Raintree County (1957) - full review!
Directed by Edward Dmytryk (Crossfire (1947)), with a screenplay by Millard Kaufman (Take the High Ground! (1953) & Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)), this average Civil War era drama received 4 Oscar nominations including Elizabeth Taylor's first for Best Actress. The cast also includes three time Best Actor nominee Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint (On the Waterfront (1954)), Nigel Patrick, Lee Marvin (Cat Ballou (1965)), Rod Taylor, four time Best Supporting Actress nominee Agnes Moorehead, Walter Abel, Tom Drake, Rhys Williams, and even DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy in Star Trek), among others. The film's long, rambling, and only mildly interesting story takes more than three hours to tell (at least in the version I saw on TCM), and suffers not only from Clift’s car accident inhibited performance (he says he loves her, but we are never really made to believe it), but also from a rather unsatisfactory conclusion.
John Wickliff Shawnessy (Clift) is the son blessed with seemingly limitless potential upon whom great expectations have been placed by his Reverend father "Doc" Shawnessy (Abel) and "out of place" Professor Stiles (Patrick). Moorehead plays his "stern" mother Ellen, in practically a cameo role. The film is set in Indiana, and the Professor is a Liberal who's eventually run out of town by the more conservative county residents when he's thought to have fooled around with one of his students, the wife of Ezra Gray (Williams). However, John has great respect for his mentor the Professor, who tells him the legend of the elusive "holy grail" raintree, the answer to all questions. John seeks the tree, making him the laughing stock of his peers like Garwood Jones (Rod Taylor) and even his girlfriend Nell Gaither (Saint). So, John meets a new girl in town, the "Southern belle" Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor), who's in town to settle some of her family's real estate. After John wins the "fastest man in the county" race, beating "Flash" Perkins (Marvin), she finagles a way to hook him, which leads him to her Southern home where he meets her family that includes brother Bobby (Drake). Once in Georgia, John learns the beginning of Susanna's family secrets and (at least the beginnings of) the reason(s) behind her increasingly inexplicable & somewhat bizarre behavior.
Eventually, John and Susanna return to Raintree County where they have a son. Meanwhile, with a war between the states pending, the opportunistic Garwood has gone into to politics, though he is unable to convince Nell to give up her hope that one day she'll be with John. Nell had returned from college to work on the town's newspaper. War erupts but, because of the birth of his son and the growing instability of his wife, John can only watch as his friends like Flash march off to fight. However, Susanna takes her son across the lines back home, causing John to enlist and join the Union Army where he is reunited with Flash and the Professor, who's writing about the war. Assigned to a special "guerrilla" unit with Flash, and in search of Susanna and his son, John comes across a Southern officer (Kelley) on the Drake plantation. Without giving away the rest, suffice it say that, after three hours, the ending is as welcome as it is convenient.
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