God's Little Acre

IN this era, when sex is easy, it's great to see all that inhibited lust steaming out over the screen. Aldo Ray and Tina Louise did one jam-up job of showing their passion for one another. Actually, Robert Ryan almost upped the ante from his '7 Days in May' stint where he lectured on the devil women sucking out the vital juices from the soldiers under his command. (That's true, you know. We women would rather suck out vital juices than just about anything.) Anyway, see this back to back with Tobacco Road, and you'll understand completely why all these Yankees think we're products of incest and can barely put 4 grammatical phrases together. No wonder, I am continually fighting off the prejudices of people who are amazed that I wear shoes and didn't marry my 1st cousin.

The writing in here is great: Robert Ryan plays a beautiful balance between an obsessed redneck who is trying to find his grandpappy's gold on his property, and his restrained longing for his son's daughter. His goodness screams out in his scene with his cotton broker son, who made it big. As my own evangelist cousin says, "We call him 'MMM"...our Miserable Millionaire Miser."

And Michael Landon, as the albino teen-ager, scared of the violence from these raging men who have kidnapped him to divine the gold.....what a sight!! Jack Lord, in his pre-Hawaiian Eye days is all wrathful, as he watches his beauteous wife with the NATURAL cleavage longing for the drunken Aldo Ray. Hard to believe the change, but the analogy between the tearing up the yard and sacrificing the peace of his family for the gold hunt...and today's all materialistic, 'if it ain't business, it ain't nothing', lifestyle.....is fantastic....rite smart writin'.

Check it out for a movie that SHOULD be colorized if ever there was one. And that house looks just my Aunt Mattie Seals' home in Talbot County, jawja!!!!! Boy, do I miss it!

I have to weigh in on the errors in alicecbr's review, since it's featured here on IMDB. I refer to the first paragraph. Robert Ryan wasn't in "Seven Days in May." And there's no lecture in that movie about women sucking juices out of soldiers. The closest thing I can think of is Sterling Hayden in "Dr. Strangelove," who tells Peter Sellers about the Commie plot to sap and impurify our bodily fluids by fluoridating the water. Nothing in it about women, though, just Commies. I'm voting it...unhelpful!

Underrated actors Aldo Ray and Robert Ryan are outstanding in this eccentric bit of Americana from the novel by Erskine Caldwell, which was banned in some towns. The setting on the farm with random holes and piles of dirt is almost surreal in appearance. And there's Tina Louise, and Little Joe Cartwright plays an albino.

I saw this movie soon after it was released when I was seventeen. Recently, I caught it again on late night TV; now, over fifty years later, I still count this one as one of the most interesting collection of oddball characters ever put to film. And all wrapped up in a timeless story about human frailties, family values and impossible dreams.

Without doubt, this is the film that launched Tina Louise's lacklustre career into a series of B-movies of the late fifties and early sixties, followed by seemingly endless appearances in mindless TV drama and sitcoms over the next thirty-five years. What a shame: because I think her debut film role as Griselda Walden set a new standard for the term 'sex appeal' – and once seen, never forgotten, especially her first appearance with sunlight behind her, outlining her entire body through her thin, cotton shift. So, see this film for Tina Louise in action, if for no other reason.

Erskine Caldwell's whole story is definitely worth watching, however. Actually, there are a number of stories beginning with old man Ty Ty Walden (Robert Ryan) and his fifteen-year, frenetic search for his grandfather's gold, supposedly buried somewhere on his farm: with that underlying scenario, Caldwell satirically skewers the lust for wealth that trap too many of us in ephemeral dreams which blind us to the reality around us. Robert Ryan gives his all, in what I regard as one of his best roles.

Interwoven with Ty Ty's quest, we see unfold the bodily lust that Will Thompson (Aldo Ray) has for Griselda, the wife to embittered and jealous Buck Walden (Jack Lord). When Will has the hots for Griselda on a feverish summer night, and they stand in darkness, fingers entwined, at the corner of the house, sweat steaming off their bodies, you see one of the finest pieces of bodily eroticism ever put to film – and an image that's still used today, as the above poster on this page shows.

