The Sea of Grass

Considering that Sea of Grass is helmed by a director who's not familiar with the western milieu it's amazing that it comes off as well as it does. Elia Kazan is so much better in an urban setting like On the Waterfront. Yet Tracy and Hepburn do make this work on some levels.

John Wayne in McLintock and Spencer Tracy in Sea of Grass have the same view of the prarie. Both films take the side of the cattle rancher as opposed to the farmer. Certainly other films like Shane make the farmer the good guy. But events here show that Tracy was right about the prarie as his arch rival in politics and love, Melvyn Douglas, ruefully points out.

Tracy and Wayne also have spousal problems, although certainly Wayne handles his with a tad more humor. One thing that Maureen O'Hara does and Katharine Hepburn doesn't is share his vision of the prarie. She befriends the farmer family nearby and that is what causes the rift between her and Tracy.

McLintock is a comedy and Sea of Grass is a western soap opera. Kazan was lucky in casting folks like Edgar Buchanan and Harry Carey who knew their way around a western. Robert Walker was taking some tentative steps toward a similar role in Vengeance Valley. He only appears in the last half hour of the film as the kid with dubious paternity, but you will remember him.

Katharine Hepburn would have to wait another 28 years before doing another traditional western in Rooster Cogburn. Eula Goodnight is certainly light years from Lutie Cameron. Colonel Jim Brewton though is the same type cattle baron as G.W. McLintock.

I think the film is more for fans of soap opera than for fans of westerns. And certainly it's for fans of Spence and Kate.

This movie is tough to love. Partly this is due to the setting of the film (nothing but grasslands as far as the eyes can see), but most of it is because the two main characters are so flawed and unlikable. In some ways this unlikability is good, as too often Hollywood films of the 30s and 40s present people in a "black/white" fashion and people who fall somewhere towards the middle are seldom seen. However, such "gray" characters are tough to bond with or care about, so I can understand why the film makers generally avoided this. Katherine Hepburn seems like a good character through much of the film, but midway through it, she shows a self-centeredness that make it tough to really see the tragedy in her life. Her initially living with the cruel and lawless Tracy is unforgivable, but her having an affair and then leaving her kids (one the bastard) with Tracy and not seeing them for almost 20 years make her very, very tough to like. Tracy, on the other hand, does stay to care for his kids--but in a very self-serving fashion. He is an emotionally constricted and yet over-indulgent father. As a human being, he's a lot worse--killing or nearly killing farmers because he saw the plains as his own personal property. The central message that eventually these farmers contributed to the destruction of the plains is lost--Tracy's not fighting against the farmers due to any love of nature or a desire to preserve the land. No, he's just a greedy rancher that will do ANYTHING to keep the land without fences.

Despite the problems with the characters, the film is exquisitely filmed--with some of the more beautiful camera shots I've seen in a long time. This film is worth seeing, but not one I would recommend you rush to see.

The Sea Of Grass is slow moving and talky, but not as bad as many have portrayed it. If I told you without cluing you in on the title I had a top-production 1947 MGM picture staring Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Melvyn Douglas, you would be expecting a glossy white telephone movie with a love triangle and lots of high melodrama from the three stars. That's essentially what you get here, only replace the white telephones with elk antler hat racks, the swank park avenue apartments with rambling ranch houses, and the busy New York street scenes with a dusty, one-horse, Nineteenth Century New Mexico town. The Sea Of Grass is a soap opera dressed up as a Western. If that is what you are expecting, instead of a traditional shoot-'em-up, you may be much more pleased with it.

