Chad Hanna (1940)

Set in the 1840s, a farm boy (Henry Fonda) from upstate New York joins a traveling circus. He falls in love with a haughty self centered bareback rider (Dorothy Lamour) who rejects him. On the rebound, he marries a naive country girl (Linda Darnell) on the run from her abusive father. Based on the novel RED WHEELS ROLLING by Walter Dumaux Edmonds and directed by Henry King (THE SONG OF BERNADETTE). Perhaps more than any other studio, 20th Century Fox embraced Technicolor in the early 1940s. Mostly in its gaudy musicals but also in many of its dramas and westerns like BLOOD AND SAND, THE BLACK SWAN, RETURN OF FRANK JAMES, CRASH DIVE among many others. This simple backstage circus story benefits from the Technicolor which is good because there's not much else going on. I'm not a Fonda fan but he's quite good here as the yokel discovering love for the first time and growing from a kid to a man in the meantime. The fresh faced Darnell (still in her ingenue stage, not yet the hardened femme fatale she would later grow into) glows in Technicolor and Lamour does nicely as the "bad" girl who turns out not to be so bad after all. With Jane Darwell (who steals the movie), John Carradine and Guy Kibbee.