Stream On: No country for young men—‘King’s Row’ puts the yikes! in melodrama
Where’s the rest of me? The dark side of provincial American life through the eyes of children as they grow up at the turn of the previous century.
“A whole way of life. A way of gentleness and honor and dignity. These things are going, and they may never come back to this world.”
The 1941 novel King’s Row, about Drake McHugh and his best friend Parris Mitchell coming of age in a sleepy mid-west American town in the 1890s was Henry Bellamann's most recognized work. It dealt with mental illness, incest, homosexuality, suicide, and sadistic vengeance. It took some trimming to make into a movie in 1942!
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅100%🍿78% /Trailer /1942 /NR
When King’s Row was released in 1942, it was still relatively close to the turn of the century. The world depicted in it would have been familiar to adults and children, not having changed that much. In 2024, though, there are only a few whose childhoods in the 1950’s were not unlike those shown in the movie. To all, King’s Row begins like a charming period piece.
And charm is what is depicted in the opening scenes, up to a point: In the small midwestern town of Kings Row, five children are friends: Parris Mitchell is a polite, clever little boy who lives with his grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya); pretty blonde Cassandra Tower is the daughter of the brilliant but secretive Dr. Alexander Tower (Claude Rains) and a reclusive mother; the orphaned but wealthy and fun-loving Drake McHugh is best friends with Parris; Louise Gordon is daughter of the town’s physician Dr. Henry Gordon (Charles Coburn); and the tomboy Randy Monaghan is from the “wrong side of the tracks.”
But, as Leo Tolstoy wrote, in Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
When young Parris is invited to Cassie Tower’s birthday party, his grandmother worries about the girl’s strange family: “A doctor who never has any patients? His wife who stays in an upstairs room all the time? Gives a person the creeps.”
At the poorly attended party, in the garden of a house not unlike that of the Addams family, Cassie is unhappy: “I wish everybody’d go home.” Parris offers to leave and lead the other children out. He goes into the house to find an adult to thank for the party. Dr. Tower appears, saying it won’t be necessary, almost hustling Parris out. As he walks home, past a more popular party, where most of his friends are in attendance and having fun, his best friend, Drake, catches up and they head to the railroad depot to play. They later meet another friend crying on his stoop, because Dr. Gordon is operating on his father. From inside the child’s house come screams: Dr. Gordon isn’t using anesthesia! He says, because the patient’s heart won’t stand it!
In a few scenes the children grow into young adults: Parris (Robert Cummings), ready to begin medical studies under Dr. Tower, runs into Drake (Ronald Reagan). Cassie hasn’t been seen for years after the party; now she too is secluded in her father’s house, like her mother. Parris finally sees Cassie (Betty Field) there, when he first goes for tutoring, and they begin a secret romance.
And the town’s other eccentric doctor, Dr. Gordon, doesn’t want his daughter Louise (Nancy Coleman) to see Drake; he believes Drake is “wild,” perhaps evil.
The original 1941 novel of Drake McHugh and his best friend Parris Mitchell coming of age in a sleepy mid-west American town of the 1890s was by far Henry Bellamann's most recognized work. Exposing hypocrisy and dark small-town secrets, the novel dealt with mental illness, incest, homosexuality, suicide, and sadistic vengeance. The film adaptation of Bellamann's controversial novel, modeled on his home town of Fulton, Missouri (in which he became persona non grata after its release), presented significant problems for movie industry censors, who wished to bring the film into conformity with the Hays Code. Screenwriter Casey Robinson believed the project was hopeless because of the code. Producer Hal B. Wallis said that Robinson felt “I was crazy to have bought so downbeat a property.” Wallis urged him to reconsider, and it occurred to Robinson that he could turn this into the story of “an idealistic young doctor (Parris) challenged by the realities of a cruel and horrifying world.”
It’s still hot stuff, and the excised subtext can be sussed out. The novel’s dust-jacket blurb also sums up the movie: “At first, King’s Row almost seems as if it could pass as just another slice of small town Americana, no more daring or cutting than a Norman Rockwell painting—a safer and gentler Peyton Place. However, as the story unfolds, it reveals surprising depths of darkness, using beautiful prose to reveal some very ugly truths about the human mind and the civilization it creates.”
Sources include City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s, by Otto Friedrich; and Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED).
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.