Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		3.5

The Wayward Bus Blu-ray Movie Review

If it’s Tuesday, this must be—Fresno?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 6, 2012

John Steinbeck holds an extremely esteemed position in the hall of American Arts and Letters, but there’s a perhaps less talked about accolade that also was visited on the author: quite a bit of the time, film adaptations of his pieces were surprisingly well done, and at least a handful of them are considered classics to this day. While The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden are probably Steinbeck’s best remembered properties in terms of their film adaptations, a host of other works are at (or near) the same level of greatness, films as disparate as Of Mice and Men, Lifeboat, The Red Pony and one of the few films where Steinbeck received an actual screenwriting credit, Viva Zapata!. Anyone who has ever witnessed the mangling of a great writer’s work as it is fed through the meat grinder that is the movie making process should stop for just a moment and consider how rare it is that so many of Steinbeck’s pieces have made it so (relatively) unscathed through that process. No one would ever accuse The Wayward Bus of being in the same league as The Grapes of Wrath, or even of being “great” Steinbeck, and the novel is in fact almost like a fictional travelogue, somewhat akin to Steinbeck’s late slice of life novel Travels With Charley. The film throws a bunch of characters together on the titular bus and lets their various stories play out with an occasional quasi-disaster movie cliché thrown in just for good measure. It’s an odd little film, to be sure, and one that certainly should hold a certain allure for audiences intrigued by the thought of a film that stars two female icons, Joan Collins and Jayne Mansfield.

The fifties weren’t an especially kind era to sexpots and glamour girls who wanted to prove they could act, all of whom were more or less forced into prefab molds of what the studios expected them to be (that trend of course being nothing new, stretching back to the dawn of the cinema age). But something kind of interesting had happened the year before The Wayward Bus came out in 1957. 1956 saw the debut of the film version of William Inge’s Bus Stop, starring the inarguably biggest sexpot and glamour girl of her time, Marilyn Monroe. And the really shocking thing was, though Marilyn was indeed sexy and glamorous in the film, she actually gave an incredible performance, one that is usually noted as being probably the finest (or at least one of the finest) of her rather short career. 20th Century Fox may have been looking for a similar breakthrough role for another of its blonde bombshells, Miss Jayne Mansfield, and in that weird if predictable manner that Hollywood honchos sometimes utilize, they may have felt that a “bus” setting made that breakthrough all the more likely. Mansfield is on hand here as Camille Oakes, a burlesque performer trying to get out of her line of work and achieve some sort of middle class domestic respectability.

The commentary on The Wayward Bus makes the interesting point that Steinbeck was aping Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in a way, positing a bunch of disparate characters on a common journey to a religious shrine. If things are at least a little bit more mundane here than they are in Chaucer, we do in fact have a bunch of passengers who are all riding a rickety old bus nicknamed Sweetheart through the treacherous mountains and canyons of California to the town of San Juan, California. The bus is owned by Johnny Chicoy (Rick Jason), whose wife Alice (Joan Collins) runs the dusty diner – bus stop in a little backwater where the only entertainment comes from the people passing through. This particular day a typically diverse set of folks shows up to ride Sweetheart into the sunset. There’s the local elderly man (Will Wright), who keeps yelling about important business in San Juan that he needs to attend to by 3 p.m.; Alice’s waitress Norma (Betty Lou Keim), the latest in a long line of younger girls Alice has lost her temper with due to jealousy; and a dysfunctional middle class family consisting of husband (Larry Keating), wife (Kathryn Givney) and reportedly (by the parents) sex crazed daughter (Dolores Michaels). Also along for the ride are a stripper named Camille (Mansfield), obviously embarrassed by her lot in life, and a traveling salesman named Horton (Dan Dailey) who takes an immediate interest in the girl.

Johnny and Alice have a big fight toward the beginning of the film when Johnny witnesses Alice literally attacking counter girl Norma, and he leaves in a huff, telling her the marriage is over. That places the bulk of the film in the bus itself, with occasional cutaways to Collins back at the restaurant, either getting sloshed or occasionally getting “friendly” with the locals (that’s Robert Bray as the helicopter pilot, an actor some television fans may remember from one of the many iterations of the long running Lassie television series). There’s really not a lot to the plot of The Wayward Bus other than character beats for most of the players. Will Johnny and Alice reconcile? Will Horton and Camille find true love? Can the bickering elderly couple come to terms with each other and their amorous daughter? Will Norma, who nurses dreams of Hollywood stardom, see her fantasy come true? And why is that old guy so intent on getting to San Juan by 3 in the afternoon?

