SCVHistory.com LW3566 | Film-Arts | Lobby Cards: Harry Carey co-stars in ''The Shepherd of the Hills'' with John Wayne (Paramount 1941).

Saugus rancher Harry Carey co-stars in the John Wayne vehicle, "The Shepherd of the Hills" (Paramount 1941).

Lobby cards, 11x14 inches.

About "The Shepherd of the Hills."

Saugus rancher Harry Carey portrays the title character in 1941's "The Shepherd of the Hills" from Paramount Pictures. Top billing went to John Wayne. It was his first Technicolor movie. Wayne (1907-1979) had caught the tail end of the silent period as an uncredited extra and graduated to leading roles in a series of black-and-white "B" (low-Budget) Western "talkies" that were filmed in Placerita Canyon in the early-mid 1930s.

A generation ahead of him, Carey (1878-1947) was a big star as a middle-aged man during the silent period — maybe not as big as William S. Hart or Tom Mix, but a popular headliner nonetheless. He was one of the rare actors who transitioned smoothly from silents to sound (unlike Hart, who never did, and Mix, who did so awkwardly). The same year a young John Wayne got his break in "Stagecoach" (1939), audiences were reintroduced to a more mature and sagacious Harry Carey as president pro-tem of the Senate in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." It is this seasoned version of Harry Carey that cuts an imposing figure throughout "The Shepherd of the Hills:" patient when he needs to be, romantic at heart, yet strong and determined when the situation calls for it. It's hard to imagine better casting. Wayne later reminisced:

"[Carey] had a style that has now become the way of acting in our business. He tried to play it down a little and be kind of natural. You have to keep things going and try and get your personality through, which is what Harry could do. I loved him, because I'd known him for years, and I was a young man and he was an older man" (quoted in Eyman 2014:112).

The film "provided Wayne's first opportunity to work with a boyhood idol," biographer Scott Eyman writes (ibid.), "and unlike Tom Mix, Harry Carey wasn't a disappointment.

Olive Carey working at the ranch in Saugus. Click for more.

"If John Ford ("Stagecoach") was the tough, demanding coach whose approval Wayne craved, Carey and his wife, Ollie, were surrogate parents who offered something approaching unconditional love. Their temperaments were well matched: Harry Carey was calm and good-humored, Ollie Carey was salty and plainspoken." (Author Eyman dedicates his John Wayne biography to their son, Harry Carey Jr.)

"The Shepherd of the Hills" also introduced Wayne to director Henry Hathaway, who would influence his career. Hathaway directed Wayne in several more pictures over the next two decades, among them "The Sons of Katie Elder" (1965) and "True Grit" (1969).

Principal shooting for "The Shepherd of the Hills" took place at Big Bear, and as usual, Duke Wayne found trouble — or rather, trouble found him, in the person of Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992). They had just co-starred in the aptly named "Seven Sinners," and "Wayne's co-workers knew they were having an affair," Eyman writes (pg. 110), "as did his friends (and) the FBI" — which had its eye on Dietrich because of some allegations she was a Nazi sympathizer — which she decidedly was not. In any event, this time, Olive Carey came to the rescue. Eyman provides the anecdote:

Trailing Wayne to the location at Big Bear was Dietrich, who stayed at Arrowhead, about twenty miles away. One morning a panicked Ward Bond sought out Harry Carey's wife, Ollie. Duke was missing, said Bond, and he didn't want to even think about what Hathaway would do to a star who failed to show up.

Ollie Carey knew very well where Wayne was. She got in her car and headed for Arrowhead. Snow had fallen the night before, and she was driving slowly when she came around a bend and saw a man walking toward her, "a tall, lanky figure, and of course, it was Duke." He quickly got in the car and she asked what happened.

Wayne explained that he'd started back from an evening with Dietrich, but his station wagon had hit a slick spot in the road and gone over an embankment. Wayne had jumped out before the crash, and had set out for Big Bear on foot. They got back to the location just as Hathaway was setting up his first shot. "I don't think he ever knew what was going on between Duke and Marlene," said Ollie Carey.

But Hathaway knew. "They had quite a thing going," he remembered in 1980. "I don't think he realized that I knew the extent of their relationship, but I was aware of what was going on" (op. cit.: 111-112).

A remake of a successful silent picture, 1941's "The Shepherd of the Hills" was adapted for the screen by Grover Jones and Stuart Anthony from a 1907 novel by Harold Bell Wright that reportedly sold 2 million copies.

Betty Field (1916-1973) plays the love interest; in addition to Ward Bond, the credited cast includes Beulah Bondi, James Barton, Samuel S. Hinds, Marjorie Main, Marc Lawrence, John Qualen, Fuzzy Knight, Tom Fadden, Olin Howland, Dorothy Adams, Virita Campbell and Fern Emmett. Uncredited cast includes C.E. Anderson, Hank Bell, Henry Brandon, Nora Bush, Jim Corey, Douglas Deems, William Haade, John Harmon, Selmer Jackson, Carl Knowles, Bob Kortman, Ann Kunde, Charles Middleton, and Glen Walters.