Producer/Screenwriter Lamar Trotti brought Cora Harris’ short story “The Circuit Rider’s Wife” to the attention of director Henry King following filming of The Gunfighter (1950), with the Georgian Trotti specifically attracted to (fellow Georgian) Harris’ evocation of the lives of people in the rural Northern part of the state. King, a son of Virginia farmers and no stranger to cinematic Americana, jumped at the opportunity to work with the story, the observations of a preacher’s wife accompanying him on his ‘circuit’ going from church to church. “It was about people who had never been seen in motion pictures” said King, eventually smoothing out Trotti’s script with ideas sparked by a priest’s homily while attending his weekly Sunday mass (born Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1940). He quickly began production on location in the mountains of North Georgia under the title I’d Climb the Highest Mountain. Preacher William Thompson (William Lundigan) forms the film’s moral center, steadfast, agreeable, boyishly attractive, and unwavering in his principles, he leads his flock wittingly and pragmatically, slipping between the various responsibilities he has in this small town with humanist grace. His new bride Elizabeth (Susan Hayward) is a city girl in the vein of Murnau, concerned about the quality of life in this new landscape and a little embarrassed at her dearth of traditional wifely skills. Hayward imbues her with a powerful presence amidst this self-doubt, as she forms a stark contrast to Lundigan’s breezy mannerisms with her fierce countenance. The community is straight from a storybook, with wind always blowing through the trees, red clay roads, Sunday school picnics, and horse buggy racing, populated by an intensely religious bunch with the notable exception of one family (we’ll get to that). The narrative remains incredibly loose for a Hollywood film, almost episodic in its willingness to meander from one event to another, with a very vague conception of time in the literal sense. Structure appears, atypically for a small town picture such as this, through instances of intense suffering: a flu epidemic, a child drowning, and a miscarriage threaten the idyll and force the Thompson’s into action. It is in this suffering and the response to it where the film emerges from its potential sentimental conventions and blooms into a contemplation of faith and community worthy of Ford or Vidor, a loving depiction of communal care and the structures in which they appear.
It is not possible to encapsulate the career of Henry King in any sort of concise manner, beginning prior to Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and sputtering out as cinemascope was dying, he spent most of that time at 20th Century Fox and ended up with over 100 directorial credits to his name before his death at 91. His output rivals giants such as Ford, Walsh and DeMille if not in quality but in productivity, although his mark on film history is minimal at best, with Pudovkin’s rhapsodies about Tol’able David’s (1921) montage being his primary claim to fame. It is slightly odd that his name barely garners any recognition, even considering his uneven filmography, as King’s career seems to span the breadth of the first 50 or so years of American cinema. He worked with Lillian Gish in 1923’s The White Sister, introduced the world to Gary Cooper in The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926), curated the star personas of Tyrone Power and Gregory Peck, and even directed Orson Welles in the ‘49 swashbuckler Prince of Foxes. Maybe the consummate studio pro, his career was propelled by a workman’s professionalism, a willingness to take on basically any project, a technician’s appreciation for craft, and a storyteller’s appreciation for character, a mindset all but extinct in contemporary American cinema. If you don’t believe me listen to Frank Capra:
“....the most underpublicized filmmaker in Hollywood. This tall, lean, handsome, urbane, but unflamboyant model of a corporation president makes film hits so easily, so efficiently, so calmly that he is not news in a community of blaring trumpets, crashing cymbals, and screaming egos.”
For my money, I’d Climb the Highest Mountain is King’s most evidently personal expression of his career, where from his typically symmetrical balance of story, character, and theme(s) appears a way of looking at the world, something like an ethics, that forms the heartbeat of his best films. Born in the 1880’s to a Southern family whose roots go back to the Revolutionary War, one’s modern prejudices can forgive King for his conservatism, a designation stripped of all meaning in the beautiful 21st century, but a value system that I am sure meant a lot to King during his long life. One thing that strikes me as somewhat unique to the American cinema in general is a certain moralism at work, a temperament undoubtedly pedagogical in spirit that will (at its worst) dip into brow-beating messaging, especially evident in our most widely valued and successful filmmakers amongst the general public, with the aforementioned Capra being one of the most shining examples, and Spielberg exemplifying the best contemporary case. This is something that King openly professed to, one time stating how directors should be thinking “before we make a picture for the almighty dollar, if we would only ask ourselves, What does it tell, what is it going to do, what effect is it going to have?’” As a fan of cinematic amorality and excess I don’t necessarily endorse this view, but I mean to say that it is something worth keeping in mind, especially when, in the case of filmmakers such as King, it isn’t just signaling, there is an honest-to-God belief behind the values being put forth. His images are infused with this belief, an honesty a viewer can sense and respond to in turn.
