LDS in movies: A film historian looks at how Brigham Young has been shown in movies and on TV

When Netflix debuted its “American Primeval” miniseries earlier this year, viewers saw a brutal depiction of the American West — particularly the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, when more than 100 members of a California-bound wagon train were slaughtered in southern Utah.

For James V. D’Arc, the depiction of the massacre was nothing surprising.

“Not much has changed in the cinematic representation of Brigham Young or the Mountain Meadows Massacre,” D’Arc, a longtime film historian and emeritus curator of the motion picture archive at Brigham Young University, said in an interview.

The scenes in “American Primeval” echoed similar moments in “September Dawn,” a 2007 movie that plowed the same narrative ground — and both, D’Arc said, got the history and even the geography of the place wrong.

“Audiences know that they have to participate in the willing suspension of disbelief in ‘American Primeval,’” D’Arc said, but “they have to be suspended so long that they might die from the noose.”

(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) The sun rises over the Salt Lake Valley at This Is the Place Heritage Park in 2023. Brigham Young, the pioneering Latter-day Saint prophet, has not fared well in most movie depictions.

Over more than a century of moviemaking, D’Arc said, the depiction of Brigham Young — the man who led the Latter-day Saint settlers to the Salt Lake Valley in 1847 and served as Utah’s first territorial governor — has been largely negative. Either Young was shown as a villain or the production was generally lackluster.

There is one notable exception, a movie that D’Arc called a “bright ray of relative sunlight”: The 1940 Western “Brigham Young,” with Dean Jagger in the dynamic title role.

Here are D’Arc’s thoughts on six portrayals of Young in movies and on TV, spanning from silent films to the streaming era:

Richard Cummings, ’A Mormon Maid’ (1917)

The first known cinematic depiction of Young, D’Arc said, was for this silent feature in which a scout wants to marry a young woman whose parents lead a wagon train headed to Salt lake City. When they arrive in Utah, however, the leader of the church tells the woman’s parents that they must practice plural marriage, which they don’t want to do.

The leader is never identified as Young but is called “The Lion of the Lord.” He’s played by Richard Cummings in what D’Arc called “pretty much a 19th-century depiction of Brigham Young — very authoritative, very demanding and everyone obeying his decrees.”

Being a silent movie, there is not much to say about Cummings’ performance, D’Arc said, as “you’re basically a slave to inter-title descriptions and visuals of his summary pronouncements.”

The actor playing the scout, Frank Borzage, was a Salt Lake City native who shifted from acting to directing and won two Oscars in the early talkies era.

“A Mormon Maid” was one of many silent movies produced essentially as propaganda against The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One of the few that has survived is “Trapped by the Mormons,” a 1922 melodrama about a missionary with the power to mesmerize innocent young women into joining the faith.

Dean Jagger, ‘Brigham Young’ (1940)

Tyrone Power and Linda Darnell are the credited leads, playing a Latter-day Saint scout and an outsider who fall in love on the trail between Illinois and Utah in the 1840s. What sets apart director Henry Hathaway’s historic melodrama is Jagger’s performance as Young, speaking eloquently as he leads his people away from persecution while quietly confiding his doubts to his rock-steady wife, Mary Ann, played by Mary Astor. (Mary Ann is the only one of Young’s wives mentioned in the movie, which generally avoided the topic of polygamy.)

“His portrayal was one of great force and vigor, and sometimes stubbornness that the historical Brigham Young has been characterized by,” D’Arc said. “But there was also a tender side to him, and he was plagued by doubts that he couldn’t talk to God.”

Heber J. Grant, then the president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, took a personal interest in the movie’s development, D’Arc said. “He decided, ‘Let’s be pro-active. Let’s work with the studio to see if we can give assistance, especially from our church archives, to whatever factual research they want to undergo for this screenplay.’”

Grant dispatched one of the church’s apostles, John A. Widtsoe, to take novelist Louis Bromfield, who worked for 20th Century Fox and received the original story credit on the film, on a two-week automobile tour of Utah, ending with dinner at the Lion House (Young’s family home) in downtown Salt Lake City. D’Arc noted Grant also sent one of Young’s descendants, Levi Edgar Young, to the set.

