Belle Le Grand (Republic, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Cossacks Charles and I watched a grey-label DVD from a TV airing on a channel called “Encore Western” of a 1951 film called Belle Le Grand, directed by silent-film veteran Allan Dwan, whose film career had begun in 1911 and would continue until 1958. At one point in the 1920’s Dwan had been an “A”-list director helming films for the likes of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (he did the 1922 Robin Hood, with Fairbanks not only as star but, under the name “Elton Thomas,” as writer, and in some ways it caught the spirit of nobility and chivalry better than any subsequent version, including the great 1938 remake with Errol Flynn, and he also did the 1929 film The Iron Mask) and Gloria Swanson (five silent films plus one talkie, 1930’s What a Widow!). Then he went to Britain for three years and when he returned he found himself mostly forgotten by the major studios – though he did two films with Shirley Temple (Heidi, 1937; and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, 1938 – both of which, as Dwan freely admitted, bore little resemblance to the children’s novels that were their ostensible story sources) at the height of her popularity.

In 1946 he ended up under contract to Republic, founded by the ferociously Right-wing Herbert Yates, who had formed a relationship with a Czech skater named Vera Hruba, whom he signed to a long-term movie contract and became her sponsor as well. Yates added “Ralston” to her last name and tried to build her into leading roles, but as Ray Hamel noted in his biographical note on imdb.com, “Hruba's English was so limited she was forced to learn her lines phonetically. Her English improved, and directors said she tried hard to learn her craft, but bad acting and a thick accent made it difficult for audiences to accept her.” At least when William Randolph Hearst tried to foist Marion Davies on the cinematic world he was dealing with a genuinely talented light comedienne – though as hard as Hearst worked to advance Davies’ career, he also sabotaged it by putting her in period dramas and other films that drowned her talents in production values. Yates was dealing with a far less talented inamorata than Hearst was, and during Belle Le Grand I joked that at the top of the talent list of foreign-born actresses who retained their accents in their U.S. films were Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, and at the bottom there was Vera Hruba Ralston.

In a 1960’s extended interview with Peter Bogdanovich that became the book Allan Dwan: The Last Pioneer, Dawn lamented having to work with Ralston and her Belle Le Grand co-star John Carroll – who in the 1930’s had made some independent films, got an MGM contract and been groomed as one of the many young actors they were trying out as potential replacements for Clark Gable after the real Gable walked out on his contract for the duration of World War II and flew in combat. The real Gable returned before the war ended, making the 1944 film Adventure, and all of a sudden the faux Gables became superfluous. Seeing the writing on the wall, in 1946 Carroll ran out his MGM contract and signed with the much less prestigious Republic studio, and when asked why he gave a marvelously practical answer I cherish: “Republic’s money buys groceries just like MGM’s does, and they’re giving me quite a bit more of it.” Carroll continued his career at Republic for several years, essentially stepping into roles that might have gone to Republic’s biggest star, John Wayne, if the Duke hadn’t got tired of working with Ralston.

Of their immediately previous picture, Surrender, Dwan groused, “Oh, boy. That’s another one with two great actors in it – John Carroll and Vera Hruba Ralston. I can’t tell you what I think about it – it should be buried some place.” Dwan was kinder to the memory of Belle Le Grand, mainly because its main action took place in the Nevada silver country in the 1870’s. “I’ve been crazy about Virginia City anyway – its history – and it was a pleasure to work in that background. I like the romance of it – quiet, strange, weird history. They were looking for silver, and throwing all this grey mud away until they found out it was silver.” Belle Le Grand, written by D. D. Beauchamp based on a story by incredibly prolific Western writer Peter B. Kyne, actually starts in the 1850’s South, where Charles LaFarge (Stephen Crane) and Sally Sinclair (Vera Ralston – she was billed without the “Hruba” this time) are running gambling operations on the Mississippi riverboats. When one of their customers drops a lot of money and accuses them of running rigged games, LaFarge stabs him in the back, throws him in the river, and then flees, leaving Sally as the fall girl. In a series of scenes showing the whirlwind exposition Dwan was proud of, within just a few minutes of screen time her attorney makes a passionate plea to acquit her, she’s convicted (we don’t see the jury return the verdict, just the judge passing sentence afterwards), she does five years in prison and just before she’s taken into custody her dad disowns her – all in about five minutes of screen time.

