Why, she's what white folks call a "leggend," the old-timer explains, and a "leggend" is someone who never really dies. The plow digs up a long-buried rag doll, and the old man guesses it must have belonged to Belle Starr when she was a little girl long ago. He opens in romantically desolate fashion with a black man and his son (or grandson) plowing a field in what used to be the yard of a Missouri mansion, shadowed by the ruins of marble columns.
But Cummings goes for the tears right from the start. Belle Starr the Bandit Queen is a highly romanticized tale that employs top studio talent - the Technicolor cinematography is by Ernest Palmer and Ray Rennahan, and Alfred Newman is credited with the score - in the service of outright evil.Ĭall me sentimental, but using this music as the theme to Belle Starr the Bandit Queen strikes me as just a bit blasphemous.
Belle starr the bandit queen movie movie#
While the film is supposedly based on a Burton Rascoe novel of the same name, its Belle Starr is the bastard offspring of the movie James and Scarlett O'Hara, and comes off more like Jesse James as some modern writers see him, as an anti-Reconstruction terrorist, than like the nebulous Belle Starr of history. While the Dwan model is a generic female outlaw, the Cummings version shows the influence of two popular films from two years earlier: the same studio's Jesse James and the Selznick superproduction Gone With the Wind.
Starr hews very closely to the known facts of her outlaw career, but the 1941 model, a Twentieth Century-Fox production, has a distinctive archetypal parentage. We last encountered Belle Starr in the appealing form of Jane Russell in Allan Dwan's 1948 oater Montana Belle, but you'd hardly recognize the lady in Irving Cummings's more ambitious 1941 epic.