These little character bits are interwoven with a couple of set pieces that almost make The Wayward Bus a proto-disaster movie. First, the bus gets caught in a landslide. That slide closes the main road and so Johnny must take an even more treacherous route via an old ranch road that is fraught with peril. Chief among the obstacles is a rickety bridge that Johnny and his passengers attempt to cross at the height of a violent storm, with the creek underneath swollen to frightening proportions. Later, the effects of the water play havoc with the bus’ brakes. All of these elements are handled well, if a bit hyperbolically, but they don’t really add much to the actual plot development or even provide much reason for any of the characters to do much of anything other than cringe in terror.

The Wayward Bus is really best experienced as a showcase of sorts for Collins and Mansfield. As the commentary notes, Mansfield’s character here is about the polar opposite of the giggly bimbos she played in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? and The Girl Can’t Help It. She’s nuanced, mature and really quite touching in this role, and The Wayward Bus proves she wasn’t just another pretty face (and knockout body). Collins has a somewhat tougher road to hoe here, and if she isn’t completely convincing traversing Alice’s admittedly wide emotional arc, this is still a fascinating performance for an actress who at that point in her career was still seen, much like Mansfield, as a sexpot puppet (witness Land of the Pharoahs).

Director Victor Vicas inherited this project after it had been lying dormant for years around Fox (listen to the commentary for some interesting tidbits on a variety of major talents who were attached to the project both in front of and behind the camera through the years). He stages things very well for the Cinemascope lens, and he does elicit some generally very fine performances from a cast that is saddled with a frankly pretty turgid script that, like the bus riders themselves, is frequently all wet.

The Wayward Bus Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Wayward Bus is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Twilight Time with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This is yet another luminous black and white Scope transfer that continues Twilight Time's largely winning ways of licensing top flight presentations from both Fox and Columbia – Sony. While there are occasional minor age related issues to contend with here, this is a near reference quality looking presentation that offers superb blacks, impressively gradated gray scale and bright, convincing whites. Depth of field is exceptional and grain is natural looking. There is some persistent shimmer and aliasing on Keating's tightly crosshatched tweed jacket, but otherwise this is a stellar transfer, if perhaps not quite at the level of Twilight Time's gorgeous Rapture , pretty darned close.

The Wayward Bus Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Wayward Bus' lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono soundtrack gets the job done with a minimum of fuss and bother and excellently recreates what would have been the original theatrical experience of the film. This is a film that probably could have benefited from a stereo or surround repurposing, at least with regard to the storm elements and some of the set pieces, but otherwise the largely dialogue driven plot is handled quite well by this mono track. All frequency ranges are well represented, and prioritization in the mix is also quite artful (very occasionally in some of the noisier storm sequences a word or two of dialogue gets gobbled up by the sound effects). Fidelity and dynamic range are both very strong throughout this presentation.

The Wayward Bus Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Audio Commentary features James Ursini, Film Historian, and Alan Silver, Ursini's collaborator on a number of film related books. This is an interesting commentary that goes into quite a bit of detail about the film's long gestation process (it was originally optioned by none other than George Stevens, later potentially to star Marlon Brando and Jennifer Jones, then Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney), as well as its adaptation and filming.


• Original Theatrical Trailer (SD; 2:21). This has some of the best "purple prose" narration you've ever heard in a vintage trailer.


• Isolated Score. Leigh Harline's score is presented in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0, and it sounds lush and inviting. Disney fans may recognize Harline's name from his association with the animation giant, but Harline had a long and distinguished scoring career for all sorts of projects, and it's really fun to hear his excellent music for this dramatic film.

The Wayward Bus Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Wayward Bus just barely hints at titillation, something that probably recommended it to buttoned down fifties audiences (who could point to the cachet of the Steinbeck name), but it's also kind of ridiculously melodramatic a lot of the time. This is certainly no masterpiece, and may not in fact be top flight Steinbeck, so there's probably a good reason it's largely forgotten today, but it does come with two very unusual and largely effective performances by some rather unexpected suspects, Joan Collins and Jayne Mansfield. This Blu-ray offers luscious image quality and solid audio, and while the supplements are on the light side, the commentary is quite informative and very enjoyable. Recommended.