Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Wuchak Released in 1955, "The Kentuckian" is one of only a couple films directed by Burt Lancaster.THE STORY takes place during the presidency of James Monroe circa 1820. Lancaster plays Eli Wakefield, a Kentuckian who desires more room to breath in Texas. Still in Kentucky, they blow their "Texas money" on freeing a beautiful indentured servant, Hannah (Dianne Foster). They don't get past the next frontier town where Eli takes up with his brother in the tobacco business and Hannah gets a job as a bar matron. Eli's dreams of Texas are sidetracked when he meets up with a schoolmarm (Diana Lynn) who encourages him to settle down and make a family with her. The problem is that Eli's son prefers Hannah and doesn't want to give up their Texas dream. Meanwhile feuders are hot on Eli's trail, not to mention malevolent local businessman with a whip (Walter Matthau).Some highlights include: Lush Eastern locations. The film was shot in Levi Jackson State Park, Kentucky (near London), as well as Owensboro, Kentucky, which is on the Ohio River, and Rockport, which is just across the river in Indiana. The river depicted in the film is supposed to be the Tennessee River (I think), but it was shot on the Ohio. In any event, although "The Kentuckian" is classified as a Western, it's actually an Eastern.The film offers a good glimpse of what the Eastern USA was like back when it was still a frontier -- the cabin-styled houses, sleeping in the woods, etc. No internet, cable, video games, DVDs or microwaves. People actually sat down with other people and communed.The story is realistic, albeit with some lame dialogue. Regardless,you don't have to worry about any goofiness or unbelievable bits that plague some 50's Westerns, except for the too-wooden-they're-funny feudalists.Back then a huge riverboat coming to town was an exciting attraction. Americans today, by contrast, get all excited over the shenanigans of some celebrity.Dianne Foster (Hannah) is a beautiful redhead. One wonders how a woman like this would stay single very long on the frontier.The whip fight with Matthau is great. Lancaster is almost whipped to shreds (!).Loyalty is a sub-theme here. Eli's son is loyal to Hannah and never warms up to the schoolmarm, although there's it's clear that there's nothing wrong with the latter. And Hannah is loyal to the man who delivered her from bondage (Eli), despite his infatuation with the marm.I liked the bit on Eli being a laughing stock because of a worthless freshwater pearl, but he gets the last laugh with a letter from the President (or is it?) and additional help.Lastly, Lancaster is a likable protagonist with his charismatic joy-of-living persona; he's humble and respectful, the antithesis of Eastwood's amoral and lifeless 'man with no name' a decade later.The film runs an hour and 44 minutes.BOTTOM LINE: "The Kentuckian" is breath of fresh air and I enjoyed it from beginning to end for all the above reasons; it's sort of like "The Last of the Mohicans" (1992) of its era, albeit no where as good. It's innocuous and easy-going, but sometimes surprisingly brutal (the dog fight and whip fight). If you can acclimate to the style of filmmaking of the mid-50s it's worth checking out.GRADE: B

Neil Welch Woodsman Eli Wakefield and his son Little Eli look to journey from Kentucky to Texas in the 1800s. In the course of their travels, their paths cross with those of an indentured servant girl, a school teacher, a corrupt local lawman and a bullwhip-wielding bully.This film, which is notable for the debuts of Walter Matthau (acting) and Lancaster (as director), tells its relatively slight tale in a gentle and leisurely manner. The moments of drama are well done but infrequent, and interspersed with rather too many scenes of Big Eli looking besottedly at his son (played rather badly by a young actor called Donald McDonald who spends most of the film wearing an expression like a tormented ferret).The strengths of this film are the portrayal of 18th century rural Kentucky, the gorgeous scenery, Lancaster's good-natured but earnest performance and Bernard Herrman's music.

James Hitchcock Although "The Kentuckian" is sometimes described as a Western, it is set several decades earlier and a long way further east than most films in the genre. It may seem obvious that first the East and then the Midwest had to be won before Americans could make a start on winning the West, but in fact there are relatively few films about frontier life in the early nineteenth century compared with the thousands set in the West during the second half of that century. The explanation I have heard is that the Hollywood studios had on their doorstep the California deserts which could easily represent Texas, or Nevada, or any one of several other Western states without too many people noticing, but nowhere that could convincingly stand in for the deciduous forests of the eastern USA in the same way.The action can be dated (by references to the Presidency of James Monroe) to the period 1817-25, and takes place in Kentucky. (This does not necessarily follow from the title. "The Virginian", after all, did not take place in Virginia). The main character is Elias "Big Eli" Wakefield, a widowed frontiersman who is considering leaving the state and moving to Texas. His reason for leaving, apparently, is that Kentucky is becoming "too crowded", even though in 1820 the state only had about half a million people spread over its 40,000 square miles. One thing that is never mentioned in the film is that at this period Texas would have been ruled by either Spain or Mexico; perhaps it would have been considered unpatriotic to have stated explicitly that Wakefield is considering emigrating from the USA to a foreign land.Urging Big Eli to leave is his son "Little Eli", who is looking forward to a life of adventure in Texas. Urging him to stay is his elder brother Zack, who hopes that Eli will settle down in Kentucky and join him in his business. A further complication is that two women take a liking to Big Eli, indentured servant Hannah who wants to go to Texas to escape from her villainous master Stan Bodine and schoolteacher Susie who wants to stay in Kentucky.Burt Lancaster, who also directed, also stars as Big Eli, but this is not one of his better performances. Indeed, most of the acting is not very good. Dianne Foster as Hannah and Diana Lynn as Susie are both dull, and Donald MacDonald as Little Eli, with his whiny voice and perpetually sulky expression, must rank as one of the least appealing screen youngsters ever. Probably the best is Walter Matthau (in his first feature film) as Bodine, played as an American version, complete with moustache and bullwhip, of the villainous Squire Jasper from a Victorian melodrama.This film was Burt Lancaster's first experience of directing; indeed, it was the only film on which he acted as sole director. (He was also credited as joint director of "The Midnight Man", made nearly twenty years later). I have often wondered what attracted him to this story. In his later career he was often drawn to complex, socially significant movies, often ones with a message in line with his own left-wing convictions. There is nothing, however, complex or significant about "The Kentuckian", a film with a turgid plot taken from an obscure novel. The gist of the story is Big Eli's indecision about whether he should move house or stay put, and even the most experienced and gifted of directors would have struggled to make that particular plot line interesting. There is very little apart from its setting to distinguish this film from dozens of standard Western B-movies. The one good about the film is that the experience clearly persuaded Lancaster that his future in the film industry lay in the field of acting rather than directing, and as a result we were not deprived of all the wonderful performances he was to give over the next three decades. 4/10

SayRayJ A mix of 50's sensibilities and period art the way they could only do it in the 1950s. Lancaster is stiff at times, but shines in the riverboat scene and of course handles the on screen fights pretty well. A.B. Guthrie Jr. knows what to put in a frontier story, and Matthau, McIntire and Carradine act rings around the rest of a fairly lackluster cast. The part of the boy isn't well-directed, and only manages to be a fairly sympathetic character. Both Foster and Lynn seemed miscast... Foster was too elegant for the indentured servant role and the Lynn character weak for a frontier schoolmistress. But the story holds together and is worth the watch for fans of Matthau, Lancaster, or the genre of offbeat 50's westerns. Watch for almost a dozen 'stock' cowboy figures from that era popping in and out of scenes, like James Griffith as a perfectly evil riverboat gambler.