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That's only because it's a lot easier to talk about a fool
I can't explain the title of Count Three and Pray (1955). It's not a line from the screenplay, it doesn't quote any folk saying that I know of, and it makes the movie sound like some kind of religious thriller instead of the dryly poignant post-bellum character drama that at its best it is. I caught it on TCM in 2016 in my first flush of discovery of Van Heflin and never managed to write it up despite intending to; now that Heflin's turned up in my dreams for two nights running, I figure I owe him a review. I have my arguments with this movie, but none of them are with him.
The story begins like another movie ending: a tall tired-shouldered man in Union blues (Heflin) walking through a rural, autumnal landscape to the harmonica strains of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Only the two men marching home with him are dressed in equally road-worn Confederate grey and when their families come running out to answer their homecoming yell, one of the wives all but spits at the sight of their companion, already turning back alone to the fields they crossed together. "You left me setting by all these years whilst you was off fighting and then you come home friendly with Luke Fargo . . . I wouldn't walk the road where his feet had passed!" The homestead that road leads him to is a burnt-out ruin of scattered bricks and weeds, its blackened chimney stack branded with white paint: "Luke Fargo—Traitor." He tries to smudge the words out with a branch of charcoal, but they glare through, mocking him as he shoulders his haversack with an already familiar weariness and moves on. The old parsonage in its rustle of dry cornfields greets him next and so does its current occupant who almost blows his head off. That's about as warm a welcome as he'll receive in his war-wrecked hometown, Luke Fargo whose name is its own epithet. Formerly the county's legendary hell-raiser, a brawler, gambler, and drunken skirt-chaser of antiheroic proportions, he couldn't even redeem himself in battle like a proper son of the South—he fought for the Union like the contrary son-of-a-gun he always was and now that he's made his unwanted prodigal's return, he's claiming of all things to have come back a preacher. He sets up camp in the parsonage. He aims to build the town a new church, the old one having been razed by Northern soldiers on their last march through. The parson himself died of a fever on the eve of Vicksburg, whose carnage seems to have been Luke's shell-shocking Damascus. "And when it was over with, we were all too tired to even try to bury our dead . . . and when I woke up, I just wanted to stop all this killing. I wanted to try to help people instead of hurting them. I made up my mind I was going to be a preacher." He says it simply, still wearing his fighting words of a "bluelegs" uniform and his nervous newfound quiet, and he is not believed. As a later exchange summarizes the problem: "You're Luke Fargo!"–"That's right."–"Then you're no parson!"
Honestly, the viewer may have their doubts about his chances. None of Luke's good intentions seem able to proceed without bad acts. He gets the lumber for his church by racing the owner of a sawmill on a Sunday, his sermons by rifling his predecessor's papers, his initial congregation by return investment on a horse-trade, even his sober black suit of preacher's clothes courtesy of the local madam's soft spot for her former "big buffalo" who looks so helplessly awkward now when she turns his platonic handshake into a kiss that raises a whoop from witnesses. His pacifism goes for nothing when the color of his coat provokes brawls in the street; the townsfolk nod sagely as he picks himself out of the dust, "Same old Luke Fargo, just like before." Without the excuse of a temperance pledge which he doesn't pretend to, it starts to look rude for a man to keep turning down drinks. And whatever credit they may extend to his church-building project, even the most warily approachable of his neighbors can't believe that he isn't living in sin with Lissy (Joanne Woodward, making her film debut), the cigar-smoking, rock-throwing, rifle-toting half-grown girl in boy's clothes he found squatting in the parsonage when he tried to move in. Of all the people currently unimpressed with Luke Fargo, she's the one to watch, boastful and belligerent with a raucous mocking voice and a loose tousle of hair the color of corn husks; the script does not actually suggest it, but the part of my brain that filters everything through folklore has very little difficulty seeing her as a crow. Her annunciatory shotgun blast dropped him in the dirt beside a scarecrow dressed in the same weatherbeaten soldier's coat as himself. She has a habit of perching in trees and snickering at him. "Why don't you talk about hell?" she calls when he dries up during his first attempt at a church meeting. "You ought to know about that—you raised enough around here!" Doggedly and self-doubtingly as he does everything these days, Luke rolls up his sleeves to civilize her in accordance with his newfound faith, but her sharp tongue and her semi-feral adolescent's keen eye for adult hypocrisy make her much less a potential convert than a cross between his conscience and the devil on his shoulder: he may be the one holding the Bible, its pages bloodstained from the battlefield, but Lissy's correctly pegged that he's the one in need of rescue, transparent in both his sincerity and his shame. "I'm sorry again, Lord. I—I guess I just keep promising."