The three stars deliver their usual stellar performances and three fine, textured character studies. Old, smoothie Douglas is particularly effective as a hard-edged attorney and later judge, cattle baron Tracy's stalwart opponent and Katherine's illicit lover, father of her second child. The large supporting cast shines, led by Edgar Buchanan and Harry Carry. Over rated Robert Walker is over-the-top as usual, but fun to watch. Production values are superb with terrific luminous, old nitrate black and white cinematography typical of the era, a rich Herbert Stodhart score, good, authentic costumes, great sets with some spectacular location scenery dovetailed in for long shots of Southwest grasslands and cliffs. Principally concentrating on relationships, the story moves along at a glacial pace, but the stars and an intelligent, if messy, script hold interest. Some of the dialog is a little preachy and overblown, but it is generally believable and satisfying. There is hardly any action until the last reels, and even then it is half-hearted and ultimately just peters out. The major subplot is the traditional Western theme of cattlemen versus homesteaders, but the eventual showdown comes early and is anti-climatic. Nevertheless, the movie is engrossing and enjoyable for the acting and the production values. It is refreshing to see a movie about the Old West that concentrates on decent real people and their real life problems instead of just dwelling on brawls between lowlifes who hang out in brothels and saloons.

The Sea Of Grass is not bad, but not as good as it should have been with all it had going for it. Director Elia Kazan reportedly said he was ashamed of the picture, and he should have been. The overly slow pacing, lack of spark between Tracy and Hepburn (they were off-screen lovers!) , and other problems clearly resulted from his flabby direction. With three top stars at the peaks of their careers, an intriguing story, and a big budget, The Sea Of Grass should have been a much better picture. And it would have been if Raoul Walsh had directed it.

Young woman in 1880 St. Louis marries a cattle-baron who wields a powerful, occasionally unpopular and unfeeling hand. The couple settles into their New Mexico ranch-house, where she soon has a child, but the days and weeks of loneliness get to her and she shares in a flirtation with the smitten local attorney. Conrad Richter's novel becomes somewhat misbegotten vehicle for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, though the stars do make valiant attempts to lend believability to these characters. Richter's story is full of stop-and-start melodrama, which nearly sabotages the central relationship (particularly since screenwriters Marguerite Roberts and Vincent Lawrence have given all the best dialogue exchanges to the supporting players, many of whom ultimately fare better than the leads). Melvyn Douglas works very simply with Hepburn and they have an easy rapport; Robert Walker (as the grown son Douglas fathered with Kate) brings along a nice swagger; Edgar Buchanan (as the cook) and Harry Carey (as the local doctor) have seldom been so endearing. It's difficult getting a handle on Tracy's reserved, unimpressed Colonel. Blank-faced and slack jawed, Tracy puts a great deal of thought into this complicated man but walls himself up from the audience in the process. Hepburn, in her early scenes, radiates nervous warmth and good will, but turning her into a black-wearing drudge filled with regrets was probably a mistake. Overlong, not particularly satisfying...yet the film has something. It's handsomely-made, reasonably well-paced and is certainly unusual coming from this high-powered star-duo. **1/2 from ****

Why do I get the feeling some folks know little about Spencer Tracy? For example, Kazan's alleged quote of "Tracy did not like horses and horses did not like Tracy either" (per Ciment's book). Excuse me, but how could a man who loved to play polo, which Tracy did and did a lot in his younger days and against studio wishes, not like horses? I've played polo and if you don't like horses (and they don't like you) you won't be playing the game more than once or twice. Maybe the quote was made for the more obvious reason: to justify Kazan turning out a movie that was below his abilities? If true that one of Kazan's excuses for the painful experience of directing the movie was not filming on location, I can't totally disagree, but then again a good many great films were not filmed on location, so this excuse only holds so much water. And how can one think that the movie is a "cattlemen vs. homesteaders" film? That's the setting, and it is the trigger of the conflict between the main characters, which leads to the betrayal, which is the center piece of the story, but that certainly isn't the movie. I grant you, it's not one of Tracy's best, but he does the best he can with the lame Marguerite Roberts' script. Even if this movie had been shot on location, it doesn't change the glaring fact that a bad script is still a bad script. If you believe Tracy was sleepwalking, then you have to also believe Kazan was on life support and Roberts was dead, from the neck up, while scripting this one. If Tracy's at fault for anything, it's for trying to save the film, which is more than it deserved.