was the Antebellum South of 1840 and not 1940, the era of Paul Robeson, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois and the NAACP. It's been a long time since I've seen a film with such an abundance of "I is," "I does" and "I'se gwine" in the dialogue.

There are a number of prominent black actors in the film, including Hattie McDaniel, Ben Carter, Ernest Whitman, Clarence Muse, Darby Jones, and Madame Sul-Te-Wan (who'd appeared in D.W. Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION—talk about Antebellum films!), but they all play stereotyped roles of one sort or another. McDaniel, fresh off her Oscar win for GONE WITH THE WIND, spends most of her time in the kitchen. Her husband in the film, Shadrach (Carter), has a weakness for shooting craps thanks to the temptations offered by local no-account layabout Dogface (Whitman) who pops up and rattles dice in Shadrach's ear at inopportune moments. At one point, owing money to Dogface, who threatens him with a knife, Shadrach goes to church with his wife and winds up giving himself to Jesus after a fire-and-brimstone sermon by the preacher (Muse). So moved by the spirit is he that Shadrach is even about to confess his fling with Maybelle, a local hottie in the church congregation, but stops short. Shadrach says, "Sista' Maybelle, Ah don't know what ta say," to which Maybelle responds, "Then don't say it. Ah forgives you," adding, with a knowing smile that tells us all we need to know, "Ain't that enough?" (Maybelle is played by Arie Lee Branche, an actress previously unfamiliar to me who makes quite an impression.) The fling eventually comes up in the climactic courtroom battle in which Shadrach's testimony will determine whether a prize horse will be allowed to enter the big race or not.

This whole aspect of the plot—a glimpse into a black world that exists side-by-side but quite apart from white society and offers up its own layers of melodramatics—makes the film much more interesting than it would have been without it, stereotypes or not. And the implied adultery would probably have been diluted by the censors if it had involved white characters.

Second-billed Fay Bainter plays "Miss Charlotte," the widow who gives up horses after her husband is killed in a fall from one. Fourth-billed John Payne plays her son, who wants to take up where his father left off, much against his mother's will. Third-billed Brenda Joyce (the future Jane in RKO's Tarzan films) plays Brennan's granddaughter and Payne's sweetheart. None of these characters are at all well-etched and Bainter's overacting and her character's condescension serve to distance the audience from her. Walter Brennan is top-billed as a veteran horse trainer who'd once worked for Charlotte. He'd won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role in KENTUCKY, in which he gave a shrill performance as a cantankerous octogenarian. His performance in MARYLAND is less showy, more modulated, and far more interesting. The other significant characters in MARYLAND are played by the aforementioned black actors.

The slim plot of MARYLAND revolves around the lineage of a horse and whether or not Payne will ride him in the big race or not. After the early fox hunt in which Charlotte's husband has the fatal fall, there's no horse action until the race finale. Hard to believe one of Fox's top directors, Henry King, would have been assigned such a weak script, especially after JESSE JAMES, his big hit of 1939. KENTUCKY, directed by David Butler, was a much more engaging film that opened with a compelling 13-minute prologue set during the Civil War before jumping to the present (1938) and focusing on two young people from long-feuding horse-racing families who train a horse together and fall in love. It has its black stereotypes as well, but the actors have a little more fun with their roles, especially Eddie "Rochester" Anderson, who does a brief bit of soft-shoe with Walter Brennan in one stable scene.