“Jimmy!”

Plot Summary: A clinging mother doesn’t approve of her son’s fiancée and so she has him drafted into WW1 to keep them apart. But all she accomplishes is getting him killed. Ten years later she travels to France to visit his grave and to come to terms with what she had done.

Review:

John Ford, the self-proclaimed “man who makes Westerns,” made some pretty good non-Western films in the ‘30s such as The Lost Patrol and The Whole Town’s Talking, but alas, Pilgrimage isn’t one of them.  Somewhere in the Arkansas Mountains a mother, Hannah Jessop (Henrietta Crosman), and her son, Jimmy, toil on their phony studio-bound farm. Hannah, a clinging mother who tries to keep Jimmy tied to her apron strings, feels threatened when the lad falls madly in love with the girl next door, and after her disapproval fails to break up the young lovers she resorts to more desperate measures. Her possessiveness proves positively pathological, however, when she deviously has Jimmy drafted into WW1 just to keep him and the girl apart. Jimmy dutifully goes off to fight in phony studio-bound WW1 trenches and promptly winds up KIA.

Ten years later Hannah is now a lonely, cantankerous old biddy who still refuses to acknowledge her son’s girlfriend, Suzanne, who lives nearby with her ten-year old son. (It’s Jimmy’s boy, of course, and thus the film falls prey to what I call the Cycle-of-Life-Cliché, which refers to the sentimental tendency in films to follow a tragic death with a miraculous birth). Hannah’s bitter attitude is about to change, however, when she’s invited by the military to visit her son’s grave in France.

But even before she embarks on her heavily back-projected boat trip/pilgrimage to Hollywood, France to visit Jimmy’s grave in a phony studio-bound cemetery, it’s painfully obvious precisely where the film is headed, and it arrives there at its appointed time, right on cue, proving that the film’s surface artificiality is matched by its dramatic predictability. However, before reaching its oh-so-obvious destination the film takes a risible detour through a ludicrously contrived plot development which conveniently affords Hannah an opportunity for redemption - in France she just happens to come across a forlorn young man and his possessive mother, who disapproves of his pregnant fiancée, and manages to settle things between them! Following this hokey detour the film heads towards its all-too-predictable conclusion in which Hannah weeps over Jimmy’s grave and asks him (and, later, Suzanne) for forgiveness as gooey music fills the soundtrack, serving as yet another example of the sort of smothering sentimentality that mars so much of Ford’s work.    

Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews