Budozanshin1

"Stars in my Crown" is a pleasant little movie with a story that's set in the immediate post Civil War era. A good performance by Joel McCrea as the preacher who settles in the town and begins is ministry. Over the years he helps various members of his congregation and the town with a myriad of issues, all done with earnestness, sincerity and a deep faith in God and religion. There's a subplot of a conflict with the local doctor...science vs. Religion...and other events..racisim, and disease. The movie is intelligent and entertaining. The description of the movie, "Minister preaches with two guns in hand" and the poster of Joel McCree pictured as if he was a gunslinger is totally out of place and inaccurate. I guess the movie makers at the time wanted to convey a sense of the typical wild west in an era when so many westerns were packing them into the theatres. Anyway, Good movie. Clean movie. Interesting movie.

I recently watched this movie on Turner Classic Movies. I sort of/kind of knew what to expect in a 60's so-called "New Wave" movie in that I expected it to be different, possibly innovative, fairly unstructured and with a lot of deep philosophical dialogue, some of which might be interesting. All but a few of other such movies of the genre that I've viewed were pretty much like that so my expectations were fairly well-grounded. Billed as a "comedy-drama" I neither expected real laughs or serious content. What I found was a movie that was completely devoid of anything entertaining. It had only the barest outline of a plot, totally disagreeable characters, convoluted and disjointed scenes, graphic unpleasant things being done to animals and unexplained circumstances and situations (car accidents all over).

That heralded long tracking shot might have been interesting at the time but I couldn't help wonder where they were going with it after the first 3 minutes of watching it. I had to daydream and wondered into trying to identify the make and model of the cars that were in the tracking shot. I spent the entire movie thinking that the next scene will straighten the movie out. That never happened. That the movie was actually given four and a half stars by TCM is a total mystery to me. Watching "Weekend" for me was like eating a bad meal and being sick for days afterwards. I suppose that the literari are "supposed" to like anything that's foreign and "avant garde" movies like "Weekend." I certainly did not.