There was co-director but this sure looks like Howard Hawks. For one thing, there's Frances Farmer, Hawks' type of woman -- young, beautiful, throaty. For another, it's almost a rough draft of "Red River". An ambitious man leaves the woman who loves him. The woman dies in his absence. Years later, he and his son meet another woman who reminds the father figure of the girl he once lost. The son falls in love with her. Conflict ensues between the two men, with the father provoking a physical fight with the younger man. The older man realizes that he's been foolish and the son winds up with the girl. (I think it was Robin Wood who first pointed out these parallels.) And that climactic scene -- with the father (Edward Arnold) slapping his son (Joel McRea) -- appears not just in "Come and Get It" and "Red River" but, in altered form, in Hawks' "Billy the Kid." Anyway, Arnold is the hearty, blustering man of business who slips sideways into a marriage de convenance, leaving Frances Farmer behind. She's good looking enough and might have been a decent actress if she hadn't been mentally ill.
Good scenes of cutting timber and processing the logs into sheets of wood. Good depiction of stubborn robber baron mentality too -- Arnold bellows cheerfully, "Why by the time I'm done there won't be ten cents worth of timber left." Joel McRea is a stubborn kid who invents the paper cup and who has notions about replanting the forest, both of which Arnold believes to be nonsense. Florence Kluckhohn, the anthropologist, suggested humans have three ways of relating to nature: conquer it, live in harmony with it, or be subjugated to it. For Arnold's rabid capitalist, it's always "Vici, vici, vici." He rails against Teddy Roosevelt and his trust busters. It wasn't that way in the old days when you could shave an entire ecosystem down to stubble. Why can't they leave a man alone to do things the way they've always been done. An appealing sentiment. Well, it must be appealing because it appears so often in advertisements and commercials. "Never had it. Never will." It's kind of an interesting thread that is only brought in a few times and then discarded.
What the script lacks in social comment -- something that never interested Howard Hawks anyway -- it makes up for in its examination of the psychodynamics of Edward Arnold. He begins as a greedy devil-may-care hard working poor guy. His fling with Frances Farmer is nothing more than that to him. But after he leaves and she dies, he finds himself in a companionate marriage that doesn't satisfy him. His old friend (Walter Brennan) had married Farmer and they'd had a daughter. When Arnold visits his old friend again, the first time in twenty years, he is struck by Brennan's daughter who looks exactly like Frances Farmer -- and in fact IS Farmer in a dual role.
Arnold is now rich and powerful but he's fifty years old, more than twice the age of Brennan's daughter. Well, as they say, there is no fool like a fool who has had twenty years to get used to having everything he's ever wanted -- and he wants Farmer. It doesn't do him any good. He showers her with gifts and finally proposes that they set up in a Chicago apartment where no one will know what's going on. She's repulsed, of course, and he comes to his senses.
It's difficult for all of us to finally come to our senses, and the last shot of Edward Arnold ringing the huge triangle at his mansion, calling everyone to dinner, and braying, "Come and get it!", with his eyes filled with tears, is a tragic one. He's one of those people who made the wrong choice years ago, just like the rest of us.
Good scenes of cutting timber and processing the logs into sheets of wood. Good depiction of stubborn robber baron mentality too -- Arnold bellows cheerfully, "Why by the time I'm done there won't be ten cents worth of timber left." Joel McRea is a stubborn kid who invents the paper cup and who has notions about replanting the forest, both of which Arnold believes to be nonsense. Florence Kluckhohn, the anthropologist, suggested humans have three ways of relating to nature: conquer it, live in harmony with it, or be subjugated to it. For Arnold's rabid capitalist, it's always "Vici, vici, vici." He rails against Teddy Roosevelt and his trust busters. It wasn't that way in the old days when you could shave an entire ecosystem down to stubble. Why can't they leave a man alone to do things the way they've always been done. An appealing sentiment. Well, it must be appealing because it appears so often in advertisements and commercials. "Never had it. Never will." It's kind of an interesting thread that is only brought in a few times and then discarded.
What the script lacks in social comment -- something that never interested Howard Hawks anyway -- it makes up for in its examination of the psychodynamics of Edward Arnold. He begins as a greedy devil-may-care hard working poor guy. His fling with Frances Farmer is nothing more than that to him. But after he leaves and she dies, he finds himself in a companionate marriage that doesn't satisfy him. His old friend (Walter Brennan) had married Farmer and they'd had a daughter. When Arnold visits his old friend again, the first time in twenty years, he is struck by Brennan's daughter who looks exactly like Frances Farmer -- and in fact IS Farmer in a dual role.
Arnold is now rich and powerful but he's fifty years old, more than twice the age of Brennan's daughter. Well, as they say, there is no fool like a fool who has had twenty years to get used to having everything he's ever wanted -- and he wants Farmer. It doesn't do him any good. He showers her with gifts and finally proposes that they set up in a Chicago apartment where no one will know what's going on. She's repulsed, of course, and he comes to his senses.
It's difficult for all of us to finally come to our senses, and the last shot of Edward Arnold ringing the huge triangle at his mansion, calling everyone to dinner, and braying, "Come and get it!", with his eyes filled with tears, is a tragic one. He's one of those people who made the wrong choice years ago, just like the rest of us.