Boy who thought his father a war hero finds he was really a deserter.Boy who thought his father a war hero finds he was really a deserter.Boy who thought his father a war hero finds he was really a deserter.
Tyrone Power
- Donald MacKenzie
- (as Tyrone Power Jr.)
Phil Dunham
- Counterman
- (uncredited)
Frank Hagney
- Fight Manager
- (uncredited)
Lew Kelly
- Harry - Daffy Diner
- (uncredited)
Eugene Pallette
- Deaf Diner
- (uncredited)
Storyline
Did you know
- Quotes
Harry - Daffy Diner: I'm sorry, but if I leave before I start I'd have to come back, so I'd better wait here till after I'm gone so I'll be sure and be here when I return.
- ConnectionsFeatured in The Universal Story (1996)
Featured review
Legacy
I have no idea why the main character and actor who plays him share the same name. As far as I can tell, there's no reason at all, which seems to make even less sense when one of the more prominent secondary characters also shares a name with his actor. Beyond that weird quirk, Tom Brown of Culver is a meaty drama about the younger generation learning the faults of the older generation, set on the grounds of a military academy in Indiana. I find it interesting that both Wyler and John Ford made movies about military academy life at about the same point in time (Ford's was Salute), though while Wyler's falters in its ending, it's the superior film overall.
Tom Brown (er...Tom Brown) is an itinerate young man who makes ten dollars after a lost boxing match, spoiling himself afterwards at the diner owned by Slim (Slim Summerville), a former military cook. Following Brown are a pair of military officers who seem to know who he is, the son of Doctor Culver, a Medal of Honor recipient who died in a bombing raid during WWI. Tom barely knew the old man, but he carries around the medal with him, treating it unimportantly since he thinks little of his father going off to get killed, leaving his mother to die of a broken heart, and him to nearly starve on the streets. The medal won't feed him. Out of respect for his father, the officers offer Brown a place at Culver Military Academy, and Tom signs up at the insistence of Slim, who served with Doc Brown (they call him Doc Brown, which is a fun little thing to note after the release of Back to the Future many decades later).
The dramatic meat of the film is about legacy. The main focus is Tom, figuring out how to exist in this place steeped in history (granted the place was only about 40 years old at the time) with traditions and expectations for respect of the signs of the place. That gets manifested most potently when Tom gets into a row with his roommate Robert (Richard Cromwell) over saluting a gold star emblazoned on the ground outside the library. Tom won't do it because he sees no point. Robert demands it because his own father's face is hanging in that hall as a former student having fallen in combat and respect is demanded of the cadets at the academy. It turns into a quick brawl, but Tom takes the blame when the superior officer shows up to stop the fight and mete out punishment.
There are another couple of small subplots that seem to be designed to feed into the central idea as well. The first involves Robert being obsessed with the singer Dolores Delight (Betty Blythe), leading to him heading to Indianapolis on the day they're supposed to report back to barracks at the end of Christmas holiday, leading him to be AWOL, which Tom tries to cover for. The other is Ernest Carruthers (Norman Phillips Jr.), one of the younger cadets who is always writing to his mother who receives news during the year of his mother's death. It's a very nice little moment for the actor when it happens, and there's a good look at camaraderie among the cadets, even when Carruthers had been an object of derision through the early academy scenes. However, I'm not really sure how either really feeds into the central thematic focus of the film. They seem ancillary, at best, instead of complimentary.
The film really gets interesting when it turns out that Doc Brown (H. B. Warner) is not dead. I would call that a spoiler, but every synopsis of the film leads with this even though it doesn't come up until halfway through the film. I guess implications of great drama around a hero father turning out to be a coward are more exciting than a son learning to live under the shadow of his father's legacy. Anyway, there's a very good look at what legacy actually means, this interaction between myth and reality that the younger generations have to navigate when looking to its fathers, and the father, come back to try and connect with the only family he has, has to deal with the idea of destroying the myth of himself to reveal the truth of himself. The immediate character resolution is something I quite like, with Tom finding a way to accept his father without damning everything else he's grown to accept in his life in the military, a certain middle ground of acceptance. And then the film goes for some kind of easy ending where everything is happy and it doesn't actually make too much sense. There's a forgiving nature towards a deserter that the US military would probably have trouble simply forgiving so easily. It's an ending that the movie leading up to it didn't deserve. It deserved better. It's a nice ending, even if it doesn't make much sense, that warms the heart nonetheless.
