From the 1940s: Rachel and the Stranger

1948 Romance Comedy Drama

From RKO

Directed by Norman Foster

Starring

Loretta Young

William Holden

Robert Mitchum

Gary Gray

Tom Tully

Sara Haden

Here's a charming little movie that I fear sits on a shelf with the forgotten ones.  Too bad.  In addition to a rare look at colonial America, it focuses on a woman at the center and her relationship with two men and a young boy in the Ohio wilderness.  And I think a valid selling point is the participation of a youthful William Holden and Robert Mitchum.

Holden is a recent widower who lives on a farm with his young son Gray.  Holden ups and decides he needs a woman to help with the chores and the cooking and to teach the boy his studies.  They travel a short distance to a settlement where he purchases a bondservant (Young) who is working off her late father's debt.  At the last minute he decides to marry her, wishing to be proper and all.  

Young and Holden, of course, become the title characters and stay that way for some time because Holden doesn't know how to be a proper husband to a woman he hardly knows and she's too shy and subservient to speak her mind.  Their situation isn't helped by young Gray who is openly defiant at having a stranger attempting to take the place of his mother.

Into this situation arrives an old family friend (Mitchum), a trapper-hunter who walks the land in search of food, adventure and solitude.  When he takes a liking to Young (as he had Holden's first wife), not only does she open up but Holden begins to see her as a lovely, caring and quite capable woman.  When Mitchum becomes determined to take her away with him, Holden steps up and becomes the loving husband he needs to be and the boy comes to appreciate her as well.

There's much comedy in the film and not a great deal of action until an Indian raid at the finale.  Nonetheless, it is a fun-filled and tender story with a delightful and natural interplay among the four lead actors.  It is my favorite Young role.  It's nice to see her out of fashionable threads and her piousness kept to a low roar.  And when her hair is down, she's a sexy thing.  And good as the two leading men and the boy are, Young will not be upstaged.

There was also an interesting dynamic among them behind the scenes as well.  Mitchum, who was never particularly close to fellow actors, found a kinship with Holden and they remained friendly all their lives.  Young observed that when Mitchum was on set, Holden seemed nervous, even irritable.  She confronted Holden about it and he told her she was crazy but she maintained it continued.

Young had been in movies for over two decades and was nearing the end of her movie career (before starting a more famous one as a television star and hostess) while her two costars were still fairly new to the business.  Sunset Blvd. was on the horizon for Holden which completely changed his career forever.  She liked to guide them and Mitchum called her Mother Superior.  She had them both over to dinner at her rented house and admonished them for the voluminous amounts of liquor they consumed.  Sadly both actors ended up as alcoholics.

Young famously had a swear box on all her film sets.  She could not tolerate cursing.  Damns and hells cost the guilty a quarter and the more ripe expressions a bit more.  I've read several different versions of the Young-Mitchum encounters on this subject but my favorite is that Mitchum put $20 in the box as payment against the blue language he planned to use.

At this point in her career, Young mainly freelanced although she had and would do a few more films at RKO.  Holden had an unusual arrangement with both Paramount and Columbia by the fact that they shared his contract and it was out of the ordinary that they loaned him to RKO for this small film.  Mitchum, however, was under contract to RKO and was clearly its cash cow.  It was unusual they would give him third billing especially after his sensational lead performance in the previous year's Out of the Past but Mitchum never cared about billing or much of anything else.

There are six songs in the film and would you believe that Mitchum sings them all?  Young joins in on a couple of them.  He had a pretty decent voice.

The film is directed by Norman Foster, a former actor of little note, former husband of Claudette Colbert, and at the time, Young's brother-in-law.  As I see it, Rachel and the Stranger is his best film as a director.

Young and Mitchum were both in the news around the time of the filming.  She was at the height of her career because she had just won the Oscar for The Farmer's Daughter.  Shortly after the shooting completed, Mitchum was arrested on marijuana charges (the horror!) and how did RKO react?  Hell, they rushed the film through editing and post-production and got it into theaters to take advantage of the free publicity.  Rachel and the Stranger became one of RKO's three biggest hits of the year.  What a contact high that became.

Exteriors were filmed outside Eugene, Oregon.

It is a delightful film... highly entertaining and well worth your time.  Here have a peek:

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One of the best film noirs of them all