This is not the kind of plot that needs a villain. Luke Fargo's his own worst enemy and he knows it—his reputation, his inexperience, and his temperament are all against him and Heflin puts his considerable talent for take-it-or-leave-it vulnerability into inhabiting a man resolutely aware that he's seen as a fool at best, a traitor at worst, and either way the dead last choice in town for a man of God. Most of his smiles are valiant winces, his determined stride at odds with his hesitant speech. Sickening of war didn't cure him of a short temper. Discovering his faith didn't tell him how to practice it. Lissy needles him that he says grace in silence because he doesn't know the words, but it seems increasingly plausible that for all his commitment to it, Luke may not have much idea of what his vocation actually entails; mostly he knows what he shouldn't be doing and somehow his intended flock never seem to catch him doing anything else. It's a funny, touching, almost entirely interior conflict and I have no idea why the filmmakers found it necessary to insert a heavy in the person of Yancey Huggins (Raymond Burr), the resentful, noncombatant storekeeper whose influence in town has replaced the broken gentility of the Descrais family, now reduced to the haughtily helpless Georgina (Allison Hayes) and her embittered alcoholic mother (Kathryn Givney). We don't need him to encourage men to burn the half-built church or disrupt its opening service when we've already seen so much of the town set against Luke just for coming back from the wrong side of the war; we really don't need him to make a weapon of his abusive association with Georgina, especially when the ex-belle has her own reasons for wanting the would-be preacher dealt with. He would make more sense if he had some allegorical weight to go with the rest of the psychomachia, the antagonism of the humiliated South for Reconstruction perhaps, but mostly he just feels artificial and unpleasant and there's only so much even Burr can do with a glower and a black-gloved hand. I don't find the spirited Miss Selma (Jean Willes), who runs the house of ill but very popular repute the next town over, much more deeply drawn, but at least she belongs in the story: a high-water mark of Luke's scandalous past, she's puzzled and a little wounded by his reinvention that has no place for her except as a friend firmly without benefits, but she does her best to support him in his quixotic ministry and whenever it backfires she's genuinely sorry. Luke's fellow veterans and their families register mostly as a collective, although Matty Miller (Nancy Kulp) stands out for her rawboned straight talk. The arsonist's wife (Adrienne Marden) who plants herself in front of Luke with a child in need of christening and won't let him get out of it despite an acute attack of impostor syndrome exacerbated by legitimate ignorance is a one-scene hit.
The other thing I'm not sure this film needs is a romance. It's foreshadowed in that Lissy's actual age and frank interest in Luke are obvious to the audience even before she's asking him forlornly, under pretence of quizzing him about his womanizing past, "I reckon if a girl wasn't pretty, you wouldn't have nothing to do with her? Even if she was so smart, she could skin a squirrel with her teeth?" and I find it both cute and in character that when she decides to femme up, she does so with a frou-frou-laden black-and-scarlet gown borrowed from Selma's bordello that's just as scandalous as her men's shirts and trousers, but your mileage for the finale will still depend on how believable you find the sudden pivot from found family to shotgun marriage. I tell myself it's her trickster crow-self, snapping up something that shines. I remain generally more convinced by their fractious camaraderie and the softer moments it allows for, like the painful candor with which Luke confesses his failures as a parson after the debacle of the dedication and the surprising gentleness with which Lissy hears him out. When he berates himself as a "fine example" of faith and understanding that waded into a fistfight instead of a sermon, "emptier inside than this church . . . I don't know what made me think I'd ever be able to find the right words to speak from this pulpit," she answers quite softly, one fine example to another, "Seems to me like you're finding them right now."
Director George Sherman was known for his B-Westerns, but Count Three and Pray really isn't one despite the presence of preachers, horses, and the occasional rifle shot; I get that the genre has kind of eaten the American nineteenth century alive, but I am also relatively confident that wherever the frontier was in the fall of 1865, Tennessee or Georgia was far from it. The screenplay is credited to Herb Meadow after his own short story "The Calico Pony" and I have to say that title doesn't sound much like the finished film, either. The score by George Duning should be unsutured from the print wherever possible, since it's full of sprightly stings that belong to an out-and-out comedy, and I should like someday to see the cinematography by Burnett Guffey in its rightful Technicolor CinemaScope, because I have the troubling feeling that the version TCM showed was pan-and-scanned. And yet I have thought about this movie on and off for three years now because its A-plot is solid seriocomic gold and so are Woodward and Heflin and therefore on some level I don't care that the rest of the film around them feels rather like it was stuck together from drafts of some other post-Civil War movie lying around the writers' room; on others I find it extremely annoying. Maybe it was bad editing. I suppose the point of this kind of movie is that imperfection can get the job done. It's a good thing to be reminded of, especially by Van Heflin. This promise brought to you by my same backers at Patreon.
