Mormons in Classic Hollywood
The representations of Mormons in Classic Hollywood films both reflected the young religion's successful attempt to become accepted mainstream Americans.
On August 23, 1940, Salt Lake City hosted what was at that time the world’s largest film premiere. Governor Henry Blood and Salt Lake Mayor Ab Jenkins declared the date a one-time state holiday closing shops, businesses, and schools. Tens of thousands of people lined Salt Lake City’s Main Street to catch a glimpse of 20th Century Fox’s established star actors Tyrone Power and Mary Astor alongside newcomer Linda Darnell. Even Latter-day Saint leaders joined in on the celebration. President Heber J. Grant offered a public benediction prior to the event and hosted Hollywood luminaries like producer Daryl Zanuck at a special banquet at Brigham Young’s Lion House.
The film was 20th Century Fox’s Brigham Young, a historical epic depicting Brigham Young’s succession to Joseph Smith and the Mormon trek across the American Frontier to settle in the Salt Lake Valley. Throughout the 1910s, Hollywood had depicted Mormons onscreen as sex-crazed theocrats and barbarous polygamists haunting the 19th century American Frontier; yet, in the span of twenty years, Brigham Young had transformed from a tyrannic wife-snatcher into an exemplary American figure worthy of a sprawling, big-budget epic. Brigham Young marks a significant turning point as the first major Hollywood studio film that sought to humanize Mormon characters. Subsequent depictions in classic-era Hollywood built upon Brigham Young’s tonal shift to create nuanced, empathic explorations and critiques of American and Mormon culture.
Mormons As Model Americans
By the time 20th Century Fox began writing a script based on Brigham Young’s life in the late 1930s, both Hollywood and Mormonism had drastically changed since the Mormon exploitation films popular in the 1910s. Led by Heber J. Grant in the 1920s, the Latter-day Saint church modernized its public image to match 20th century American Christian patriarchal values. Grant worked to distance the church from its polygamist roots, excommunicating any member who entered into a polygamist marriage after 1904, and its 19th-century American animosity, removing anti-American violent rhetoric from church scriptures, publications, and the temple endowment ceremony. These forward-thinking policy changes aimed to slowly shift the public’s perception of Latter-day Saints as theocratic, polygamists to morally upright Christians in line with 20th-century American values.
While Mormonism underwent these modernistic shifts, Hollywood itself sought to rid their films of depictions of sex, violence, and any material offensive largely to strict, Judeo-Christian values of the time. To fend off growing calls from politicians and powerful social groups in the late 1920s and early 1930s for the government to censor Hollywood’s films, Hollywood studios created and adopted the 1930 Production Code that dictated what filmmakers could and could not depict in their films. By 1934, the Production Office Administration had the power and resources to review and suggest edits for all studio scripts, order offensive scenes cut from films before distribution, and prevent any film from being shown in studio owned theater chains that did not follow the stringent rules of the dos and don’ts in the Production Code.
20th Century Fox’s interest in producing a Brigham Young biopic was largely made possible by the Production Code’s stringent guidelines for morality. Studios in the late 1930s increasingly turned to literary works and historical period pieces to avoid contemporary politics or social issues that could irritate Hollywood’s opponents. Plus, Mormonism’s increasingly successful appeals to mainstream American Christianity made it possible for a Hollywood studio to center a movie on a sympathetic portrayal of Mormons without offending Christian groups dedicated to sustaining monogamous marriage.
To address polygamy in a way that would please both the Production Code Administration and the Latter-day Saint church, producer Daryl Zanuck sought input from multiple writers before shooting Brigham Young in April 1940. Worried this new film would ignite a new round of negative Mormon film representations, Heber J. Grant and John A Widstoe eagerly lent their support and met with studio executives numerous times to ensure their views were incorporated into the film.
The end result is something of a mixed bag. The film starts in Nauvoo as Joseph Smith, played by a young Vincent Price, is brought on trial and subsequently murdered in prison by a mob. From there, the film centers on the budding romance between Jonathan Kent, a young Mormon man, and Zina Webb, a friendly non-Mormon who lives outside of Nauvoo, as they trek west following the saints’ expulsion from Illinois. Running alongside this romantic plot, Brigham Young struggles with filling Smith’s shoes while questioning whether he is the man who God wants to lead his people west.
While Brigham Young does create sympathetic and dynamic Mormon characters, the film’s historical inaccuracies are aplenty. Several characters are an amalgamation of two or three historical figures to cut down on time. Dean Jagger’s Brigham Young is almost nothing like the historical figure. You can say many things about Brigham but humble, shy, and unsure of himself aren’t fit descriptors; yet this is how the film characterizes the “Lion of the Lord”.
The most awkward aspect of the film is its portrayal, or lack thereof, of polygamy. While Brigham Young is shown traveling with a handful of women in his wagon, only one is referred to as his wife. This lack of directness towards polygamy in the film led New York Times critic Bosley Crowther to quip that “it’s too bad that Young had to be so monog --- I mean monotonous”. In one of the best parts of the film however, polygamy is directly, if briefly, addressed as Zina admits to Jonathan she does not want to convert to Mormonism and marry him if she will have to share him with other wives.
