utgard14 Stranger Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey) arrives in an Ozarks mountain community and has a positive affect on those around him, including Matt Matthews (John Wayne), who is bent on killing his father who abandoned his mother when he was a baby. John Wayne's first color film is more of a starring vehicle for Harry Carey, despite the billing. Wayne gives a very nice performance. Carey is excellent and has a commanding presence throughout the film. He just owns every scene he's in, even when he's not saying anything. Pretty Betty Field is all kinds of adorable and likable as the girl in love with Wayne. The supporting cast is terrific. Beulah Bondi is great as Wayne's evil aunt. You can't really have a hillbilly movie without Marjorie Main, so she's here. It also wouldn't be a proper John Wayne movie without Ward Bond and John Qualen, so they're here too.There were quite a few hillbilly movies in the '30s and '40s. Some outright made fun or were judgmental and some were just that way incidentally. This is one of the rare ones that doesn't look down on the Ozarks people, although they do make use of stereotypes. It's a very pleasant movie, slow and soft throughout most of its running time. The climax leaves a little to be desired and the central twist you'll see coming immediately but it's still a good movie worth checking out, especially if you're a fan of the actors involved.

zardoz-13 Henry Hathaway's "The Shepherd of the Hills" represented the first time that John Wayne and he worked together. Hathaway was the director of record on other John Wayne movies, among them "Circus World," "The Sons of Katie Elder," and "Legend of the Lost." "The Shepherd of the Hills" is an early John Wayne saga, made just four years after "Stagecoach" catapulted the Duke to stardom. Wayne isn't really the hero of this saga. The hero is portrayed by none other than Harry Carey. Later, Carey would play the lawman opposite Wayne in "Angel and the Badman." He shows up in the Ozarks where the Wayne clan makes bootleg whiskey. Revenue agents raid the hills, wound a moonshiner, but they never find young Matt's family moonshine operation. Meantime, Matt visits his mother's grave in a valley. He has vowed to kill his father if he ever sees him again. Matt isn't particularly friendly toward Daniel Howitt (Harry Carey) when he meets him for the first time. Nevertheless, Matt's sweetheart Sammy Lane (Betty Field) likes him. She has seen him help extract a bullet from a moonshiner. Eventually, Howitt visits Matt's family and buys land in a sacred part of the county to the chagrin of Matt. You see, Matt didn't want anybody to live where his mother died. Grudgingly, he grows fond of Howitt. Howitt helps an older woman regain her sight. This is neither a typical Hathaway or Wayne movie. There is very little fighting. Some of the conversations are interesting. It is a shock to see veteran gangster Marc Lawrence playing a half-wit. Of course, Carey delivers an impeccable performance and he makes all this folksy baloney work better than it should.

Jimmy91 man i may be young in 2006 but sometimes i wish i was young in 1941 because Betty Field is so so beautiful and i wonder what she would have been like to know well and to talk to and to discuss the world with why is life so mind numbing the way time moves and passes and cruises and saunters and ignores and slithers and compensates and reacts and promises and lies and creates and breaks and takes and gives and whispers and yells and how certain things but certain things and no things but everything.Anyway, Betty Field , makes me crazy when u watch this movie..... but at this point I've only seen her behave incredibly and with great intention for emotion.... incredible.

theowinthrop THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS was made into a silent film in 1919. Harold Bell Wright, the author of the story, was a popular novelist of the day, and a number of his stories were turned into films. He usually concentrated on stories regarding people who lived in mountainous regions (one hesitates to call them hillbillies as they are usually shown to be non-stereotypes). As was mentioned in another of the comments here, Wright also wrote the story that was the basis for the Henry Fonda / Fred MacMurray film THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE.John Wayne is not the central figure of this film, although considered the star nowadays. In reality this film should be considered one of the best in the career of Harry Carey Sr. A leading movie cowboy actor in the silent period and early sound years, Carey had slowly moved into character parts after 1933. Possibly his best recalled non-western role is the Vice President of the United States in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON. As a Western star, he proved to be Wayne's own model of the perfect western film actor. In fact, in the shooting of John Ford's THE SEARCHERS, Wayne purposely honored Carey by copying a mannerism he had (holding his arm with his hand in a particular position) in Wayne's last visible moment in that film.In the movie Wayne is a member of a family centered around James Barton and Beulah Bondi (Wayne's blood aunt), and his cousin Marc Lawrence. Bondi has never forgiven Wayne's father for abandoning the family, and indirectly causing the death of her sister. She has instilled in Wayne a hatred of the father. At the same time, the death of the sister is tied to the other tragedy of the family - that Lawrence is a mute. He has been unable to speak since he survived the fire that killed his aunt (Wayne' mother). The only one who occasionally stands up against Bondi's vicious hatred is Barton, but he admits in his best scene in the film that he really lacks the nerve to openly condemn her behavior.This is a great film for character actors. Besides Barton, Bondi, and Lawrence, please take note of Marjorie Main in one of her most prescient performances. She is blind, and she requires expensive surgery to have a chance for the restoration of her sight. At a critical moment Carey will lend her the money for that surgery. When her eyesight is restored everyone in the community rejoices, until Main recognizes somebody in the crowd she did not expect to ever see again. Her comment when she reveals this person's identity, and realizes the tragedy she may have unwittingly caused, is devastating in it's simplicity and ironic truth.Carey is a newly arrived rancher in the area, who (as witness his assistance to Main) gets involved trying to do good for his neighbors. And all usually benefit. Yet he too has his secrets, and they nearly rip him and several others apart.THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS is a movie about redemption and forgiveness, and it's cast shows the difficulties faced by common people when presented with these seemingly simple acts of behavior. All of the stars of the movie gave first rate performances in it, and for Wayne it was the first big follow-up to his overnight success in STAGECOACH. But the best performance remains Carey's, who in the end has to commit an act of violence in order to try to save his last chance for acceptance from those who count the most.