The story begins like another movie ending: a tall tired-shouldered man in Union blues (Heflin) walking through a rural, autumnal landscape to the harmonica strains of "When Johnny Comes Marching Home." Only the two men marching home with him are dressed in equally road-worn Confederate grey and when their families come running out to answer their homecoming yell, one of the wives all but spits at the sight of their companion, already turning back alone to the fields they crossed together. "You left me setting by all these years whilst you was off fighting and then you come home friendly with Luke Fargo . . . I wouldn't walk the road where his feet had passed!" The homestead that road leads him to is a burnt-out ruin of scattered bricks and weeds, its blackened chimney stack branded with white paint: "Luke Fargo—Traitor." He tries to smudge the words out with a branch of charcoal, but they glare through, mocking him as he shoulders his haversack with an already familiar weariness and moves on. The old parsonage in its rustle of dry cornfields greets him next and so does its current occupant who almost blows his head off. That's about as warm a welcome as he'll receive in his war-wrecked hometown, Luke Fargo whose name is its own epithet. Formerly the county's legendary hell-raiser, a brawler, gambler, and drunken skirt-chaser of antiheroic proportions, he couldn't even redeem himself in battle like a proper son of the South—he fought for the Union like the contrary son-of-a-gun he always was and now that he's made his unwanted prodigal's return, he's claiming of all things to have come back a preacher. He sets up camp in the parsonage. He aims to build the town a new church, the old one having been razed by Northern soldiers on their last march through. The parson himself died of a fever on the eve of Vicksburg, whose carnage seems to have been Luke's shell-shocking Damascus. "And when it was over with, we were all too tired to even try to bury our dead . . . and when I woke up, I just wanted to stop all this killing. I wanted to try to help people instead of hurting them. I made up my mind I was going to be a preacher." He says it simply, still wearing his fighting words of a "bluelegs" uniform and his nervous newfound quiet, and he is not believed. As a later exchange summarizes the problem: "You're Luke Fargo!"–"That's right."–"Then you're no parson!"
Honestly, the viewer may have their doubts about his chances. None of Luke's good intentions seem able to proceed without bad acts. He gets the lumber for his church by racing the owner of a sawmill on a Sunday, his sermons by rifling his predecessor's papers, his initial congregation by return investment on a horse-trade, even his sober black suit of preacher's clothes courtesy of the local madam's soft spot for her former "big buffalo" who looks so helplessly awkward now when she turns his platonic handshake into a kiss that raises a whoop from witnesses. His pacifism goes for nothing when the color of his coat provokes brawls in the street; the townsfolk nod sagely as he picks himself out of the dust, "Same old Luke Fargo, just like before." Without the excuse of a temperance pledge which he doesn't pretend to, it starts to look rude for a man to keep turning down drinks. And whatever credit they may extend to his church-building project, even the most warily approachable of his neighbors can't believe that he isn't living in sin with Lissy (Joanne Woodward, making her film debut), the cigar-smoking, rock-throwing, rifle-toting half-grown girl in boy's clothes he found squatting in the parsonage when he tried to move in. Of all the people currently unimpressed with Luke Fargo, she's the one to watch, boastful and belligerent with a raucous mocking voice and a loose tousle of hair the color of corn husks; the script does not actually suggest it, but the part of my brain that filters everything through folklore has very little difficulty seeing her as a crow. Her annunciatory shotgun blast dropped him in the dirt beside a scarecrow dressed in the same weatherbeaten soldier's coat as himself. She has a habit of perching in trees and snickering at him. "Why don't you talk about hell?" she calls when he dries up during his first attempt at a church meeting. "You ought to know about that—you raised enough around here!" Doggedly and self-doubtingly as he does everything these days, Luke rolls up his sleeves to civilize her in accordance with his newfound faith, but her sharp tongue and her semi-feral adolescent's keen eye for adult hypocrisy make her much less a potential convert than a cross between his conscience and the devil on his shoulder: he may be the one holding the Bible, its pages bloodstained from the battlefield, but Lissy's correctly pegged that he's the one in need of rescue, transparent in both his sincerity and his shame. "I'm sorry again, Lord. I—I guess I just keep promising."
