Customer Reviews

The Farmer's Daughter (1947) [VHS]

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Unlike some of the other reviewers, I've watched and loved this movie for years. The is one of Loretta Young's best, along with "Rachel and the Stranger" which is also wonderful. Being an old movie addict, it just boggles my mind WHY distributors will put out a movie on VHS and then not on DVD??? There are so many unbelieveably wonderful old movies that deserve to be put on DVD and this is one of them!

I tripped over this movie one day on TCM and absolutely fell in love with it! Loretta Young plays Katie, a Swedish maid that is very interested in politics. As fate would have it, she is working in the house of a powerful family in politics, but she doesn't always agree with their positions or the candidates they nominate. What she does enjoy, though, is the company of Joseph Cotten, who plays son Glenn Morley. I love their sweet romance, especially when Katie is running around the lake and Glenn can't keep up.
Just as the two protagonists really start to connect, Glenn's mother (the wonderful Ethel Barrymore) calls a meeting of her political party to nominate a candidate, one that Katie really opposes. So she decided to run for Congress herself.
This movie is so wonderful, really filled with romance, comedy, and the spirit of democracy. Not to mention Katie's handsome brothers!

This movie is as heartwarming as others, "It's A Wonderful Life" comes to mind, that have become classics, but it doesn't seem to get the same amount of respect. Loretta Young won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Katie Holstrom, and she deserved it very much. Charles Bickford, as the butler Clancy, was also nominated that year in the Best Supporting Actor category. He was just great as well.

The story is about a young woman's journey to town from her father's farm to become a nurse. Once in town, she gets sidetracked by romance and politics. There are some wonderful moments throughout that will make you laugh and may even bring a tear to your eye. I can't recommend this film enough. It's just great.

Loretta Young and Jospeh Cotton make a great couple in this film. It has everything comedy, romance, and great scenery. Ethel Barrymore, is equally delightful in it. It's a film, well worth seeing.

In an election year when most voters are wondering which candidate is the least dishonest, which is the lesser evil, The Farmer's Daughter is not only refreshing but instructive. It contrasts a political "machine" with a lone, honest voice crying in the political wilderness. Katie is that voice. She is the attractive housemaid of a powerful but amiable family, called the Morleys, who have been running their party's political machine for generations.

As one might assume, the Morleys entertain many influential people; but Katie doesn't mind listening to their conversations and interjecting her political views as she hands them a drink or canapé. Everyone is taken aback by her candor except for the son, Glenn, who is fascinated by Katie, and eventually falls in love with her, as she does with him. He takes her under his wing and encourages her to improve herself by taking night classes. In one class, she has to give a speech, which has her worried; but the family butler, Joseph, who is like another member of the family, introduces her to a little speech once delivered in the Senate by Glenn's deceased father. Katie's simple reading of it moves Joseph and Mrs. Morley.

Eventually, the family realizes that Katie does not approve of their party's candidate for Congress, and she speaks out against him in a town meeting. When the opposition party hears her, and likes what they hear, they talk her into running on their ticket. Katie's three brothers leave the family farm to come and help with her campaign. But it doesn't go well at first; until Glenn advises that she stay honest by being herself. Then the Morleys unwittingly buy into a smear campaign to destroy Katie's candidacy, which causes Glenn to leave the party and fight to clear her name.

Loretta Young plays the naive but wonderfully wise Katie, and it earned her an Oscar for Best Actress. Amazingly, 1947 was also the year she appeared in The Bishop's Wife, another great classic. Joseph Cotton plays the good-hearted Glenn, who was captain of Yale's greatest hockey team and is now following in his father's footsteps as Senator. Ethel Barrymore is Glenn's world-wise mother, Agatha, the family matriarch, who spots character in Katie and isn't above making side bets with the family butler, Joseph. Charles Bickford is memorable as Joseph, for which he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Lex Barker (Tarzan), Keith Andes (Clash By Night) and James Arness (Gunsmoke) play Katie's strapping brothers, who are terrific in a knock-down, drag-out fight with the bad guys.