There's a surprising complexity to the thematic approach of Tom Brown of Culver, one coming from an artist obviously looking to push the cinematic medium in a more mature direction after having started by making a series of low-rent Westerns for Universal (the one I've seen was quite good, to be honest). He was on the right path, if you ask me.
Tom Brown (er...Tom Brown) is an itinerate young man who makes ten dollars after a lost boxing match, spoiling himself afterwards at the diner owned by Slim (Slim Summerville), a former military cook. Following Brown are a pair of military officers who seem to know who he is, the son of Doctor Culver, a Medal of Honor recipient who died in a bombing raid during WWI. Tom barely knew the old man, but he carries around the medal with him, treating it unimportantly since he thinks little of his father going off to get killed, leaving his mother to die of a broken heart, and him to nearly starve on the streets. The medal won't feed him. Out of respect for his father, the officers offer Brown a place at Culver Military Academy, and Tom signs up at the insistence of Slim, who served with Doc Brown (they call him Doc Brown, which is a fun little thing to note after the release of Back to the Future many decades later).
The dramatic meat of the film is about legacy. The main focus is Tom, figuring out how to exist in this place steeped in history (granted the place was only about 40 years old at the time) with traditions and expectations for respect of the signs of the place. That gets manifested most potently when Tom gets into a row with his roommate Robert (Richard Cromwell) over saluting a gold star emblazoned on the ground outside the library. Tom won't do it because he sees no point. Robert demands it because his own father's face is hanging in that hall as a former student having fallen in combat and respect is demanded of the cadets at the academy. It turns into a quick brawl, but Tom takes the blame when the superior officer shows up to stop the fight and mete out punishment.
There are another couple of small subplots that seem to be designed to feed into the central idea as well. The first involves Robert being obsessed with the singer Dolores Delight (Betty Blythe), leading to him heading to Indianapolis on the day they're supposed to report back to barracks at the end of Christmas holiday, leading him to be AWOL, which Tom tries to cover for. The other is Ernest Carruthers (Norman Phillips Jr.), one of the younger cadets who is always writing to his mother who receives news during the year of his mother's death. It's a very nice little moment for the actor when it happens, and there's a good look at camaraderie among the cadets, even when Carruthers had been an object of derision through the early academy scenes. However, I'm not really sure how either really feeds into the central thematic focus of the film. They seem ancillary, at best, instead of complimentary.
The film really gets interesting when it turns out that Doc Brown (H. B. Warner) is not dead. I would call that a spoiler, but every synopsis of the film leads with this even though it doesn't come up until halfway through the film. I guess implications of great drama around a hero father turning out to be a coward are more exciting than a son learning to live under the shadow of his father's legacy. Anyway, there's a very good look at what legacy actually means, this interaction between myth and reality that the younger generations have to navigate when looking to its fathers, and the father, come back to try and connect with the only family he has, has to deal with the idea of destroying the myth of himself to reveal the truth of himself. The immediate character resolution is something I quite like, with Tom finding a way to accept his father without damning everything else he's grown to accept in his life in the military, a certain middle ground of acceptance. And then the film goes for some kind of easy ending where everything is happy and it doesn't actually make too much sense. There's a forgiving nature towards a deserter that the US military would probably have trouble simply forgiving so easily. It's an ending that the movie leading up to it didn't deserve. It deserved better. It's a nice ending, even if it doesn't make much sense, that warms the heart nonetheless.
There's a surprising complexity to the thematic approach of Tom Brown of Culver, one coming from an artist obviously looking to push the cinematic medium in a more mature direction after having started by making a series of low-rent Westerns for Universal (the one I've seen was quite good, to be honest). He was on the right path, if you ask me.
helpful•10
- davidmvining
- Jun 30, 2023
Details
- Runtime1 hour 22 minutes
- Color
- Aspect ratio
- 1.37 : 1
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