Trail of the Lonesome Pine has the distinction of being the first outdoor production filmed in the then-new Technicolor 3-strip process. Its color qualities are still impressive in this UCLA Film Archives print. The story is set in a backwoods Virginia community where “old woods, old ways and old codes live unchanged.” The plot revolves around an inter-family feud which is finally settled through the intervention of a young mining engineer (Fred MacMurray). Outstanding in the cast are Henry Fonda, Sylvia Sidney and Beulah Bondi.
Henry Hathaway entered the cinema as a child actor in 1908, graduated to assistant director in 1919, and began directing in 1932. Thoroughly unpretentious in his style, Hathaway has never been feted as an “auteur” by serious critics of the American cinema; but he is often compared to Ford and Hawks as a master of the outdoor adventure film, and more specifically, the Western. His later Westerns include The Sons of Katie Elder and True Grit; Trail of the Lonesome Pine was his second major assignment. In the late Forties, Hathaway contributed to the introduction of the semi-documentary into crime thrillers in such films as Kiss of Death and Call Northside 777. One of his all-time great films, much appreciated by PFA audiences, is the 1935 Peter Ibbetson.