“I have often explored religious themes in my pictures but I’ve never tried to be preachy or holier-than-thou” said King about Mountain, a definitively religious film that sees faith in people as a natural extension of faith in God, where real-life suffering serves to test that faith so that it can emerge stronger in the end. The Salter family is the one part of this community where the father (a Harvard graduate of course) professes his atheistic views to William, values he is imparting on his children, barring them from Sunday School. Their first encounter is a startling break in the previously smooth narrative progression, an unforeseen challenge to William’s moral authority filmed without any semblance of condescension or stereotype, maybe aside from the Harvard education. I really can’t think of another American film that handles this dynamic with this sort of nuanced respect. William approaches the situation with his bright smile and relaxed mannerisms, while the father is calm and measured in his light protestations, really just wanting to be left alone but not willing to give any ground to William. There is barely a trace of animosity between them. This is not simply an aside, as the dynamic is furthered when William takes the Salter children with him to the Sunday School picnic, asking their mother while the father is out working.
The picnic is the centerpiece of the film, as we are lightheartedly introduced to the activities, baseball on a grass field, egg races, ring tosses, eating contests, and so on. King films these rituals with more interest than a fistfight that took place earlier in the film, meticulously panning over the green hills where the picnic is taking place and noting each person’s participation in the festivities. When we make our way to the exterior endeavors, two lovers hiding away from the crowd and expressing concerns over parental approval, their problems are eventually interrupted by a bunch of kids playing hide-and-seek. The sunny mood now proves to be a misdirection. All of the sudden, a child falls into the river and the kids run away and scream for help. William runs over and dives in, but shockingly, the child drowns. The child turns out to be the son of the atheist father, and William and the country doctor deliver his body to him in a devastating scene, as the father now rejects eye contact with William. The picnic comes directly after the end of the flu epidemic, intended to be representative of a community’s resilience amongst death, but now those noble intentions are cruelly dismantled by even more death and misery. We move from one tragedy to the next, immediately cutting to Elizabeth on her bed being informed of her miscarriage, consumed by anguish but nonetheless insisting that William baptise their dead child.
Following the miscarriage, what previously could have jumped back into the light tone of an “adventures of a small town preacher” film now fully transforms into a more contemplative one. What is faith’s place in this world with so much suffering? Is the atheist right? King has unassumingly nudged these questions closer to the center as the film progressed, and now we wonder, like Elizabeth, if this community is built to last or just a farce grasping at a belief system that won’t save it. Even in his conservatism, King is willing to allow space for challenges to his belief in the sacredness of this community and their traditions. Now the community’s limitations stand out amongst its good character, even amongst the righteousness of its religious beliefs. When witnessing the horrors of the community’s struggle against the flu due to a lack of modern medicine, Elizabeth almost breaks, yelling at William and saying she wants to go home because this place is “ugly, awful, and a lie”. What tests the community simultaneously tests their relationship. Now, following the miscarriage, Elizabeth is in a similar state of despondency, her voiceover lamenting how she has let herself go. Out of nowhere, a woman from the city appears, clearly lusting after William, but disguising it behind a desire for religious education. Elizabeth recognizes her intentions immediately, and breaks from her grief spell, determined to show William why he married her in the first place. Similar to King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934), this arguably unnecessary ‘temptation’ subplot betrays a rather antiquated view of marriage and gender dynamics, but serves to reinforce the film’s center. Elizabeth fiercely scolds and discards the outsider threat to her marriage, and is now fully reincorporated back into life and into the community.
The film itself, like the short story, is lensed through Hayward, where her growth within this community and her marriage is of the utmost concern for King. King himself admitted Lundigan “could never support a picture on his own” and so the film mines material from Elizabeth’s subtle moral transformation, while William is a rather static presence of visceral goodwill. This is not Murnau, so love does not transcend societal obstacles like in City Girl, instead King views love as a domestic virtue, a bonding mechanism through which Elizabeth’s wifely role is affirmed in a moral sense, as an extension of the work her husband does. King’s films often contain some sort of sublime vocation, where an appeal from the depths of the soul, land, and/or community are privileged events (Twelve O’Clock High, The Bravados, The Song of Bernadette, etc) and Mountain contains what is probably the most blatant formal flourish of his career in this respect. Towards the end of the film, right before the Thompson’s are set to leave for their next assignment, he shows them at the grave of their miscarried child, and films Elizabeth’s recognition of her duty to the world with a protracted reverence. He starts in close-up, then moves the camera back as the couple joins hands in paying their respects, finally moving back in and framing them against the stunningly blue sky. Elizabeth affirms her growth resulting from their time serving this town, how she has learned “not only to love it but to understand it”, and in turn understand herself and her relationship to William.