This is not the kind of plot that needs a villain. Luke Fargo's his own worst enemy and he knows it—his reputation, his inexperience, and his temperament are all against him and Heflin puts his considerable talent for take-it-or-leave-it vulnerability into inhabiting a man resolutely aware that he's seen as a fool at best, a traitor at worst, and either way the dead last choice in town for a man of God. Most of his smiles are valiant winces, his determined stride at odds with his hesitant speech. Sickening of war didn't cure him of a short temper. Discovering his faith didn't tell him how to practice it. Lissy needles him that he says grace in silence because he doesn't know the words, but it seems increasingly plausible that for all his commitment to it, Luke may not have much idea of what his vocation actually entails; mostly he knows what he shouldn't be doing and somehow his intended flock never seem to catch him doing anything else. It's a funny, touching, almost entirely interior conflict and I have no idea why the filmmakers found it necessary to insert a heavy in the person of Yancey Huggins (Raymond Burr), the resentful, noncombatant storekeeper whose influence in town has replaced the broken gentility of the Descrais family, now reduced to the haughtily helpless Georgina (Allison Hayes) and her embittered alcoholic mother (Kathryn Givney). We don't need him to encourage men to burn the half-built church or disrupt its opening service when we've already seen so much of the town set against Luke just for coming back from the wrong side of the war; we really don't need him to make a weapon of his abusive association with Georgina, especially when the ex-belle has her own reasons for wanting the would-be preacher dealt with. He would make more sense if he had some allegorical weight to go with the rest of the psychomachia, the antagonism of the humiliated South for Reconstruction perhaps, but mostly he just feels artificial and unpleasant and there's only so much even Burr can do with a glower and a black-gloved hand. I don't find the spirited Miss Selma (Jean Willes), who runs the house of ill but very popular repute the next town over, much more deeply drawn, but at least she belongs in the story: a high-water mark of Luke's scandalous past, she's puzzled and a little wounded by his reinvention that has no place for her except as a friend firmly without benefits, but she does her best to support him in his quixotic ministry and whenever it backfires she's genuinely sorry. Luke's fellow veterans and their families register mostly as a collective, although Matty Miller (Nancy Kulp) stands out for her rawboned straight talk. The arsonist's wife (Adrienne Marden) who plants herself in front of Luke with a child in need of christening and won't let him get out of it despite an acute attack of impostor syndrome exacerbated by legitimate ignorance is a one-scene hit.
The other thing I'm not sure this film needs is a romance. It's foreshadowed in that Lissy's actual age and frank interest in Luke are obvious to the audience even before she's asking him forlornly, under pretence of quizzing him about his womanizing past, "I reckon if a girl wasn't pretty, you wouldn't have nothing to do with her? Even if she was so smart, she could skin a squirrel with her teeth?" and I find it both cute and in character that when she decides to femme up, she does so with a frou-frou-laden black-and-scarlet gown borrowed from Selma's bordello that's just as scandalous as her men's shirts and trousers, but your mileage for the finale will still depend on how believable you find the sudden pivot from found family to shotgun marriage. I tell myself it's her trickster crow-self, snapping up something that shines. I remain generally more convinced by their fractious camaraderie and the softer moments it allows for, like the painful candor with which Luke confesses his failures as a parson after the debacle of the dedication and the surprising gentleness with which Lissy hears him out. When he berates himself as a "fine example" of faith and understanding that waded into a fistfight instead of a sermon, "emptier inside than this church . . . I don't know what made me think I'd ever be able to find the right words to speak from this pulpit," she answers quite softly, one fine example to another, "Seems to me like you're finding them right now."
