From the film's opening shot, we can see that The Trail of The Lonesome Pine (the second feature shot using Technicolor Process IV) has very different color goals than Becky Sharp. From beginning to end, the color photography of Lonesome Pine emphasizes the beauty of nature, and champions the ability of Technicolor to capture and render natural beauty faithfully.
Based on a 1908 novel by John Fox Jr., The Trail of the Lonesome Pine tells the story of a Hatfield-McCoy-esque feud between two families, the Falins and the Tollivers, somewhere in the deepest darkest reaches of Eastern Kentucky. An engineer for a mining company shows up, hoping to buy mining and railroad right-of-way rights from both families. He packs the beautiful "savage" daughter off to Louisville to get finished and so she can understand things, fightin' ensues, and a little boy is killed. Progress wins the day and the families reconcile after some more fightin' and shootin'. Viewed today, I can't say I accept the idea of having your land become a coal mine as such a boon.
Unlike Becky Sharp, which really only had one star, Miriam Hopkins, Pine co-starred two up-and-comers, Fred MacMurray and Henry Fonda, alongside the well-established Sylvia Sidney. Never mind the hackneyed Appalachian dialects; the obvious intellectual disdain with which the film treats its poor, uneducated subjects; and the questionable believability of California pine forests in place of Kentucky hollers: the film was a financial and critical success.
Restraint and Nature
Scott Higgins, in his book on 1930s color design for Technicolor, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, defines three color modes of 1930s Technicolor—demonstration (films like Becky Sharp, intended to show color was a viable and exciting tool for filmmaking), restrained (films like Lonesome Pine, in which color is treated as subordinate to the storytelling), and assertive (films like The Adventures of Robin Hood, in which the color is more effulgent but integrated with the story in a non-distracting way). [1] In Higgins's appreciation of the history of Technicolor, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is "a landmark film in the restrained mode." [2]
On the other hand, as Kia Afra has noted, while it is convenient to be able to lump the early Technicolor productions together, blindly following Higgins's historiography can lead us away from seeing what is actually there on the screen:
If we accept [Higgins's] reductive model, every Technicolor film from the era must fall within one of the three modes or approaches to color design.Yet imposing this teleological framework on 1930s color design ignores color cinematography’s historical overlaps and its stylistic heterogeneity. In fact, a close analysis of color design in Becky Sharp shows that aspects from all three modes are already present in the earliest three-color films, undermining the need for any evolutionary narrative of progression from one mode to the next. [3]
I'm introducing Afra's quote (which I came across while reading up on Becky Sharp) at this stage not to dismiss Higgins's framework, but rather because it is a good reminder to consider the ways in which the low output and clear timeline of early Technicolor films almost yearns for a logical evolutionary explanation. And I think Afra is correct to note that Higgins's analysis can be too easily glossed into a story which tells us that Becky Sharp was a color fiasco, and the filmmakers of the next Technicolor feature, The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, were at such pains to make a film that was not a color fiasco that they repressed even otherwise typical colorful clothing. (Indeed, Higgins tells us that according to Technicolor cinematographer William H. Greene, "Even red and black checkered shirts, which might well be found in the mountains, were not allowed because the effect might suggest that they had been added to bring out more color.") [4]
Although (as Higgins is quick to note) restraint necessitates a tremendously attentive approach to color, I don't read restraint as the primary goal of the color design here. Instead, as I mentioned above, I think it's better to consider the ways in which Technicolor used The Trail of the Lonesome Pine to present nature in living color. From the present day, it is difficult to imagine what it was like to see nature so large and in color in a movie theater, especially if you lived far away from the mountain wildernesses that appear regularly in the film. The sunset shot above is used purely as a transition, a thoughtful pause before the beginning of a funeral scene. If the film had been made more recently, the shot would be two to three times as long to let us artfully shift gears and think; as it is, it's a notably modern moment in the middle of a classic studio production.
Color Themes
As befits a film set in the woods with "pine" in the title, this is a green-brown movie. Even most of the interior sets are brown, since most of those scenes take place in cabins or tents. Indeed, when Sylvia Sidney's June goes off to school in Louisville the most disorienting color transition in the whole film takes place during a phone call, when she answers the phone in a white neoclassical foyer. The intercutting of the two sides of the conversation is jarring, and I cannot help thinking that the designers liked the idea of using color to emphasize the contrast between the city and the backwoods.
Amid all the brown and nature there are other cues to the film's careful color design. Taking two shots from the same phone conversation, we see in one a minor spectrum of colored pencils on the desk of engineer Fred McMurray are a subtle reminder that the fact that the rest of the frame, too, is shot in full color. In the shot in Louisville, Sidney wears a jacket that matches the deep blue of the rough homemade dress she first appears in at the beginning of the film. She might be getting refined and finished in the Big City, but she's still the same June underneath.
