I wasn't expecting much from this film - just something to pass a rainy Sunday.

What a wonderful surprise to find myself watching a screwball comedy about as good as Cary Grant or Irene Dunne could have hoped to make in the 1930's.

Give it a chance - you might love it like I did.

What a crosscurrent of styles! Alan Hale appears to already on "Gilligan's Island," McLaughlan is still doing "The Quiet Man," Tamblynn and Richards appear borrowed from "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (as do some of the sets; of course "Seven ..." was made the same year). Parker is nearly a decade too old for the part (In seven years, she'd play George Hamilton's mother!), Taylor about two decades (his adult movie debut was in 1936!). Still, this movie is fun enough.

This movie would have been better with more outdoor scenes, and a story that doesn't turn so serious toward the end. However, it is certainly worthwhile and not as predictable as I first thought it would be. With a little better pacing (and more humor) in the second half, "Many Rivers to Cross" would have been first rate. Still, it is a pretty good "near miss".

This wonderful rollicking comedy set in the early days of the republic, roughly sometime in the Federalist era had to take its inspiration from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers from the year before. In fact two of the brothers, Jeff Richards and Russ Tamblyn are featured in Many Rivers to Cross.

The surprise to me in this film is Robert Taylor. At the time he did this film Taylor had been doing dramatic parts for many years. He did some comedy roles in his early days at MGM, but they were the modern sophisticated sort of stuff.

Robert Taylor is Bushrod Gentry, a frontier trapper who's a pretty fancy free and footloose sort of character very much like Adam Pontipee in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. But while it was Howard Keel who was looking for a wife in that film, here it's the woman who does the chasing and it's the woman who comes from a pretty frisky frontier family herself. Eleanor Parker is Federalist era Calamity Jane who takes a real shine to Taylor.

Of course she pursues Taylor through out the film, try as he may to get back to his trapping. Their last escape from some pursuing Shawnee Indians is an absolute comic riot.

Good as Taylor and Parker are, Many Rivers to Cross almost cries for a song or two other than the theme about the Berry Tree. In a musical I could have seen Howard Keel and Doris Day doing it easily.

In any event I'm sure that when Taylor and Parker settle down and commence to having children that they were the ancestors a hundred years later of that Pontipee clan in the Pacific Northwest.