When she gets out after a five-year sentence, all she has for family is her ever-faithful Black maid Daisy (Marietta Canty, third in line for the “Mammy” roles if they couldn’t get Hattle McDaniel or Louise Beavers). Belle finds out that her dad died in the first year of her sentence and her younger sister Nan was taken away to be raised in an orphanage and given the new last name “Henshaw.” Then another one of Dwan’s whirlwind montages shows Sally reviving her riverboat games under the name “Belle Le Grand” and becoming sensationally rich. (One date in the montage is 1864, which had Charles wondering just how many riverboat casinos were plying the Mississippi tlat late in the Civil War.) Eventually she settles in San Francisco in 1870 and opens a big and highly profitable casino on the Barbary Coast. One day her travels take her to the San Francisco Stock Exchange, where she notices that her ex-husband, now using the name “Montgomery Crame,” is trying to make a fortune by short-selling shares in a supposedly played out silver mine in Nevada called the Carousel – only the Carousel’s principal stockholder, John Kilton (John Carroll), has actually discovered a new lode on the Carousel’s property but successfully withholds that information until he dramatically arrives on the floor of the stock exchange to announce it, send the Carousel’s share price up stratospherically, and all but ruin Crame. (It was fun to watch a movie in which an unscrupulous short-seller gets creamed by an active effort to trade up the price of the stock just after the Gamestop affair when that happened in real life.)

Then Crame realizes that key to controlling the flow of silver from the Carousel is owning the Queen Midas mine just north of it – only he finds that Kilton has beaten him to that, too. Meanwhile, Belle, who’s never given up looking for her sister, Nan Henshaw (Muriel Lawrence), finds her about to give a concert as a singer in San Francisco. Her vocal training has been subsidized by a mysterious benefactress named “Mary Kittredge,” but do I really need to tell you who “Mary Kittredge” actually is? In one of the fits of bravado he’s prone to, John Kilton offers Nan Henshaw $10,000 for just one concert in Virginia City, center of the Nevada mining community – but Crame strikes again, acquiring an $800,000 debt Kilton owed someone else and threatening to foreclose on the Queen Midas if it isn’t paid in 30 days. To make sure Kilton and his miners can’t produce enough silver in that time to meet the payment, Crame hires a drifter named Abel Stone (Henry Morgan – Charles was really startled to see him; I was less surprised because I’d noticed his name in the credits, but still it’s a shock to see the avuncular Col. Potter from the later stages of the M*A*S*H TV show not only so young but so villainous) to set fire to the mine.

The plan works too well for Abel Stone’s conscience, since the fire leaves 13 miners trapped inside; in a number of scenes that must have taxed John Carroll’s stunt double, Kilton heroically rescued eight of them but the other five died. Crame uses the fire to turn the miners against Kilton and get them to lynch him and his principal associates, but at the end Belle Le Grand – who in her “Mary Kittredge” persona has already paid off the $800,000 Kilton owed Crame – saves the day by persuading the miners that it was actually Stone, not Kilton, who set the fire. (I thought it would have been stronger writing if Stone had himself made the confession out of guilt, but instead he tries to run away and one of the miners shoots him.) There are also a couple of other characters, Emma McGee (a marvelous performance by Hope Emerson in a Molly Brown-type role) and her husband Corky (John Qualen), who have hit it big in Kilton’s silver mines and built a preposterous house in which neither of them feels particularly comfortable – until they lose their money in Kilton’s mines due to Crame’s machinations and are forced to go back to running the boarding house for miners they started out in, while Belle Le Grand agrees to buy their big house so she can turn it into her latest casino.

Meanwhile John Kilton is romancing Nan Henshaw in hopes of getting her to give up her singing career and settle down with him as a housewife – shades of Maytime and The Red Shoes! – only Belle in her “Mary Kittredge” role short-circuits that in a hurry by paying an impresario named Gambarelli (Gino Corrado) to book her on a nationwide tour that will end in New York City and drive out of her head once and for all any notion of her giving up her career to get married – especially to the man Belle herself is in love with, and whom she lands in the last reel. Belle Le Grand isn’t a great movie – and as Charles noted it’s not particularly a “Western” even though it’s set (mostly) in Nevada in 1870 – but like The Cossacks it’s a triumph of style over (lack of) substance. Allan Dwan’s years of practice in the director’s craft show in his easy command of a moving camera and his expert pacing of the film, while he gets out of Ralston and Carroll the best performances of which they were capable. Dawn admitted of Ralston, “She tried very hard and was a very nice girl. She just hadn’t been trained to be an actress long enough to star in pictures.” I spent much of Belle Le Grand noticing its plot similarities to Rex Beach’s novel The Spoilers, also about skulduggery in a mining community (though in The Spoilers it’s gold in Alaska instead of silver in Nevada) and wishing the stars of the best-known version of the oft-filmed The Spoilers, Marlene Dietrich and John Wayne, had got to be in this one instead of Vera Ralston and John Carroll. But even as it stands Belle Le Grand is a pleasant film and one you can spend 90 minutes watching without the feeling that you’ve wasted your time.