The Necessity of Full Color
The limited palette of The Trail of the Lonesome Pine brings up an interesting question: is full color essential to its design? On the one hand, we might say that the inessentiality of color was exactly what Technicolor was going for. Frank S. Nugent came to the same conclusion in his contemporary review of the film in The New York Times:
Paradoxically, [The Trail of the Lonesome Pine] improves the case for color by lessening its importance. it accepts the spectrum as a complementary aspect of the picture, not its raison d'etre. In place of the vivid reds and scarlets, the brilliant purples and dazzling greens and yellows of "Becky [Sharp]", it employs sober browns and blacks and deep greens. It may not be natural color, but at least, it is used more naturally. The eye, accustomed to the shadings of black and white, has less difficulty meeting the demands of the new element; the color is not a distinction, but an attraction – as valuable and little more obtrusive than the musical score. [5]
On the other hand, we can look for reasons why a film so dominated by greens and browns still showed the superiority of Technicolor IV over its two-color predecessors, and see that the presentation of the full spectrum, not as a rainbow, but as a natural palette, had a certain allure for Technicolor's advocates. Let's just suppose, for a moment, that Pine had been filmed instead in Technicolor Process III - the red-green process used for King of Jazz, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and other films.
In the interior shot shown above, my simulated two-color version is acceptable. If we had been watching the movie for even a few minutes at this point, the appearances of the characters, sets, and clothing would not be at all distracting. Clearly, Natalie Kalmus and the other designers of the film are leaning into Technicolor IV's capabilities by dressing both of our main characters in deep blue (not to mention suggesting the character's obvious romantic compatibility using their similarly-colored clothes as a metaphor), but we are not missing much without that blue.
In exterior scenes, however, we are immediately looking at a much-degraded image. The natural settings and the near-constant sunlight (the exterior scenes really were filmed outdoors, not on a soundstage) appear flat, drab and dead. How are we supposed to believe that a city slicker engineer could fall in love with an uneducated girl who lives in a place like that? In full color, the natural settings become a part of the characterization of a number of the main roles in the film, Sylvia Sidney's June foremost among them.
I am not showing these images to suggest that there were any kinds of plans or discussions about shooting Pine in two-color Technicolor. Rather, I am showing how even the not-very-colorful scenes, dominated by green and brown which were part of the earlier process's gamut, are greatly enhanced by the full spectrum of three-strip Technicolor.
Twilight on the Trail: Some Closing Thoughts
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine is a very beautifully photographed film. The natural shots are stunning, all the more so when you consider all the equipment and people standing just out of frame. The film decidedly feels shot on location, in a way that not all that many films from 1936 do. The color design is thoughtful and makes the film feel special. This is something Frank Nugent noticed as well in his review:
For all its gunplay and fist-swinging, its plot—considered alone—would be unimpressive and little more meaningful than the elemental fodder on which most Class B melodramas feed. But when, to that story, is added a cast of unusual merit and a richly beautiful color production, then it becomes a distinguished and worthwhile picture ... The real credit for "Trail of the Lonesome Pine" belongs not to John Fox Jr., nor to the cast, but to Natalie Kalmus, who supervised the color photography; to Alexander Toluboff, who was responsible for the Art Direction, and to Henry Hathaway, its director, who adhered steadfastly, in the face of what must have been great temptation, to his avowed intention of keeping color under control. [6]
For all its beauty, I find The Trail of the Lonesome Pine difficult to like. I get too hung up on the ways in which it relentlessly misunderstands and stereotypes Appalachia. For a film in which there are no characters from racial minorities, it lays bare an impressively large amount of post-Hays Hollywood's production prejudices. The transformation of Sylvia Sidney's June is particularly disturbing in that she has very little opportunity to express her intelligence, goodness, or lovability within the hillbilly version of her character; this is no Pygmalion.
The dislocation of the film is also jarring. It is shot on location and that location is blatantly California. The songs are good ("Twilight on the Trail" in particular), but they're Hollywood cowboy songs, not Appalachian songs. Lonesome Pine is western romance masquerading as a hillbilly melodrama and I would probably find the story more tolerable if it was just set in the west in the first place, though given that the book was well known and there had been prior film adaptations, it is easy to understand why the film's producer, Walter Wanger, and Harvey Threw, Horace McCoy, and Grover Jones, who were variously credited as writers, would not have considered relocating it.
Versions & Availability
The Trail of the Lonesome Pine was released on a Blu-Ray disc for the home market by Universal in 2021.
Reasons
Reasons to watch: historical signifiance; beautiful photography, particularly of natural settings; solid performances by a good cast, particularly Fred Stone as Judd Tolliver.
Reasons to avoid: the themes (the goodness of the march of progress as represented by mining, warring backwoods heathen clans, the little savage girl made into a respectable woman) feel outdated; the Appalachian setting (including music, speech and landscape) lacks believability; rife in Hollywood's implicit biases
Bonus listening: my favorite version of "Twilight on the Trail" is the version sung by the Quebe Sisters on their self-titled album from 2019 - this is how I first heard the song, in fact. Bing Crosby comes a close second in this version from 1959 (the good: unexplained lumberyard set; the bad: the warbling background choir).
Credits
[1] Scott Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 19-20
[2] Ibid., 94.
[3] Kia Afra, "Becky Sharp, Technicolor, and the Historiography of Film Style," in Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 32 no. 2, (2015), 99-101. Accessed 03.15.2023 from the Timeline of Historical Film Colors, here.
[4] William H. Greene, quoted in Higgins, Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow, 94-95.
[5] Frank S. Nugent "The Screen: 'Trail of the Lonesome Pine,' the First Outdoor Film in Technicolor, at the Paramount," The New York Times, February 20, 1936. Accessed 03.14.2023 through TimesMachine.
[6] Ibid.
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