Director H. C. Potter's filmmaking career lasted for little more than ten years; but he is distinguished for not only this film but also Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy. (Lex Barker is in that film as well.) The Farmer's Daughter was a play by Hella Wuolijoki (Juhni Tervataa), that was adapted for the screen by Allen Rivkin and Laura Kerr. The dialogue is snappy and witty, and the situations fun. It was later turned into a TV show that was entertaining but lost a great deal in translation.

The Farmer's Daughter is smartly insightful. It shows that when We the People are honest, it makes honest politicians possible; but when We the People are corrupt, so are our politicians. Katie, an honest politician, was able to rise to the surface because the people around her were basically honest. That is a great lesson to us in this year of dishonest and disappointing politics.

Waitsel Smith

That's the choice the voters must make when politician Cotten finds himself being challenged for his seat by his own Swedish housemaid, Young. Young is very appealing in the title role as is Cotten; also see a very solid supporting performance by Ethel Barrymore as Cotten's mother.

Loretta Young is adorable playing a swedish maid for a to-be congressman. This is a good movie to watch on a frosty morning with a cup of grog! (Which she fixes in this movie with a hot poker).

This classic B movie has stayed with me since childhood as a touchstone. Somebody needs to get going on the DVD/BluRay requests. YOU DO have an audience who responds to nostalgia. THERE ARE market results that back this fact up. WE WILL pay for this movie! What is wrong with you people? Get busy and make the fans happy or we'll conjure up Loretta Young milking a cow in a swishy dress.

Loretta Young stars as a young Swedish farm girl who goes into the big city and ends up as a maid for an important political family (Joseph Cotten and Ethel Barrymore). She has opinions herself, and wouldn't you know it, she winds up running for Congress herself. This is one of Young's most famous films, and the movie contains some of my favourite actors from the Forties (Cotten, Barrymore, and Charles Bickford as the family's butler). This is an easy, warm comedy that benefits from the expert performances of the entire cast.

1947 seems to have been a bit of an off year in Hollywood; its best remembered film is *Miracle on 34th Street*. Even so, the way in which *The Farmer's Daughter*, which won Loretta Young an Oscar for Best Actress, has been neglected is ridiculously unfair. Aside from my being the first Epinions member to tackle it, even the IMDB provides only one review link for this movie (to a German TV listing). Now, no one is going to claim that *The Farmer's Daughter* is a candidate for the AFI's Top 100; but Loretta Young's acting is just one of several attractions the film offers. The dramatic thrust of the story - an honest individual's attempt to break the stranglehold of corrupt backroomers on politics - has lost none of its topicality. Postwar idealism and its conflict with the structure of prewar American politics were hot themes in 1947 (the year's Oscar for Best Picture went to *Gentlemen's Agreement*). And though it would be possible to argue that making a woman the hero in a 1940's film about politics was intended to make the whole plot even more of a romantic fantasy, that's too cynical an assessment by far. Young's feisty Katie Holstrom is given several opportunities in the story to "go home to Papa" or even to settle down with the man of her dreams, but she doesn't take them; and its worth pointing out that both Papa and the man of her dreams, both strong characters, support her decision. The moral thrust owes something to Frank Capra's films, obviously, but like those films, *The Farmer's Daughter* maintains that sincere and determined action can change the system, and cynicism is just a cop-out.

The screenplay's origin is also relevant. It was adapted from a play by the female Finnish writer Hella Wuolijoki, called (in English) "Hulda, Daughter of Parliament", and had already been filmed in Finland in 1937. The story had been optioned in the U.S. originally as a vehicle for Ingrid Bergman, which helps to explain the Swedish ethnicity of our farmer's daughter - along with the reputation Scandinavia already had at the time for more advanced social equality.

