User Reviews

I'm not a Raymond Hatton fan. So a film that offers the garrulous Raymond as a third lead - and is directed by uninteresting William Berke to boot - is hardly likely to inspire my confidence.

However Rolling Home is more entertaining than I expected. True, Raymond Hatton certainly rates as aggressively hammy - even more so than usual - but he is removed from the scene halfway through. True too that the ham stakes are then taken over by Jimmy Conlin, who seems unswervingly determined to make an impression, no matter how thin his material. Needless to say, incompetent director Berke indulges these two scene-chewers with lots of close-ups.

Another early strike against the film occurs when we discover that Russell Hayden is playing a parson. The presence of Pop's grandson is also not guaranteed to lift our entertainment expectations. Fortunately though, the grandson is played by a quite presentable youngster named "Buzz" Henry. And also by good script fortune, Hayden's ministerial duties do not preclude him from racing and fighting.

And wonder of wonders, Berke lifts his game quite a notch with fairly frequent tracking shots yet, a couple of pans and even two or three attempts to use the dolly. Clumsy attempts, but the thought was there. However, there are plenty of typical Berke effects as well, like ruthlessly mundane camera set-ups, jerky continuity, poorly-matched close-ups (including a confrontation scene between Hayden and Hale which was originally filmed in a two-shot but is now intercut between flimsy close-ups obviously blown up in the lab), dull backgrounds, copious quantities of ancient stock footage, and - worst of all - truncated, economically staged and disappointingly ineffective action scenes. It's in these clumsily inept action spots that the budget limitations of the movie are so dramatically defined.

On the credit side, however, it must be admitted that Rolling Home does have a certain rustic charm. It's rare for a mainstream Hollywood plot to concern itself with such matters as a new parson's fight with his money-tight church board. And there are a couple of other plot surprises and innovations as well. Rolling Home also benefits from its interesting cast. The lead, Jean Parker (the heroine of Sequoia and Texas Rangers), here plays a villain - and she acts it out most convincingly too.

If dogs are indeed man's best friend, then horses provide the transportation that delivers them because they are indeed a close second. For young Buzz Henry, his grandfather's rodeo horse Briar has indeed been his best pal, and Briar helps him through the roughest patch of his life, losing the only family member he's ever loved, Grandpa Raymond Hatton. The small community they have just moved to features a devoted young minister (Russell Hayden) whose church is in financial trouble, and when one of the town elders, Jonathan Hale, suggests that he marry wealthy widow Jean Parker, Hayden is livid. She's a snooty young woman who is aghast by the presence of rodeo performers in their town, but passive/aggressively pretends to care when Briar goes missing and she offers a reward for him.

The perky Pamela Blake plays Parker's young daughter, planted in a boarding school by her neglectful mother, finding Briar and taking him to hide with her paternal grandfather Jimmy Conlin. She hysterically asks him to hide the horse with his pink elephants, an inside joke that he may enjoy a nip now and then. Hayden is actually in love unknowingly with Parker's niece, Jo Ann Marlowe, but the scheming Parker has other ideas for him.

There's a lot going on in this homey drama, reminding me of big budget films such as "National Velvet", "Kentucky", "Maryland" and "Home in Indiana", other films that dealt with horse racing and the human love for them. Good performances especially by the child actors makes this independent programmer well worth seeing.

Parker, who played mostly heroines, is fascinating as a shrewish control freak, trying to dominate everybody in town and unlike Hale, unable to see past her own desires and willing to see the town fall apart if she can't get what she wants. While the title of this film indicates that it's a western, it only shows that in the scene where Hatton has an accident while riding Briar out in the open. In spite of the fact that there are a lot of characters and a lot of story for each of them, this flows nicely and ends up being a surprise little sleeper.