CinemaSerf

I found the title of this film slightly misleading as Susan Hayward shuns her glamorous looks to play "Mary". She lives happily with her husband and young son "Robbie" (Dennis Holmes) until a forest fire renders her a widow and she really begins to struggle to maintain their small farm. Things might improve though when "Fred" (Stephen Boyd) arrives on the scene. He had been working at a local lumber mill but the conflagration put paid to that. For C$80 per month, he agree to stick around the place and help out. He sleeps in an annexe to the barn and as time passes it becomes clear what's going to happen next... "Fred" has something of the "Jekyll" to him though, and as he struggles to relate to the youngster and increasingly to his new wife, we discover that he has some baggage of his own and that is seriously compromising his new family. Tempers - and the weather - flare up and soon lives are in danger. Boyd does an ok job here, but is hampered by the scope of his character. The man we see at the start of the film isn't really the violent, bad-tempered, man we see in the middle - and we only have sparse crumbs to explain this change from the rather undercooked screenplay. The production benefits from some fine cinematography, it also suffers from some clearly studio based external scenes and a snow storm that must have all but exhausted the Californian confetti supply. Hayward offers a convincing performance here as the doting mother and the film tells a story of the pioneering spirit from a slightly different perspective.