Many Rivers to Cross

I watched this on TCM one night & my wife & I laughed so hard we almost fell off the couch!! This is one of those little movies that has something for everyone...comedy, action, a wonderful script, & characters that force you to like them. Robert Taylor was perfect as the footloose, frontier Romeo, & Eleanor Parker was never more beautiful & funny playing the love-sick woman who intends to "get her man" no matter what it takes...but make no mistake, she is no wimpy, sighing, helpless female...she really is "Steppin' Woman"!!!! The title song is so catchy that you'll have trouble not singing it for months afterward. Some of the dialogue is at one turn hilarious, then a few lines later, subtly humorous...a real scriptwriter's dream. There is nothing to offend anyone but lots of things to delight everyone. A great family film!!!!

It is a film reflecting a period, more than a genre. because it is western and comedy and love story and beautiful eulogy to the people of frontier. and occasion for Robert Taylor to be seductive at whole. its virtue - to translate, in right manner, the atmosphere of "50. and to use , in inspired manner, the humor , remembering, in other context, same spiced, the couple Hepburn - Tracy. and, maybe, it is the axis of a story with old flavour and a lot of fun, mixed with tension, in package of old fashion sweat moral lesson.

I wasn't expecting much from this film - just something to pass a rainy Sunday.

What a wonderful surprise to find myself watching a screwball comedy about as good as Cary Grant or Irene Dunne could have hoped to make in the 1930's.

Give it a chance - you might love it like I did.

This wonderful rollicking comedy set in the early days of the republic, roughly sometime in the Federalist era had to take its inspiration from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers from the year before. In fact two of the brothers, Jeff Richards and Russ Tamblyn are featured in Many Rivers to Cross.

The surprise to me in this film is Robert Taylor. At the time he did this film Taylor had been doing dramatic parts for many years. He did some comedy roles in his early days at MGM, but they were the modern sophisticated sort of stuff.

Robert Taylor is Bushrod Gentry, a frontier trapper who's a pretty fancy free and footloose sort of character very much like Adam Pontipee in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. But while it was Howard Keel who was looking for a wife in that film, here it's the woman who does the chasing and it's the woman who comes from a pretty frisky frontier family herself. Eleanor Parker is Federalist era Calamity Jane who takes a real shine to Taylor.

Of course she pursues Taylor through out the film, try as he may to get back to his trapping. Their last escape from some pursuing Shawnee Indians is an absolute comic riot.

Good as Taylor and Parker are, Many Rivers to Cross almost cries for a song or two other than the theme about the Berry Tree. In a musical I could have seen Howard Keel and Doris Day doing it easily.

In any event I'm sure that when Taylor and Parker settle down and commence to having children that they were the ancestors a hundred years later of that Pontipee clan in the Pacific Northwest.

higher up the berry tree" it stuck with me and so did the fun of the movie. i remember that robert taylor just looked out of place to me but the movie stayed with me all these years. I have enjoyed it over the years and have seen it on tv a couple of times and i always recommend it to my friends. good.