The lust for power is given its comic turn with Sheriff wannabe Pluto Swint (Buddy Hackett) trying to get votes from all and sundry. With a name like Pluto – on the edge of society physically, mentally and emotionally – how far can he get? Well, he's also pining for the hand in marriage of Ty Ty's other daughter, Darlin' Jill (Fay Spain). With Pluto, Darlin' Jill pulls off an open-air, erotic bathtub scene that must be seen for its bawdy humor and Freudian overtones. Not to be missed...

Wrap all that around Will Thomspon's efforts to power up the bankrupt local cotton mill again, add Ty Ty's visit to his only financially-successful son (to ask for money), Jim Leslie (Lance Fuller), and you have a succession of vignettes that pretty much cover the whole gamut of what it means to be human. Watch for very young Michael Landon (as the albino) and Vic Morrow (as Shaw Walden). Happily, with such an interpersonal imbroglio to appreciate fully, the cast fully delivers. Some argue it's over the top; and so it is, because it's mostly social satire.

One puzzlement: the mise-en-scene looks and feels Depression era, but the presence of mid-1950s autos belies that. One wonders if that was a deliberate ploy by the producer and director. The black-and-white photography is exquisite; the sound track is appropriate, given the social milieu of the times, but I could do without it.

Overall, it's a classic film which, despite winning no awards, should still be seen by all film lovers.

Never mind that the front yard has more holes than no-man's land after a WWI artillery barrage. Or that Pluto's up-and-down pump appears to drive Darlin' Jill into censored delight. Or that the rotund Pluto appears to be running for sheriff of Disneyland. No, this is not the deep South of Rhett and Scarlett; it's the cartoon South of Dog Patch and Lil' Abner. Take drop-dead sexy Griselda who delivers water to sweating boys in a see-through dress. Or, patriarch Ty-Ty, God's very own real estate agent. And, of course, mustn't forget Darlin' Jill with her own ideas about how to integrate the South. Don't get me wrong—this first half is mildly amusing with its exaggerated characters and heavy breathing, much like an R-rated cartoon.

And, had the screenplay followed through with this comedic style, a mildly memorable movie could have resulted. But it's like someone suddenly decided the movie needed to really "serious up". So, we get a second half that's more like over-heated Tennessee Williams than Al Capp's riotous Dog Patch. I don't know if all that contrived staging around the cotton mill is supposed to deliver a "message", but it's sure as heck heavy-handed and out of sync with the first half. Plus, there's that typical 50's ending that ties up every loose end in unbelievably happy fashion. I don't know which of the many versions (thanks to censors of the time) I saw, but I doubt any combination of this bi-polar disorder could work. Too bad, since it's a rare stab at departure for that strait-jacketed decade.

(In passing—I do like how Ty-Ty's manic mining for his father's gold gets resolved. We discover that despite appearances, he knows there's no buried gold. Instead, he keeps digging in order to "keep the family together" and the memory of his dad alive. He's not crazy— he just has a wacky way of expressing his "family values". Still, I don't think I'd hire him to do my gardening.)

What this and "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell's other magnum opus, have in common is a portrait of the Deep South as populated by a people with a collective IQ of about 50. There's Robert Ryan as the clueless patriarch convinced that his granddaddy buried gold treasure on his land; he's a God-lovin' cuss but a hypocrite, forever changing his life rules to accommodate his avarice. There's Buddy Hackett (of all people) as a sheriff candidate who can't even paint an "N" correctly, in love with one of Ryan's nubile daughters. Characters have names like Ty Ty and Darlin' Jill, to make them more folksy, I guess, and the themes are greed and lust, most particularly between Tina Louise (the camera lovingly caressing her breasts at every turn) as Ty Ty's sassy daughter-in-law, desperately craving her brother-in-law, Aldo Ray. Tina Louise was sho' 'nuff all woman, and Aldo Ray all man, and I'll long remember their encounter at the water pump. The characters' collective idiocy gets on one's nerves, and the various conflicts resolve themselves entirely unconvincingly, but it's not a total loss. Ernest Haller's handsome black-and-white widescreen photography does capture the heat and grime of the cotton fields, and Elmer Bernstein's score is very good fake Copland.