Cinema: Hillbilly Shakespeare

Your Cheatin' Heart, like many another mediocre film biography, threatens a legend with oblivion. Based on the life of Singer Hank Williams, Heart throbs to the proper words and music but misses the chaotic inner rhythm of a man who rose from boyhood poverty in Alabama to become the idolized author of such country-and-western hits as Jambalaya, Cold, Cold Heart, and the movie's title tune. Williams lived hard, worked hard and drank hard until the January day in 1953 when he leaned back in his white Cadillac and died of a heart attack at the age of 29.

As Williams, Tennessee-born George...