Director George Sherman was known for his B-Westerns, but Count Three and Pray really isn't one despite the presence of preachers, horses, and the occasional rifle shot; I get that the genre has kind of eaten the American nineteenth century alive, but I am also relatively confident that wherever the frontier was in the fall of 1865, Tennessee or Georgia was far from it. The screenplay is credited to Herb Meadow after his own short story "The Calico Pony" and I have to say that title doesn't sound much like the finished film, either. The score by George Duning should be unsutured from the print wherever possible, since it's full of sprightly stings that belong to an out-and-out comedy, and I should like someday to see the cinematography by Burnett Guffey in its rightful Technicolor CinemaScope, because I have the troubling feeling that the version TCM showed was pan-and-scanned. And yet I have thought about this movie on and off for three years now because its A-plot is solid seriocomic gold and so are Woodward and Heflin and therefore on some level I don't care that the rest of the film around them feels rather like it was stuck together from drafts of some other post-Civil War movie lying around the writers' room; on others I find it extremely annoying. Maybe it was bad editing. I suppose the point of this kind of movie is that imperfection can get the job done. It's a good thing to be reminded of, especially by Van Heflin. This promise brought to you by my same backers at Patreon.
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It is! But it is not the kind of premise that requires a plot in anything more than the sense of following a character as they interact with their world, and I don't know why Herb Meadow thought it did. Maybe the studio did. I'm curious about the original short story, if it exists as published fiction; if it was smaller-scale, it might work even better.
I'd love to see it developed without the standard bolt-on plot elements it seems to have got itself lumbered with.
I still love much of it even so, but Yancey Huggins and the Decrais women really seem to come from the movie being filmed on the next lot over and I wish they would go away. This film is best when it stays out of its own way.
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Mow, mow!
I am still very amazed at how easily Van Heflin just works his way into your subconsciousness. He did a lot of things with ease, but that bit is one of the most fascinating.
He does appear to be here to stay. I don't even dream of Anthony Perkins like that. (Sometimes of Leslie Howard.) I had no idea when I went to see a film noir double feature with
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Thank you! I have missed writing them. July was just dreadful in terms of energy.
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https://www.abebooks.com/paper-collectibles/Count-Three-Pray-Calico-Pony-Original/19947388584/bd
Draft script for the 1955 film, here under the working title "The Calico Pony." Actor Van Heflin's copy, with his holograph notations throughout.
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Oh, my God, why don't I have money to burn?
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There is NO way I could afford that and no reason for me even to ever have it! even if I had like $400! and yet I still was like....booklust
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I really want to read the annotations!
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It does! And that doesn't suit this story, either!
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As I was reading, I was struck by how I'd like to see this done where the protagonist is a sole Confederate in a Union town. As it stands, by making the town Confederate, the movie signals that they're collectively "wrong," but I feel like that's as unnecessary as having a villain. I feel like it might have been a more challenging film if you imagine this guy coming home to a Union town; if you imagine a change of heart on the part of someone who put on gray just for laughs now coming home to preach to people on the winning side. But it also sounds like the film is more about his interior battle, so in that sense maybe the town's alignment isn't that relevant.
I adore the idea of Lissy as a crow! Brilliant!
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I can see other people's mileage varying, but it didn't wreck it for me. It's just so unnecessarily meta-apt!
As it stands, by making the town Confederate, the movie signals that they're collectively "wrong," but I feel like that's as unnecessary as having a villain.
I'm not sure the Confederacy of the town would have signaled collective wrongness in 1955 as much as it might today—think of how often the Lost Cause mythos was taken by Hollywood as established fact. I just wasted some time trying to find a friend's post (on Facebook, hence the futility) from a couple of years ago where he noted that he had seen any number of Westerns whose heroes had a Confederate background and very few with Union war records, which he thought was partly geography but also partly not; he was looking for counter-examples. The 1939 Stagecoach and Count Three and Pray were the only ones I could think of at the time. You can see it even in contemporary descendants like Firefly (2002–03), with their Browncoat heroes and Alliance villains. It's true that my knowledge of Westerns is far from encyclopedic, but my sense is that the presentation of former sides tended more toward neutrality or even underdog romance. (And now, of course, it's contested all over again.) I don't think Count Three and Pray falls for that degree of false equivalence—there is nothing attractive about the Decrais trying to hang on to their antebellum aristocracy—but the townspeople aren't seen in need of spiritual guidance any more than any other community that traumatically lost its preacher; they don't need redeeming from their politics, except insofar as it would be nice if Luke didn't have to have a fistfight every time he went into town.
I feel like it might have been a more challenging film if you imagine this guy coming home to a Union town; if you imagine a change of heart on the part of someone who put on gray just for laughs now coming home to preach to people on the winning side.
That would be fascinating: Luke would have to earn the audience's trust as much as the townspeople's.
I adore the idea of Lissy as a crow! Brilliant!
I feel no story can be hurt by the addition of crows.