King Vidor's The Stranger Returns

...its classical plotting is a pleasurable mechanism.
Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simon, King Vidor, American (University of California Press,1988)

The Stranger Returns (1933) is one of obscure director King Vidor's more obscure films, but its populism, classical style and low-key comedy are common elements of Vidor's work.  Miriam Hopkins plays an urban woman similar to those she played in Lubitsch's films (Trouble in Paradise, 1932 and Design for Living,1933) while Lionel Barrymore plays a benign and crotchety old man (compared to the evil old man he plays in Vidor's Duel in the Sun,1946) and Beulah Bondi plays a parasitic version of the generous rural woman she played in Mitch Leisen's Remember the Night, 1940.  During the depression Hopkins is separated from her husband in New York and comes to her grandfather's farm to live.  She is beset by "little town" gossip when she falls in love with the equally educated Franchot Tone, who has also come home to his family farm but has a wife and child.  Eventually Hopkins warms to the farm -- the cooking and the occasional dance-- and realizes, as her grandfather quotes Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard, that she could live there and enjoy the beauty of the country.  Barrymore dies and leaves the farm to her, while Franchot Tone returns with his family to a teaching job at Cornell.

Vidor started making films in 1913, only five years after D.W. Griffith made his first films.  Vidor, like many directors who started in silent films, knew how to tell a story visually, and with Griffith he shared a Jeffersonian faith in rural America, without turning a blind eye to its sometimes small-mindedness.  Vidor could see the positive comforts as well as the boring conformity of rural religion (see my post on Hallelujah, July 23rd of this year); in The Stranger Returns even the dogs are put to sleep by the pompous sermons.  Most importantly Vidor also understood and shared Griffith's passion for showing "the wind in the trees."