When BRIGHT LEAF was made in 1950, Gary Cooper’s career was in a slump. Between the end of World War II and his iconic, Oscar winning performance in HIGH NOON (1952), he appeared in a string of movies that underperformed at the box office considering his status as one of Hollywood’s major stars. As in a previous film, Ayn Rand’s THE FOUNTAINHEAD (1948), Cooper plays an essentially unlikeable character and looks very uncomfortable doing it. Some of this may have had to do with his having recently undergone operations for stomach uclers and a hernia. In BRIGHT LEAF he looks tired and older than his 49 years and critics and fans were not happy with the film.
Also miscast in the movie is Lauren Bacall who plays a successful bordello madam who loves the Cooper character but that is not reciprocated until it is too late. Perhaps Bacall, like Cooper, was trying to stretch herself and branch out from her screen image as the cool contemporary, tough talking broad who eventually falls for the leading man (usually Bogart) by the end of the movie. Fans and most critics want their stars to be personas not characters and don’t like it when they deviate. However Patricia Neal is perfectly cast as a combination of Scarlet O’Hara and Mildred Pierce’s daughter while old pro Donald Crisp gives the movie’s best performance as a Southern tobacco tycoon.
The rest of the supporting cast are uniformily fine with Jack Carson as a con man turned bookkeeper, Jeff Corey as the cigarette machine inventor and Elizabeth Patterson as the tycoon’s fussy sister standing out. Also look for future TV stalwart James Griffith as a milquetoat accountant. These players were what I enjoyed most about BRIGHT LEAF. What I really didn’t enjoy was the overall story which concentrated on high class soap opera. Rags to riches Cooper loves Southern Bell Neal while ignoring and taking advantage of Bacall. Lost in all this is a story of how the tobacco industry came into being by switching from cigars to cigarettes. Unfortunately soap and tobacco don’t mix.
Director Michael Curtiz (CASABLANCA), nearing the end of his long and succesful tenure with Warner Brothers, seems unable or unwilling to do much with this material. The movie lacks his usual visual flair and with ace cinematographer Karl Freund behind the camera, this is even more puzzling. With a better script and a few casting changes, BRIGHT LEAF could have been a really good movie. Instead it’s simply a middle-of-the-road potboiler that is worth seeing for the talent involved. But only once. This 2009 Warner Archive edition looks and sounds good but there no extras of any kind, not even subtitles. The fact that it has not been re-issued in an updated format speaks for itself.
The Capsule Critic 