"Destry Rides Again" director George Marshall's American Civil War saga "Tap Roots" shares more in common with "Gone with the Wind" than "Free State of Jones." "North West Mounted Police" scenarist Alan Le May adapted James Street's 1942 novel about a Southern patriarch, Hoab Dabney (Ward Bond of "The Searchers"), who refuses to embark on war the rest of Mississippi with the Confederacy against Abraham Lincoln. "The Very Thought of You" writer Lionel Wiggam contributed additional dialogue. Since I haven't read Street's novel, I cannot attest to the film's fidelity to the novel. Hoab Dabney has a sprawling plantation style ranch in south central Mississippi that his ancestors carved out of the wilderness. The action unfolds on the eve of the war with everybody dreading the prospect of Lincoln taking up residence in the White House. Oddly enough, the protagonist of this spectacle isn't Hoab Dabney. Instead, newspaper publisher and writer Keith Alexander (a trimly mustached Van Heflin of "The Raid") is the central character. He totes a pair of black powder pistols and he dresses impeccably. Keith has his eyes on Hoab's beautiful, rambunctious daughter Morna (Susan Hayward of "Garden of Evil") who has her eyes glued on American officer Clay MacIvor (Whitfield Connor of "The Saracen Blade"), who hates Lincoln and resigns from the Union Army to become a Confederate officer when hostilities break out. Actually, despite the fact that Jones County native James Street was inspired to write his novel owing to the exploits of Newton Knight, he appears to have been inspired more by Margot Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind." The Newton Knight character Hoab Dabney retreats into the background as a muddled, misguided peripheral character who dominates the action with his refusal to follow Mississippi. The romance between Morna and Clay assumes paramount importance in this Universal-International production. Disaster strikes when Morna is thrown off her horse and injures her spine so badly that Dabney physician Dr. MacIntosh (Griff Barnett of "Santa Fe Stampede") informs everybody that Morna will never walk again. Hoab's close friend, a Native American appropriately named Tishomingo (Boris Karloff of "Frankenstein") rejects MacIntosh's diagnosis and vows to have Morna back on her feet and walking again. Tishomingo believes that relentlessly massaging the leg will restore Morna's ability to perambulate. Meantime, a disillusioned Clay strikes up a romance with Hoab's other daughter, Aven (Julie London of "Nabonga"), and Keith spots them pitching woo. Naturally, Keith moves in on Morna, but she initially rebuffs his advances. Eventually, and inevitably, these two will be drawn together, while Clay shed his blue uniform for a gray one, and Hoab decides to withdraw from the Confederacy. Clay is ordered to arrest Hoab, and Hoab assembles an army, but the Confederates have them surrounded and cut off from the outside world so that Keith cannot get a caravan of arms and ammunition through after the rainy season sets in and turns everything to mud. Marshall and his scenarists carefully set up the dramatic oppositions with Clay emerging as the chief villain and Keith as the steadfast hero. After Clay and his combined Confederate artillery and cavalry attack, Hoab staggers about in a daze when explosions rip his own plantation style ranch apart and this militia scrambles into the swamps. Despite the lack of historical accuracy and the "Gone with the Wind" template, "Tap Roots" isn't a bad movie, merely a formulaic one, but what is particularly galling is that the Confederacy is triumphant in the end when Jefferson Davis' minions were not so in reality. Hoab employs a "Gone with the Wind" maid, Dabby (Ruby Dandridge of "Cabin in the Sky") who does everything out of the goodness of her heart. Marshall does generate suspense and excitement during the final half-hour as it looks like Clay will wipe out Hoab's men despite Keith's best efforts. Universal-International looks like the studio blew a bundle on this Civil War epic. As somebody pointed in the goofs section, mountains can be seen rearing up in the background, and Mississippi has no mountains. Initially, I thought that they might have been pine-clad hills. The photography is excellent as are the performances and the lush production values.
