High, Wide and Handsome – 1937

Though usually classified as a musical, this film doesn't quite fit the genre.

Featuring a love story between a "Medicine Show" entertainer (Irene Dunne as Sally Watterson) and a Pennsylvania farmer (Randolph Scott as Peter Cortlandt), the backdrop is 1859 with an oil boom going on as derricks go up on farmland and fortunes are being made by transporting "rock oil" (as they call it in this film) over to refineries.

We start off with Irene Dunne belting out the title song, but musical staging of the story wilts away as melodrama and action sequences take over. The story becomes a contest between Pennsylvania farmers who've found oil up against a railroad tycoon magnate (Alan Hale as Walt Brennan) who is charging such high prices to freight the oil that he is angling to drive the farmers into a forced sell-off of their land so he can scoop it up, cheap. Helping him in this endeavor are thugs led by the town bully (Charles Bickford as Red Scanlon) who sabotage the farmer's efforts, using bullwhips as their main weapon. This synchronized assault makes you wonder why this musical didn't come up up with an appropriate song and choreography for the spectacle of dozens of men snapping whips like a bizarre metronome, but it demonstrates how much distance there is between High, Wide and Handsome and a "true" musical.

The tunes are by Jerome Kearn and Oscar Hammerstein II, and the film is directed by Rouben Mamoulian. There are staged songs, and Dunne, of course, hits every note with accuracy, but these moments are really set pieces for the entertainer and song itself, not integral to explaining the story as is done in a developed Hollywood musical. When Dorothy Lamour (as an important secondary character, a dance hall girl who turns into a kind of double agent working for the farmers) gets on stage with Dunne for a duet, the musical bona fides of High, Wide and Handsome are again temporarily re-established. Comedy is generously ladled across the film, for example how Dorothy Lamour's character can only sing mopey, sad songs, and Dunne, in their shared duet, tries to kick up the timing and razzle dazzle, pulling Lamour across the stage like a puppet, trying to get her to "sell" the song to the audience of distracted men (and this is probably a reflection of the film itself: how do you tell a story about oil derricks? You'll need some razzle-dazzle.)

Randolph Scott is almost always on the "go" in this tale, rushing, moving, and even thinking at a desk as if it is an action sequence. There's deadlines-a-plenty counting down as the Pennsylvania farmers have to come up with a clever way to get their oil to the refineries on time or risk losing everything.

Dunne's character pines for marital attention and then leaves town to rejoin her father (Raymond Walburn as Doc Watterson), leaving Scott's over-worked character on his own to battle circumstances. It seems like the failure of the marriage and the failure of the farmers are coupled, and as the farmers try to lay pipeline over a mountain to get their oil pumped to the refineries on the other side, the bullwhip swinging bad guys attack again. This becomes the "ultimate battle" for the climax of the film, and things are not going well for the outnumbered and embattled farmers, none of who curiously own a gun and in this Pennsylvania of 1859 the police have yet to be invented, though there seems to be plenty of lawyers.

But then Irene Dunne reappears, leading a phalanx of circus performers who wade into the bad guys like the United States Marine Corps hitting a beach. With three armies battling and the clock ticking down, the farmers and the strongman, acrobats, little people and elephants have literally minutes left to reach the deadline for delivery of the oil. Can they do it?

This preposterous movie is a heady mix of tunes, farm-boy melodrama, marital blues and comedy with a slice of mad-inventor side-story as Scott's character has to keep thinking up new technical tricks to beat the odds. Elizabeth Patterson (as Grandma Cortlandt) appears throughout as the one woman who never fails to back Scott's ambitions, who can see through the meanness in the town's local "purity league" (led by Irving Pichel), can see that Irene Dunne and Dorothy Lamour are show business girls that have genuinely human sides, and brings a slightly goofy comedic angle to the whole affair, which is High, Wide and Handsome in a nutshell.

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Original Page July 18, 2026