The Trail of the Lonesome Pine belongs in the history books for having gone far to prove the viability of color in commercial moviemaking. By the end of Lonesome Pine‘s second week in New York, the jury was back on that question. People began to wonder if Technicolor could justify the extra expense. More to the point, Becky Sharp was a financial disappointment, if not a flop. The first full-Technicolor feature, Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp, also made experiments with color, but it was setbound and stagy where Lonesome Pine was sun-splashed and outdoor-crisp. It’s as if the credits are designed to invoke Your Father’s Technicolor, to remind you of what Technicolor couldn’t do just before showing you what it can do now. And the credit sequence to Lonesome Pine - names carved into tree trunks in a thick forest - seems almost deliberately weighted toward the red range that had been the old Tech’s long suit. Even oceans and skies came out a sort of yellowish green. Blue was one color that the old two-color system simply couldn’t handle the closest it could come was a sort of turquoise. Here’s the first sight that greeted audiences after the opening credits, and it suggests a canny calculation in the movie’s color scheme. But it could also be simply that the amazing success of Hathaway’s version - reinforced by numerous reissues over the next 20-plus years - made it an indelible act to follow. The reason could mainly be changes in public taste - romantic backwoods melodramas aren’t the surefire thing they were at the turn of the 20th century. There hasn’t been a movie from Fox’s novel since then. The movie Hathaway and writer Grover Jones made for producer Walter Wanger in the late summer and early autumn of 1935 was the last, but not the first from Fox’s book there had been three silent ones, in 1914, 19. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine - all by themselves, the words conjure up a time, a place, and a heart-on-the-sleeve sentimental romanticism. Even if you’ve never heard of him or his books (and these days, most people outside Virginia and Kentucky haven’t), you feel as if you know what the story’s about the minute you hear it. Fox managed somehow to come up with one of those perfect titles. In the wake of the 1936 movie, there was a stage adaptation that is still performed every summer (“official outdoor drama of the Commonwealth of Virginia”) in Big Stone Gap, Va., where Fox died in 1919. The novel has gone in and out of print (it’s currently in), but its popularity has never really gone away. They’re not uncommon, even after 102 years, and they’re not expensive no telling how many times used copies like this one have been sold, resold, and resold again since 1908. It may look familiar if you’ve spent any time at all in a used bookstore, you’ve probably seen several copies. In any case, here’s what Fox’s novel looks like. Surely in the hundreds of thousands, probably more one source I found said 1.3 million, at a time when a million-selling book was something to write home about. Records being what they were in those days, it’s hard to know exactly how many copies it sold.
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