Loretta Young phyically suited the role, tall and with high cheekbones (though not blond, unlike her counterpart Inger Stevens in the 1960's TV series based on the film). Of course the role requires her to assume a fake "Svedish accent", and this may grate with some viewers. But Young deploys her rather unconventional good looks to add considerable punch to her part. Loretta Young was not a classic beauty. Aside from the cheekbones, she had a wide mouth and almost overlarge eyes. In a soft mood, the eyes had a luminous glow and the mouth could open in the most radiant of smiles. But when the going gets tough for Katie Holstrom, fire flashes from those eyes and the mouth is set like a bulldog's, and the contrast is particularly stark when the object of her wrath is the easygoing Congressman Morley (affably portrayed by Joseph Cotten), the upright but somewhat lazy product of an established political family, which never had to squeeze a living off the Minnesota prairie through the Great Depression. Cotten's role is tricky; his character has to be honorable enough to make Katie's growing attraction to him credible, but also indolent enough to have put himself in a compromising situation to which Katie must awaken him. This is undoubtably Cotten's finest role as a romantic lead. The extremely strong supporting cast is rounded out by Ethel Barrymore (as Agatha, Glenn Morley's mother and a political heavyweight in her own right), Charles Bickford (as the Morleys' butler - always reliable in this sort of role, he garnered a best supporting actor Oscar nomination) and Harry Shannon (as Katie's down-to-earth farming father).

The plot, although offering ample scope to Young, Cotten and co. to show their stuff, is fairly straightforward. The Holstroms are a hardy Swedish immigrant family farming the Minnesota prairie. Katie Holstrom has long played housekeeper to her father, mother and three brothers. But she longs for a career of her own, and finally, after saving her money and laboriously persuading her menfolk, she sets off for nursing school - only to be swindled out of her tuition money before getting there. Rather than suffer the embarrassment of returning home, Katie takes work as a maid in the mansion of Congressman Glenn Morley and his mother to re-earn her tuition, where she soon crosses swords with the crotchety family butler Clancy. Katie's practised efficiency running a household soon catches the attention of the Morleys ("YOU didn't make this coffee", winks the Congressman to Clancy, whose foul brew has hitherto ruled the premises). Morley is amused by Katie's characteristic bluntness in political matters; she doesn't hesitate to point out to her employer the gap between a politician's public duty and the self-serving way in which most politicians discharge that duty. In fact the feelings of Congressman (an eligible bachelor, of course) and farmer's daughter towards each other are becoming something more than mutual respect when Morley is drawn into a political scam. His party's other state congressman has suddenly died. When the party bosses come to Morley's house to plot how to anoint an appropriately subservient replacement (and anyone who doubts this is how the system really worked has only to look into the career of then-president Harry Truman from nearby Missouri), Katie is horrified to overhear their scheming in the course of her domestic duties. She attends the rally at which the (corrupt) nominee is announced and causes a sensation by her embarrassing revelations of his early political career in her corner of the state. The opposition party, in a no-hope election situation, immediately offers Katie their nomination. Having breathlessly accepted, she is exposed to slander and mud-slinging as the election approaches. Now Katie's farmgirl origins betray her; completely unaccustomed to this personal aspect of the political rough-and-tumble, she breaks down and goes back to the farm, resolved never to leave it again. Morley is in a quandary. For the first time in his life he must face the morality of his own political position. And, apart from the censure of his mother and his household, he finds himself missing Katie in ways he had never expected. There's just one thing to do: pursue Katie to the family farm and have it out with her there...

*The Farmer's Daughter* was unquestionably the high point of Loretta Young's career. Rosalind Russell was widely touted to win the 1947 Best Actress award for her role in *Mourning Becomes Electra*, and when the judges named Young the winner, she leaped up in delighted surprise and shouted, "At last!" She had been making movies for almost 20 years at that point, and nobody knew better than she that her days as a young romantic lead were coming to an end. Her achievement finally established her as a star with serious acting credentials, and she went on to do fine work in Orson Welles' *The Stranger* (1946), *The Bishop's Wife* (1947), and *Come to the Stable* (1949; nominated for another Oscar) before turning very successfully to television. Likewise the film's success was part of the brief postwar renaissance of RKO Studios (Young was the only postwar Best Actor/Actress winner for any of its films), before Howard Hughes gained control and mismanaged the studio into oblivion by 1955.

As of this writing (July 2009) this film, which received two Oscar nominations (Loretta Young's win and Charles Bickford) is unavailable on DVD. It's a TCM favourite and pleas for a DVD are numerous on IMDB and here on Amazon. What's the holdup?