So Big

Selina (Jane Wyman) is a happy student in a pricey girls' boarding school. Her world is turned upside down when her father dies leaving her alone and broke. She is reluctant to accept any help. She becomes a teacher in small rural town. She nurtures student Roelf, and he develops a crush on her. She marries farmer Pervus De Jong (Sterling Hayden) and they have a son, Dirk nickname So Big.

There is a bit of sentimental hokum and melodrama in this film. It's calling back to an olden times and olden ways. It's trying very hard to push the ideals of substance over money. Through it all, Jane Wyman maintains its sincerity. When she leaves the screen, the movie struggles. She is the biggest One of them all. This movie wants to be an old time character epic and I want it for Jane. She pulls it through the finish line. Her reunion with Roelf is ten times more compelling than all of Dirk's drama.

In the third and final big screen adaption of Edna Ferber's novel, Jane Wyman essays the role of the schoolteacher who moves into a community of Dutch immigrant farmers in the Midwest and changes her life forever as she goes from rich débutante to a farmer's wife and widow. Wyman takes pride in her work and her child whom she nicknames So Big.

Jane's family fortune was lost when her parents died and she was forced by circumstance to become a schoolteacher. She's assigned to the Midwest town of New Holland and she works hard to teach the Dutch immigrant children. She also meets and weds sturdy farmer Sterling Hayden who leaves her a widow with a child and a farm to manage.

She meets the challenge and in doing so finds what Kirk Douglas as Vincent Van Gogh called 'the nobility of toil' in her work. So Big is Edna Ferber's ode to the agricultural life, there is indeed something special in seeing the seeds you plant grow into something. It's a lesson she imparts to her son who when he's full grown is played by Steve Forest. Forest in fact becomes an architect, but his mom literally and figuratively drags him back down to earth every so often.

Wyman's best scenes are with the various children who play her son Dirk, aka So Big at various stages of life. The film probably deserved to run a bit longer because I don't think all of Edna Ferber's thoughts were translated to the screen. Still So Big holds up well as fine family entertainment, as good as it was when released in 1953.

If you like terrific acting, triumphs over adversity, laced with plenty of life's heartbreaks, So Big is what Hollywood does best for you. Contrived? A bit. Overly Theatrical? guilty as charged. Gripping melodrama from beginning to end? You bet. It's all relationship-driven so men who disdain "chick-flicks" should leave this one alone. All others should find it as wonderful as I do.

Despite the above cited drawback, this Edna Ferber story of a mother's love with that stifling title, SO BIG, seems aimed at the tear ducts to give JANE WYMAN another chance to show how well she can age from young woman to maturity to old age with a nice array of expressions and changes of hairdo and make-up.

She's really the best thing about SO BIG. It's story is a simple, even trite saga of a woman who wants all the best things for her son, especially since she has to rear him single-handedly once her husband (farmer STERLING HAYDEN) dies. Hayden gives such a persuasive performance that once he's gone, the picture suffers from his untimely death and the remaining scenes never achieve the same intensity of the earlier ones. Brief performances from dependable players like NANCY OLSON, MARTHA HYER and a very young RICHARD BEYMER help sustain interest in the long-winded plot.

There is an appropriately agreeable score by Max Steiner to emphasize the soap suds and the usual dramatics, but this somehow misses the mark as what should have been a superior vehicle of its kind despite having all the trimmings.

STEVE FORREST, as Wyman's "so big" son, has moments when his resemblance to real-life brother Dana Andrews is remarkable. Unfortunately, his role is poorly written without giving him the chance to show much acting range.

I enjoyed the movie, not just because of the cast, but because of the faithfulness to detail, r/t the actual book, "So Big" by Ferber. It shows the values of responsibility not just to our work, but to people, and to the beauty that is all around us, if we would just open our eyes and see it.