Bright Leaf (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Oct 01, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
-
Director
Michael CurtizRelease Date(s)
1950 (July 29, 2025)Studio(s)
Warner Bros. (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: C+
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C-
Review
“Tobacco! Tobacco! Tobacco!” – Margaret Singleton (Patricia Neal)
“I feel like I’ve been wallowing in filth!” – Brant Royle (Gary Cooper)
Something like a cross between Mildred Pierce and Gone with the Wind with a dash of Edna Ferber, Bright Leaf is an overheated, overlong waste of good talent. Lavishly produced for just under $2 million, it’s got great production design, good direction (by Michael Curtiz), cinematography (by Karl Freund), and performances, all adding up to very little. At 110 minutes, it feels hours longer than it is, and its revenge-centered plotting just isn’t any fun. Who wants to see star Gary Cooper act like an irresponsible jerk for two hours?
The first half-hour shows modest promise. Brant Royle (Cooper) returns home to late-1800s Kingsmont, North Carolina to find his dead uncle’s home boarded up, now the property of tobacco magnate Major Singleton (Donald Crisp), whose daughter, Margaret (Patricia Neal), Brant has loved since childhood, though all his life both Singletons have treated Brant like dirt—uncultured, poor white trash.
Brant is approached by inventor John Barton (Jeff Corey) to finance his new invention, an industry-changing cigarette rolling machine. Other tobacconists, including Singleton, see no use for the device, as their business is dominated completely by hand-rolled cigars, not cigarettes, a minor part of their businesses. But visionary Brant gets behind the invention, capable of producing thousands of smokes cheaply, arm-twisting financial support from another childhood sweetheart, Sonia Kovac (Lauren Bacall), now the prosperous owner of a bordello but still pining after Brant. Former medicine show huckster Chris Malley (Jack Carson), joins them as Brant’s lieutenant.
Soon enough, Brant has driven his old-fashioned if more gentlemanly competitors out of business, buys up Singleton’s debts and shares in his company, and threatens to marry Margaret and take control of his Southern mansion regardless. But where the younger Brant had to be ruthless for his own survival, as the millionaire owner of a tobacco monopoly, what little remaining of his humanity threatens to slip away in his single-minded thirst for vengeance against the Singletons.
Ranald MacDougall’s (Mildred Pierce, The World the Flesh and the Devil) screenplay, from Foster Fitz-Simons’s story, is dominated by unlikeable, uninteresting characters. Cooper’s Brant is a determined maverick at the start, but his ruthlessness intensifies as his wealth and power accumulate, to the point where he treats even his friends, including Barton, Chris, and Sonia, badly while irresponsibly running his company, all his attention focused like a laser intent on destroying Singleton and marrying Margaret. She, meanwhile, is all Southern Belle snooty at the beginning, and hostile and revengeful in the second-half. Neal’s performance is impressive, and she’s unconventionally beautiful but thoroughly unlikeable. Lauren Bacall, meanwhile, seems out of place in this Southern Gothic setting, and while more sensible and less self-destructive than Brant or Margaret, her bad life choices don’t endear her to audiences, either.
The supporting cast fares better. Jack Carson was probably cast based on his work in (and here it is again) Mildred Pierce, but mostly he had been playing the genial best friend of Dennis Morgan and Doris Day in Warner’s light comedies. He very good here, trying to cover up for a boss whose personal problems are impacting his professional life, a part not far removed from his cynical press agent in the Judy Garland A Star Is Born a few years later. Jeff Corey, soon to be blacklisted, is also excellent as the meek but determined inventor. It’s one of his meatiest pre-blacklisting roles with screentime throughout the story.
The largely forgotten film offers an interesting look at the tobacco industry, and the industrial revolution-influenced changes, though it’s a little surreal watching such scenes as the first test run of Barton’s invention, with everyone lighting up in a thick cloud of triumphant cigarette smoke. One imagines Warner Bros. had little trouble finding real 1950 cigarette companies for commercial tie-ins to their movie, but after the ban of cigarette commercials on television in the late-1960s, I wonder if Bright Leaf was pulled from syndication or, at least, not encouraged for broadcast. Given its big star-name cast, I don’t remember it airing in my TV market in the 1970s and ‘80s.
Warner Archive’s Blu-ray of Bright Leaf looks great, however. The black-and-white 1.37:1 image is bright itself, sharp, with excellent blacks and contrast, all of which show off the money Warner Bros. invested in its flashy production, really overloaded with Southern flavor. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also fine, supported by optional English subtitles. The disc itself is Region-Free.
Extras are minimal, two cartoons: Hillbilly Hare (1950), Robert McKimson’s hilarious Bugs Bunny short featuring a classic square dance sequence; and Bunker Hill Bunny (also 1950), also with Bugs, also funny, directed by Friz Freleng. I had more fun revisiting these cartoons than any of Bright Leaf.
Bright Leaf is not really terrible; much of it is okay and there are a couple of well-staged scenes, a smattering of good performances, etc., but it’s egregiously overlong and not much fun.
- Stuart Galbraith IV