Levi watched Jagger shoot an early scene in which Brigham Young stands in court to defend the church’s founder, Joseph Smith (played by Vincent Price). The scene was fictitious but was added by screenwriter Lamar Trotti, D’Arc said, “as a way to bring together all of the elements that explain the persecution and the injustices the Latter-day Saints were undergoing.”

The scene worked on Levi, D’Arc said. “When I closed my eyes,” Levi said, “the inflection of Dean Jagger’s voice made me think of the Brigham Young I knew as a little boy.”

The movie was shot primarily in California, D’Arc said, but a key scene was filmed in Utah: The devouring of crickets by seagulls. The gulls were filmed at Utah Lake, D’Arc said, and the visual effect of the crickets was added later.

A decade after “Brigham Young” was released, Jagger won an Academy Award for his supporting performance in the World War II aviation drama “Twelve O’Clock High.” Holiday movie watchers also know him as Maj. Gen. Thomas Waverly, the retired military man who gets helped out by Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in “White Christmas” (1954). According to D’Arc and historian Davis Bitton, Jagger late in life became a Latter-day Saint.

Maurice Grandmaison, ‘Brigham’ (1977)

The makers of this low-budget biographical drama “claimed that they did research in the church archives,” D’Arc said, “and that this was going to be a friendly film to the church.”

Unfortunately, he added, it was “poorly written, poorly photographed and unfortunately cast. Maurice Grandmaison [as Young] had no presence at all on the screen.” (Former Utah resident Richard Moll played Joseph Smith, years before becoming famous as the bailiff Bull on the sitcom “Night Court.”)

Outside of the “Mormon corridor” — Utah, Idaho and Arizona — and a few theaters in California, nobody saw it, D’Arc said.

Charlton Heston, The Avenging Angel’ (1995)

Tom Berenger played the title role in this TV movie for TNT, a bodyguard assigned to protect Latter-day Saint leaders — but it was Charlton Heston, a legend for roles in such biblical epics as “The Ten Commandments” and “Ben-Hur,” who took the juicy role of Young.

Heston “really enjoyed playing Brigham Young,” said D’Arc, who interviewed the actor in 1999 for a book. “He was terrific in it. That nicely cropped beard, the square jaw that he had. He just exuded Moses or El Cid, and every other powerful leader that he had played in the past. He brought it all to bear on his portrayal of Brigham Young.”

Terence Stamp, ‘September Dawn’ (2007)

British star Terence Stamp, whose long career has included the title role in the naval drama “Billy Budd” (1962) and playing General Zod in “Superman” (1978) and “Superman II” (1980), played Young as a stereotypical bad guy.

“When you have Brigham Young making such statements as ‘I am the voice of God, and anyone who doesn’t accept that, I will hew down,’” D’Arc said, “well, that pretty much says it all about his depiction of Young.”

The movie portrays the Mountain Meadows Massacre, when scores of Arkansas emigrants en route to California were gunned down by Latter-day Saint militiamen in southwestern Utah. Historians have long debated whether Young knew about the massacre in advance, but the movie’s screenwriters, Christopher Cain (who directed) and Carole Whang Schutter, show no doubt in their mind that Young ordered the killings.

As Stamp plays him, D’Arc said, Young “comes across as morose, very soft-spoken, unless he’s delivering his revelations and pronouncements.”

(Netflix) Kim Coates, left, as Brigham Young and Alex Breaux as Wild Bill Hickman in an episode of "American Primeval."

Kim Coates, ‘American Primeval’ (2025)

Coates’ performance matches the general tone of the Netflix miniseries, D’Arc said. “The entire series comes across as dark visually, dark morally and dark musically. … There is no rhythm, there is no break from this morose, dark tone.”

Coates portrays Young as “very manipulative,” D’Arc said. “He’s very shrewd. He knows how to handle people, both outsiders and insiders. … He knows exactly what he’s doing, and, of course, he’s the one to blame for the Mountain Meadows Massacre.”

LDS prophet Brigham Young on screen: Lots of darkness and one ‘bright ray’ of sunlight