YOUR CHEATIN' HEART (1964)

This biopic about country music legend Hank Williams begins with Hank as a 12-year-old shoeshine boy who sings and plays guitar with his older Black mentor Teetot. Hank can even make up songs as he shines shoes. Teetot dies of a heart attack in front of Hank, and the next thing we see is a 20-year-old Hank (George Hamilton) making a living with a traveling medicine show. Audrey Williams (Susan Oliver) sees him singing and, impressed with his raw talent, steals him away to join her band, the Drifting Cowboys. While getting gigs at high schools and church socials, Audrey sends one of his songs to famous music publisher Fred Rose who locks him up in an office to write a song, to prove he's not stealing from others. He proceeds to write "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," so Rose agrees to publish his songs and gets the band a gig on the Louisiana Hayride radio show. We get a one-minute montage of newspaper headlines, and suddenly Hank is (relatively) rich and famous. He's married to Audrey, they live in a nice suburban house, and he's had a sting of hits. But he's also running into writer's block and has taken to sitting around the house in his sweaty underwear, getting drunk while trying to get inspired. Even if you know next to nothing about Hank Williams, you know the trajectory of the Hollywood biopic: humble beginnings, fame, romance, people hurt along the way, downfall, redemption (or not). That's what happens here. Hank starts arriving late to concerts or showing up drunk, gets picked up by the Grand Ole Opry, and later dropped because of his unreliability, and alienates his wife and friends. In the end, he goes through a sort of rehab process (offscreen) and winds up sober but weakened, and on the way to a New Year's gig, he stops at a diner where the people recognize him and ask him to play a song. As he begins, he looks out the window and sees the face of Teetot peering in at him. Sensing that death is at hand, he asks Teetot for one more song, which he sings. Later that night, his death is announced at the concert hall and the audience spontaneously stands and sings a gospel song of his, "I Saw the Light."

We all know that Hollywood biographies rarely stick to the truth, so I won’t even begin to tally up the factual problems here except to note two things. First, it hurts the movie that we don't really get to see Hank's rise--it all happens in that one-minute montage. Second, the real story of his death--he died being driven to a concert in an ice storm--is at least as interesting as the fiction presented here, though the shot of Teetot (Rex Ingram) at the end is touching. Most critics who dislike this film focus on George Hamilton's performance. He may not be perfect, but I found him believable as a charming but abrasive and self-destructive musician. His melodramatic acting style, undoubtedly coached along by director Gene Nelson, fit the times when the movie was made, and fits the larger-than-life image of Williams that MGM wanted to sell. Williams' first wife Audrey was a technical advisor and pulled some strings to get what she wanted, but she still comes off as, if not villainous, at least manipulative and generally unpleasant. We never see the two of them very happy with each other. Susan Oliver is fine in the part, as is Arthur O'Connell as Fred Rose. The songs are lip-synced by Hamilton to new recordings made by Hank Williams Jr., who was only 14 when he sang them, and they sound great. The more recent biopic, I Saw the Light, with Tom Hiddleston, is probably a bit truer to the historical record, but this is enjoyable enough for people who know who Williams was but aren't necessarily die-hard fans. [TCM]