I’ve got to review September Dawn in the near future, so I figured I’d check out a couple other films about early Mormon history. First up was Brigham Young (1940), which is everything you’d expect a grand old Hollywood film of that era to be: romantic, idealistic, dramatic, the works. Thankfully, the disc comes with a commentary by film historian James D’Arc, who curates the movie archive at Brigham Young University, and he points out some of the places where the film deviates from history.
The film plays very strongly on the idea that Brigham Young led his people through the wilderness just like Moses did, and one of the film’s more amusing elements, for a Bible-movie buff like me, is the fact that two of the early Mormon leaders are played in this film by actors who would eventually appear in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). Above, you can see Vincent Price as Joseph Smith and John Carradine as Porter Rockwell; in DeMille’s film, Price would play the taskmaster killed by Moses, and Carradine would play Moses’ brother Aaron. (Brigham Young himself is played by Dean Jagger, who is not in DeMille’s film.)
How valuable this film is as a history of the 1840s, I could not say; but I do think it is a very interesting document of the 1940s. It makes an explicit, if fleeting, parallel between the persecution suffered by the Mormons and the oppression of the Native Americans, which is fascinating given that popular culture at that time was still very much in “cowboys and Indians” mode. And D’Arc notes how the film seems to allude to the persecution of Jews in Nazi Europe, as well as how the efforts of the more suspicious Mormons to “appease” their persecutors would have resonated so soon after the Munich Agreement of 1938.
Not surprisingly, the makers of September Dawn have said that their film will reflect the current geopolitical scene, too.
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