Driftwood (1947) directed by Allan Dwan

I have never seen an Allan Dwan film that wasn’t worth seeing, and with Dwan either directing or responsible for around 1400 films (by his estimate) that’s a lot of great movies. Driftwood is a story about an orphan, played by a young Natalie Wood, who helps a town doctor (Dean Jagger) fight a epidemic of Spotted Fever.

If you’ve ever watched the first minute of the current TCM primetime movie intro (the one where we start with a cityscape and zoom into a couple getting ready to watch a movie) you get a hint of the audience that TCM is trying to reach, and why not? It’s a truism that American film is city-centric: The Naked City, The City That Never Sleeps, the list is endless. And I’m not being critical to filmmakers about this; We like to see stories about ourselves, and Americans – since about 1900 – primarily live in an urban or suburban setting, as opposed to a rural one. But coming from a small farm-support community, I have a special interest in movies that try to stage a story in a small town rather than a city.

If life in a small town has any central theme, it’s that you are part of one large, dysfunctional family. In other words, what’s good (and what’s bad) about living in a small town is that – like it or not – everyone knows everyone else’s business.

In Driftwood, Dwan accepts this challenge and plunges headlong into sharing with us the trials and tribulations of small town life – the story starts when Dr. Steve Webster (Dean Jagger) finds a young girl, Jenny (Natalie Wood), wandering in the Nevada desert after her grandfather has died. He takes her back to the small town where he lives, and in trying to find out what to do with her, Jenny meets the local townspeople, who have a long list of problems that she eventually helps to solve.

Traveling angel stories are stories where a family or community is visited by a stranger who by magic or sheer force of good will, manages to solve everyone’s problems. The traveling angel story takes on many forms, and sometimes is even a literal angel, such as The Bishop’s Wife or It’s a Wonderful Life. But in Driftwood, the angel is a little girl named Jenny, who comes to a strange town, and by her innocence and good will, enables the townspeople to see themselves in a new light.

So this is a traveling angel story, but the particular interest for this film is that this angel has landed in small town in Nevada that looks remarkably similar to Mayberry R.F.D. And like Mayberry, everyone in this town is in arrested development, frozen in time and space (did you ever notice almost everyone in the Andy Griffith Show was single?).

That by itself might create a very ho-hum story, but in this case, the astute script (by Mary Loos, niece of Anita Loos, and Richard Sale) deftly expose the pain caused to themselves and others when people are too scared to take chances and move on with their life, which means Driftwood is like a film version of the Andy Griffith Show, only with each of the character’s melancholy fully revealed.

And I have a special affection for the town doctor, Steve Webster, who is managing a busy practice while carrying on research to fight the town’s endemic Spotted Fever. His dilemma of whether or not to stay in town when better offers await him in California becomes the emotional centerpiece of the story and a fine cast adds both drama and humor to the plot. And to top it all off, there is a hilarious scene where a dog is being tried in a courtroom for its life which shows off Dwan’s ability to switch from drama to farce on a dime.

Richard Brody praised this film recently in the New Yorker, explaining that Driftwood “both typifies and expands Dwan’s core inspiration: his dramatization of a thick tangle of social connections and conflicting lines of power and passion that seemingly bring the town itself to life along with its individual characters.”

Another great Allan Dwan film seen for the first time and checked off my list. Just 1310 films to go.