Jubilee Trail (1954)

Pretty Good

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The acting in this movie is really good.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Unusual and charming western, though it is really more of a romantic costume film. The sets and costumes are glorious, as others have noted. Very unusual color combinations for the ladies. Great authenticity to the sets. Lots of Spanish being spoken, without translation. The acting is good and the story is not at all the usual wagon train picture. I did not care so much for all of the singing. It was a little distracting. Filler if you will. But the romance was good. It was kind of an old fashioned melodrama actually. Well just watch it, but do not have expectations ahead of time because it is not at all what you would expect.

The film is a combination of western, melodrama and musical. The action sequences are quite good, and there is humor, too. Even if you have not read the book by Gwen Bristow, it is obvious that producer Herbert Yates has omitted key chunks of the narrative, presumably to keep the focus on his wife, Vera Ralston, who stars in this project.But the omissions hurt the picture. Indeed, too many liberties have been taken while transferring Bristow's epic story to the big screen: the New York prologue is eliminated; we do not see the death of the California woman who kills herself and her baby; the Russian character is introduced at the Hale ranch, not in San Francisco. And the film spends its final half hour in Los Angeles.There are other changes. For instance, we do not get a scene in which Garnet (Joan Leslie) learns she's pregnant; and at one point, she has her arm in a sling, though we have no idea why she's been injured at the ranch. Apparently, there was an earthquake, but those scenes were either edited out or not filmed at all.Despite the imperfections, the film is more enjoyable than one would expect it to be. It is told from the point of view of the western female; and at its heart, the story celebrates the friendship of pioneer women.

In once again reviewing a movie or TV appearance of a cast member of the original "Dallas" in chronological order, I'm now at 1954 where Jim Davis is once again in a Republic production directed by Joseph Kane. He plays Silky, a bar owner who's friends with the main characters played by Joan Leslie, Vera Ralston, Forrest Tucker, and Pat O'Brien. The story moves along briskly with occasional stops for action and music. The Trucolor scenery is nice to look at. Victor Young's music score is also enjoyable to listen to. Really, I don't have a thing to complain about. I do wonder if the novel this movie was based on had even more that happened that they couldn't show here due to time constraints...

This is a wonderful story which was the most poorly cast movie I've ever seen. I've read the book 20+ times in my life (obviously a favorite!) but the casting person obviously didn't waste their time doing the same even once. The book has rich characters which the movie didn't bring out. Overall, terribly disappointing. Florinda was the blonde, not Hispanic. Garnet had the black hair (I guess in the movies in those days, blondes were the good girls and dark hair was the bad...kind of like the white hat/black hat cowboys!A perfect cast (impossible because of age differences) would have Gary Cooper as John, William Shatner as Oliver, Kirk Douglas as Texas and James Cagney as Oliver's brother, to name a few! That's just part of my dream cast.My advice is to go get the book from the library!