REVIEW: "Wagon Master"

It is interesting to contrast "Wagon Master" with "brigham Young," a movie ten years its senior. Both could be classified as westerns, both involve Mormon pioneers, both are intended crowd-pleasers. And both try to portray the LDS people as ideal Americans. Anti-Mormon sentiment is a old as the Church itself and it is interesting to see two films that go out of their way to portray the Church in a positive light. It certianly has something to do with the fact that negative portrayal of religion was illegal at the time but I think there is something to filmmakers' apparant interest in looking to such a marginalized group as a portrait of the American Dream. It seems to spring from largely the same impulse as early anti-Mormon films. The Church here is a tool for storytelling purposes. While it was easy at first to use the Mormons as mysterious villains in horrifying settings, it became as convenient to utilize a group of good people with romantic ideals as subjects (or at least as a motif) in western cinema. Interestingly, the neutral portrayal of groups of Mormons has proven time and time again to be quite a blessing for the Church's public relations. To be seen in the public eye as ideal Americans seems to be quite the missionary tool.