The Hallelujah Trail [Blu-ray]

Director: John Sturges John Sturges

Overview

Lancaster and a fine cast are wasted in this comedy about a man assigned to protect a liquor shipment crossing the Great Plains. His foes are native tribes eager to get the liquor and a women's temperance organization eager to stop it. Much of the humor is telegraphed when not outright predictable. The film concerns itself with neither history nor geography, even inventing a nonexistent mountain range between Kansas City and Denver. This sprawling misfire from the mid-sixties was an early sign that the genre was wearing out.

Product Details

Release Date:	12/13/2022
UPC:	0738329261368
Original Release:	1965
Rating:	NR
Source:	Kl Studio Classics
Language:	English
Time:	2:36:00
Sales rank:	17,671

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Burt Lancaster	Thadeus
Lee Remick	Cora
Pamela Tiffin	Louise
Jim Hutton	Paul
Donald Pleasence	Oracle
John Anderson	Buell
Brian Keith	Frank
Tom Stern	Kevin
Martin Landau	Chief Walks-Stooped-Over
Bob Wilke	Chief Five Barrels,Chief Five Barrels
Jim Burk	Elks-Runner
Dub Taylor	Clayton Howell
John McKee	Rafe Pike,Rafe Pike
Helen Kleeb	Henrietta
Noam Pitlik	Interpreter
Carl Pitti	Phillips
Bill Williams	Brady
Marshall Reed	Carter
Caroll Adams	Simmons
Ted Markland	Bandmaster
Bing Russell	Horner
Billy Benedict	Simpson,Simpson
Karla Most	Mary Ann
Elaine Martone	Loretta
Hope Summers	Mrs. Hasselrad
Carroll Henry	`A' Company Sgt.
Whit Bissell	Hobbs
Val Avery	Denver Bartender
Larry Duran	Brother-in-law #2
Jerry Gatlin	Brother-in-law #2
Buff Brady	Bilkins - Miner
John Dehner	Narrator
James Burke	Actor
Elmer Bernstein	Composer

Technical Credits

John Gay

William Gulick

John Sturges	Director,Producer
John Gay	Screenwriter
Paul Pollard	Special Effects
William Gulick	Screenwriter
Wayne Fury	Sound Effects
Gilbert D. Marchant	Sound Effects
Robert Martin	Sound Effects
Clem Portman	Sound Effects
W.C. Smith	Sound Effects
Charles Bail	Stunts
A. Paul Pollard	Special Effects

Editorial Reviews

The Hallelujah Trail was director/producer John Sturges' effort at doing a light-hearted Western, almost a satire of the genre. It dates from a period in which the major studios, distributors, and producers had decided that bigger was almost always better, not just in dramas and musicals, but also in comedy, which led to such gargantuan productions as Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines and The Great Race, both released in that same year. But those movies, for all of their outsized casts and lengths, had a key virtue that The Hallelujah Trail lacked: They were funny -- not all the way through, but in many of their scenes and shots, enough to justify an entire afternoon or evening invested in watching them; whereas The Hallelujah Trail just lay there for much of its 166 minutes, eliciting a few chuckles (at best). Sturges had directed and produced some extremely long (and successful) dramatic films the late 1950s and early 1960s, but seems to have had no ability to handle sustained comedy -- every shot in The Hallelujah Trail is held too long, every scene runs too long, and he was unable to be able to get the kind of laugh-inducing performances out of his cast that he needed. Given that the cast was led by Burt Lancaster, this is not surprising -- Lancaster, like Sturges, was known and praised for many things, but comedy was not high on the list; James Garner, whose sense of irony is much more light-hearted and nearer the surface, and who subsequently delivered his share of comedic westerns as a star in Support Your Local Sheriff (1969) and Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971), would have been a better choice. And with that impediment at the center of the movie, and a director who couldn't achieve the overall tone required, the picture was doomed from the start. Among the cast, only Donald Pleasence, playing a sagely drunk, fares well -- especially in his first scene, which savagely parodies the scene with the village wise-man in Sturges' own The Magnificent Seven. Pleasence makes the most of his material and evidently inspired Sturges at those moments. His performance and Elmer Bernstein's score (one of his best), and maybe the chance to watch Lee Remick (who would have looked good in a burlap bag) modeling 19th century women's fashions, are the best reasons for seeing this movie, unless you have endless patience.