God’s Little Acre **** (1958, Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Buddy Hackett, Jack Lord, Fay Spain, Vic Morrow, Tina Louise, Michael Landon) – Classic Movie Review 10,558

‘Love! Hate! Pride! Passion! Rampant, Riotous In the Heat of a Southern Sun!’

The 1933 Erskine Caldwell novel about a Depression-era Georgia farming family is faithfully translated (though diluted) in director Anthony Mann’s steamy, stormingly acted 1958 drama God’s Little Acre.

Robert Ryan is superb as the widower patriarch Ty Ty Walden, Jack Lord and Vic Morrow are excellent as his boys Buck and Shaw, and Helen Westcott and Fay Spain are solid as the daughters Rosamund (Will’s wife) and Darlin’ Jill.

Poor Georgia cotton farmer Ty Ty Walden, who lives on his family farm in the backwoods of Georgia during the Great Depression, searches with his sons for gold his grandfather presumably buried on their land, while his farm suffers from years of neglect as poverty, marital infidelity, unemployment and alcohol threaten to destroy the family.

The comedy doesn’t work, but the film does justice to the book’s passions (especially when Aldo Ray as Rosamund (Westcott)’s husband Will Thompson makes adulterous love to Tina Louise, as Buck’s wife Griselda Walden, in the mill) and feeling for the 1930s Deep South.

Michael Landon plays the albino Dave Dawson, who, using a divining rod, claims the gold lies on the neighbouring church’s land, referred to as God’s Little Acre. Buddy Hackett plays Pluto Swint, who arrives to announce he is running for sheriff.

Louise is terrific in her movie debut, as Griselda. She won the 1959 Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer – Female.

Elmer Bernstein’s score is a big plus. It is shot in black and white by cinematographer Ernest Haller.

Also in the cast are Lance Fuller as Jim Leslie, Rex Ingram as Uncle Felix, Russell Collins as watchman, Davis Roberts as farm worker with hoe and Janet Brandt as angry woman. Brandt is also listed in the credits as dialogue coach.

The novel was prosecuted for obscenity but the film was still controversial. In 1958, audiences under 18 were prohibited from viewing what were perceived to be sexy scenes throughout and scenes of marital infidelity. Possibly even more controversial, the film shows a workers’ insurrection, in the US South by laid-off millworkers trying to gain control of the factory equipment their jobs depended on.

After decades of neglect, the film was restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive under the supervision of master restorer Robert Gitt. God’s Little Acre was originally credited to screen-writer Philip Yordan as a HUAC-era front for Ben Maddow. In the restoration, Yordan’s name was removed and replaced by Maddow’s in the main title roll.

It is in the public domain because it was published in the US between 1925 and 1963 and the copyright was not renewed. Here it is (still credited to Philip Yordan):

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 10,558

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