Produced in 1950 by Henry Blanke for Warner Brothers BRIGHT LEAF is set in the tobacco growing region of the American South at the turn of the 20th. Century. A highly charged drama - BRIGHT LEAF is about ambition, love and loss and retribution and was expertly directed by the prolific Michael Curtiz. Based on the novel by Foster Fitz-Simons it was splendidly written for the screen by Ranald MacDougall ("Mildred Peirce") from which emerged a sparkling, and at times, spontaneous script. Its balmy Southern setting looked great thanks to the smart Art Direction by Stanley Fleischer, the crisp Monochrome Cinematography of Karl Freund and the atmospheric music by the always wonderful Victor Young.
Gary Cooper is Brant Royle who returns to his home in the South after some years. He rides into Kingsmont where years before his family was dispossessed, humiliated and forced out at the hands of wealthy tobacco tycoon Major Singleton (Donald Crisp). Now he's back and intends to exact some sort of vengeance on the irascible and acerbic Major. Low on funds ("I own a good horse - I own a good suit of clothes and I have $40 in my pocket") he meets up with an old flame - the attractive Sonia Kovac (Lauren Bacall) who runs a "boarding house for young ladies" and persuades her to back him in a business venture in establishing a new idea of a cigarette making machine. The enterprise is a runaway success and almost overnight Royle - along with his partners Sonia and Chris Malley (Jack Carson) - becomes a millionaire to the chagrin of the Major. Royle had always loved the Major's unobtainable and distant daughter Margaret (Patricia Neal) and makes plans now to marry her. This - together with Royle's on going presence in Kingsmont, his phenomenal business success and a pistol duel between them that goes wrong - drives the Major to take his own life. Later Margaret does agree to marry him but only with the sole purpose to destroy Brant Royle and obtain retribution for the death of her father. The picture ends with Royle financially ruined and a well executed climactic sequence which sees the opulent Singleton mansion going up in flames. With Sonia also turning him down Brant Royle rides out of Kingsmont on the same road he entered in the hope of finding contentment elsewhere.
One of the great aspects of BRIGHT LEAF is the stunning score by the great (and cigar chomping) Victor Young! Normally a Warner picture like this would have a score by the studio's resident composer Max Steiner. But Steiner was over committed on other projects and suggested his friend Victor Young write the music. Young accepted the assignment and turned in one of his finest scores. The Main Title is a sprawling and sweeping theme for full orchestra! A ravishing piece with the strings, upward yearning, climbing to their topmost register. There is also a gorgeous plaintive melody for the Lauren Bacall character, a brilliantly exciting cue for a montage of the cigarette machine as it spews out thousands of cigarettes and a frantic cue near the end for the magnificent house fire. The music from BRIGHT LEAF is high on the list of admirers of Young's scores!
BRIGHT LEAF is an engrossing and engaging story and has smooth performances throughout. Cooper is particularly good as is Bacall but Neal's southern nasally drawl is a bit grating at times. And in a rare unsympathetic role Donal Crisp is excellent as the Major. Curiously cigarette smoking is somewhat glorified in the picture and viewing the film today - some sixty years after it was made and when the smoking habit is increasingly taboo - it now seems a little perverse!
Classic line from BRIGHT LEAF...........
Jack Carson to Lauren Bacall when she bail's him out of jail.......
"Maam! I consider you a rare gem in the diadem of womanhood".
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