She stares her suffering in the face and rises above it, deciding grief and self-pity is too selfish of a mindset and recognizing her salvation is in her vocation, as a preacher’s wife and as a servant of humanity. A blatantly conservative view that is rather off-putting out of context is rendered with transcendental power within the film’s natural progression. The previous moments of doubt and suffering prove key to King’s conception of the world of this film, where lived experience becomes a catalyst for the formation of morality, a belief in overcoming human limits of understanding and the cruelties of an irrational world. The greatest injustice in King’s mind is a threat to the natural growth of a group of people trying to build a way of life, and the greatest virtue is a strength of character that is able to aid in this communal journey, the realization that every personal problem is a reflection of the life and society in which it occurs. Faith’s place in the world is not a blind wail towards a higher power in the hopes that we might be saved, but instead a moral imperative, a healthy motivator towards a worthy life in service of something larger than the individual. What is striking about Mountain is that it is a truly bleak film at many moments, so much death and sickness threatening a near total destruction of a people’s way of life. Their traditions are tested, marriage, the church, the pre-modern routines of this rural community, all rising up to the challenge, not as institutions to cling to for the sake of it, but necessary structures through which humans can care for each other even amidst the darkest and most tragic events scattered throughout the lives of every person.
The Thompson’s final act in this town occurs right around Christmas, after William realizes the Salter children won’t be getting any presents on the 25th due to their father’s views on the subject. He decides that every child in the community deserves a Christmas of some sort, and starts a fund in order to make that happen. The community bands together, stitching stockings and making presents, while William arm-wrestles with the locals for some pocket change to dedicate to the fund. “The community banding together to deliver a true Christmas to the children” feels cliché until you see the look on everyone’s face with each person brimming with earnestness, as King says “There wasn’t a synthetic soul in the whole picture”. So on Christmas morning, the Salters wake up to presents adorning their porch, and the children overflowing with happiness at their good fortune. Later, as the Thompson’s are about to leave, Mr. Salter interrupts their goodbyes, holding his children while telling them he’s sorry to see them go. He explains that his views are still his views, but something about seeing the light on his children’s faces on that Christmas morning has opened his eyes and his mind towards possibility, a recognition (as mentioned previously) that faith is just as much about a will towards happiness in spite of everything as it is about putting your hands together and looking towards the sky every Sunday. Now, as a result of his close-mindedness becoming more apparent to him, he is willing to at least contemplate that which he cannot concretely conceive of. For the Thompson’s and for King, that is all they can ask for.
Henry King was never talked about in the pages of the yellow Cahiers, only briefly mentioned by Andrew Sarris in The American Cinema to be called “turgid and rhetorical in his storytelling style”, and won’t be the subject of any NYC retrospective anytime soon. His filmmaking approach was unobtrusive with a vehement dedication to classical decoupage, a mirror of his unassuming public persona as a rather invisible worker within The Dream Factory. He seamlessly transitioned from silents to sound, black and white to color, academy ratio to cinemascope, studio sets to real locations, big-budgeted spectacles to small-scale termites, all with a beautiful simplicity and competence worth appreciating. No one seems to think with much conviction about Henry King these days, his lifetime of service to the art form largely responded to with indifference. With artists like King, I find that in a similar manner to the townspeople in I’d Climb the Highest Mountain, a proper appreciation requires a leap of faith, where you must trust that even if some people don’t see what you do, there is a special quality that is there, and visible to those who believe enough to see it. A man who’s best work represents a cinema built on a moral vision of humanity and the world we inhabit, Henry King was already of a dying breed when he first stepped behind the camera, and will remain a pillar of what was once a vibrant and creative American industry, even if he would’ve never thought so himself.
“I just like to tell stories. Making a motion picture is the greatest fun I’ve had in my life. You can work yourself completely to death and enjoy every minute of it. You may get to the point where you’re ready to collapse and you’re still enjoying it. You get up the next morning and can’t wait to get out and continue on with it. I love the motion picture business.”
-Henry King