Potempa: Movie offers a ‘Green’ promise
A film used to promote the merits of 4-H from the 1940s included an Indiana child star-turned mathematician with a recipe for success.
Last week after supper, my parents invited me to watch a classic black and white film airing on Turner Classic Movie network. None of us, even my older brother Tom when later asked, could recall having seen this movie.
Titled “The Green Promise” and released in 1948 as an independent film distributed by RKO Pictures, it starred 10-yearold child star Natalie
Wood in her follow-up screen project after her 1947 debut at age 8 in “Miracle on 34th Street.”
What makes “The
Green Promise” so unique is that it was funded and co-produced by Houston, Texas, millionaire Glenn McCarthy as his personal national campaign to promote the merits of 4-H clubs and responsible agriculture, including heavy themes about soil erosion, deforestation, gardening and canning science.
Directed by William Russell and also starring Walter Brennan, Robert Paige and Marguerite Chapman, the plot involves a family who moves to Millwood, a fictional small, rural town, to start a new life farming, following the death of the mother of four children, with Wood as the youngest and Chapman as the oldest daughter. Brennan plays the widower father with his usual character actor traits of a stubborn and argumentative demeanor, refusing to listen to the advice and experience of Paige’s character, who plays a helpful local agricultural agent.
The film, which since 2015 has now fallen into public domain, also has a key church scene for the inspiration of the movie’s title based with a theme perfectly timed for this Easter weekend, which also marks the end of the Passover.
The scene has the townsfolk gathered for Sunday church services as the local pastor’s sermon preaches about God’s “green promise” from the Book of Exodus which directed Moses to lead the people to a “the land of milk and honey.”
Much of the film’s subplot involves Wood learning about the advantages of joining a local
4-H club and her desire to purchase two lambs in hopes of showing them to compete in the county and state fairs.
The bonus of this movie is the additional casting of child star Jeanne LaDuke, 10, who hailed from Mount Vernon, Indiana, and at the time was an active member of her own local 4-H club.
She plays the neighbor girl to Woods’ character and was cast for the part because of a national promotion by the motion picture company. More than 12,000 4-H girls submitted recipes and applications to be selected to star opposite Wood.
The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Floyd LaDuke, farming parents who each boasted college educations, she was raised with an older sister Nancy and attended a two-room schoolhouse in rural Posey County. She was especially close to her aunt who lived in Chicago and taught mathematics, which inspired her early love of arithmetic.
Though some newspapers dubbed Jeanne as “the next Margaret O’Brien,” she never returned to Hollywood after completing her first and only film. Jeanne studied mathematics at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. She continued on to earn a master’s degree in mathematics and then completed her Ph.D. with a dissertation in mathematical analysis in 1969 at University of Oregon. She spent three decades on DePauw’s math department faculty before retiring in 2003, and today, at age 83, is hailed as one of the pioneering females of our time in the field of mathematics.
She continues to have fond memories of the glitz and glamour of her first, and only, Hollywood film red carpet premiere. Following early film previews and a Chicago premiere Dec. 2, 1948, it was on March 17, 1949 when a St. Patrick’s Day screening was held in Houston with an elaborate party for 2,000 attendees at the Shamrock Hotel, the $20 million hotel also built and owned my Texas oil millionaire McCarthy.
In addition to Jeanne and 25 other 4-H girls treated as her guest attendees, other luminaries also attending the event were Errol Flynn, Dorothy Lamour, Pat O’Brien, Robert Paige, Ruth Warwick, Dennis O’Keefe, J. Carroll Naish, Van Heflin, Joan Davis, Andy Devine, Alan Hale, Virginia Gray, Walter Brennan, Katherine Grayson, Robert Preston, Gale Storm, Buddy Rogers and Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy.
Of course, the “shamrock” remains the symbol of 4-H clubs, as Irish oilman, film producer and newspaper publisher McCarthy like to remind his theater audiences. The four leaves symbolize an “H” of each of the club’s four founding mission attributes: Head, Heart, Hands and Health.
As for Jeanne’s Indiana State Fair winning 4-H recipe, which netted her the winning spot for her film role in “The Green Promise,” it’s a simple “drop biscuit” recipe using Swans Down Cake Flour.