While Brigham Young is a watered-down, white-washed, inaccurate historical account, its empathetic portrayal of Mormons cemented the religions’ growing acceptability in American entertainment and culture. Many reviews of the film connected the sympathetic story of the Latter-day Saint religious minority to the current events in Europe to drum up American support to intervene in Germany to protect Jews.
Subsequent films in the classic era stayed away from specific events in Mormon history but followed Brigham Young’s lead and included likable, sympathetic Mormon characters. Mormons in the 1940s and 50s were almost exclusively shown in Westerns set on the 19th-century frontier.
The best of these classic Western is John Ford’s 1950 Wagon Master, a tale of a Mormon wagon train who hires two scouts to successfully traverse a difficult westward-bound trail. The Mormons are portrayed much like any other pioneers of the era, dancing to folk music at night and struggling through the harsh terrain in hope of a new life in the West. Their faith is referenced several times as a source of strength to the travelers. While their theological beliefs are downplayed (for instance polygamy is only referenced once in a humorous manner), the film does not shy away from their specific culture. For instance, the Mormon hymn Come, Come, Ye Saints plays on the soundtrack in several scenes throughout the film.
Placing Mormons in the Wild West affirmed their position in American society. Instead of depicting Mormons as ‘the other’, films like Brigham Young and Wagon Master asked Americans to identify with Mormons’ struggles settling the frontier instead of hissing or gawking at their idiosyncratic beliefs and past polygamous social structure. In essence, these films signaled a wider acceptance of Mormonism, albeit a watered-down version devoid of specific theology or polygamy, in the American mainstream.
The Nuanced Mormon
Just as the Production Code’s arrival opened the door for more sympathetic portrayals of Mormon characters, the loosening of and eventual retirement of the Production Code in the 1960s allowed filmmakers to tackle more negative aspects of Mormonism. Depictions of Mormons became more nuanced as America’s post-war optimism gave way to revolutionary distrust of institutions and religion in the 1960s. Instead of reverting back to silent era depictions of bloodthirsty Danites and coercive polygamists, Mormons in the newly liberated Hollywood straddled a middle ground. No longer the idyllic picture of romanticized American settlers, Mormons became a backdrop to investigate the contradictions of 1960s and 70s American culture.
The most pronounced of these films is Otto Preminger’s 1962 political drama Advise and Consent, one of the first Hollywood pictures to directly address homosexuality in the dying days of the Production Code. Based on a best-selling 1959 novel of the same name, the film follows behind-the-scenes political infighting during the nomination process of a controversial new Secretary of State candidate. A key plot point in the film involves Senator Brigham Anderson of Utah who, although he is never explicitly labeled a Mormon in the movie like in the novel, is heavily coded as a Latter-day Saint. Serving as the head of the committee to interview the nominated Secretary of State, Senator Anderson is blackmailed to vote against the nominee on incriminating evidence of a love affair he had with a fellow male navy officer during his service in Korea. Crushed by the prospect of losing his career and tortured by his own internalized homophobia, Anderson’s arc ends in his suicide.
Advise and Consent isn’t interested in Mormons’ view of sexuality but in using the all-American Mormon character to investigate broader attitudes towards homosexuality in American politics. Anderson’s coded Mormonism sets him up as a symbol of the ideal American man of 1950s conservatism with a loving family, burgeoning political career, and strong devotion to his country. When contrasted to his fellow senators caught up in petty party politics and morally questionable backroom dealings, Anderson stands as the moral center of the film, a charismatic, trustworthy politician who aims to stand above the raucous of Washington.
While Anderson’s tragic end is an all too familiar trope in LGBTQ representation of the time period, his suicide exposes his fellow senator’s hypocrisy in willingly destroying Anderson’s career and life to further their own political careers. In the end, Advise and Consent argues the threat to the American Dream is not the gay senator but the morally corrupt senators willing to do anything for their own political gain.
Other 1960s Mormon representations onscreen took a lighter tone than Advise and Consent. For example, the 1969 Western musical Paint Your Wagon features polygamy at the center of its plot. When a Mormon man married to two wives stumbles upon an all-male mining town of 400 men, his youngest wife agrees to be auctioned off to the highest bidder. The rest of the film follows a love triangle between the auctioned-off wife and two miners played by Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood. Unlike Advise and Consent’s use of Mormonism to explore homophobia, Paint Your Wagon relies on its comedic Mormon characters to push the bounds of showing sexuality onscreen after the Production Code.
Just as the 1940s and 50s films like Brigham Young and Wagon Master signaled the increasingly accepting attitudes towards Mormonism in the United States, 1960s films like Advise and Consent’s more direct and nuanced approach to representing Mormons mirrored the criticism that followed Mormonism following cultural shifts and social reforms in the 1960s and 70s. Other than some stereotypical comedic Mormon characters, the depictions of Mormons that would appear in post-1970 films would overwhelmingly avoid sensationalism for grounded, realistic Mormon characters. Despite the more mature direction Mormons in the modern era have been portrayed onscreen, the idyllic American Mormon and the nuanced Mormon tropes first solidified in the classic Hollywood era have laid the groundwork for depictions of Mormons from the 1970s to the present day.