In the middle of the Great Depression, President Roosevelt's Tennessee Valley Authority is building dams across the great river to prevent the calamitous periodic floods and provide jobs for the people of Appalachia. Montgomery Clift arrives in a small town as the TVA agent to see that everything is in order before the new dam submerges the farm acreage behind it.
Some folks 'round here like it; most don't. They'll sell, though, because the TVA offers a fair price and, heck, ain't nothing' doin' 'round here anyhow. But one of the hold outs, who REALLY objects to being displaced, is old Ella Garth, Jo Van Fleet, who owns an island in the middle of the river.
How is Clift going to get her out of her broken-down ancient house and off her devitalized farm? That's Problem A. Problem B is that Clift enlists the aid of Van Fleet's granddaughter, the distraught and horny Lee Remick. She has two small children, is engaged to a local nonentity, Frank Overton, and she falls desperately in love with him. Her grandma might not be much for social change, but, man, is Remick ready for a change in circumstances. What's Clift going to do about HER? There are ancillary problems. Albert Salmi runs a tiny cotton plantation and is the leader of the anti-TVA faction in town. He's paying his black cotton pickers two dollars a day and the TVA is offering "the coloreds" five dollars. This discrepancy causes Salmi to offer active resistance to Clift and his plans.
Van Fleet does an impeccable job as the tough old lady. Such roles are her strong suit. She's played variations on the role a number of times, yet ALL of her tough old broads are different from one another. There is probably a "tough old lady" default setting somewhere in Van Fleet's repertoire but she doesn't activate it. One of her tough old ladies is always slightly different from the others. This one is uniformly sullen and unsmiling and imbued with dignity.
Lee Remick gets the job done, but I'm not sure about Montgomery Clift. This was after his accident and he was no longer the beautiful young man. On top of that he was going through booze and prescription drugs at an alarming rate. He's skinny and tic-ridden. When a distracted Remick swishes past him in her tight Levis, and Clift blinks, and remarks, "I wish you wouldn't walk like that," it's a little hard to believe him because he doesn't seem virile enough. Nobody wants John Wayne, but just someone with a little more masculine heft. Clift is fine being clobbered by Salmi in a fist fight, though, and getting drunk afterward.
Elia Kazan directs the story from William Bradford Huie's novel. Huie, as most Southern writers of the period were doing, showed us the human side of the isolated Southern redneck stereotype. It's more complicated than you outsiders seem to think. Kazan honors the intent. The incidents we witness -- the politeness pregnant with violence -- is thoroughly convincing. It's about as far from "To Kill a Mockingbird" and its humanistic platitudes as you can get. Salmi's character is despicable, true, but also reasonable and practical given his subculture. He doesn't beat his black worker because the guy is black, but because he's breaking the rules. We got our own kinda rules around here, Mister. John Wayne would have approved.
Anyway, if you can put up with the absence of a clear distinction between what the rest of us consider "good" and "bad", if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone very different from the kind of people most of us are, you'll get a lot of help from Elia Kazan and you'll understand that social change doesn't take place without some kind of sacrifice.
Some folks 'round here like it; most don't. They'll sell, though, because the TVA offers a fair price and, heck, ain't nothing' doin' 'round here anyhow. But one of the hold outs, who REALLY objects to being displaced, is old Ella Garth, Jo Van Fleet, who owns an island in the middle of the river.
How is Clift going to get her out of her broken-down ancient house and off her devitalized farm? That's Problem A. Problem B is that Clift enlists the aid of Van Fleet's granddaughter, the distraught and horny Lee Remick. She has two small children, is engaged to a local nonentity, Frank Overton, and she falls desperately in love with him. Her grandma might not be much for social change, but, man, is Remick ready for a change in circumstances. What's Clift going to do about HER? There are ancillary problems. Albert Salmi runs a tiny cotton plantation and is the leader of the anti-TVA faction in town. He's paying his black cotton pickers two dollars a day and the TVA is offering "the coloreds" five dollars. This discrepancy causes Salmi to offer active resistance to Clift and his plans.
Van Fleet does an impeccable job as the tough old lady. Such roles are her strong suit. She's played variations on the role a number of times, yet ALL of her tough old broads are different from one another. There is probably a "tough old lady" default setting somewhere in Van Fleet's repertoire but she doesn't activate it. One of her tough old ladies is always slightly different from the others. This one is uniformly sullen and unsmiling and imbued with dignity.
Lee Remick gets the job done, but I'm not sure about Montgomery Clift. This was after his accident and he was no longer the beautiful young man. On top of that he was going through booze and prescription drugs at an alarming rate. He's skinny and tic-ridden. When a distracted Remick swishes past him in her tight Levis, and Clift blinks, and remarks, "I wish you wouldn't walk like that," it's a little hard to believe him because he doesn't seem virile enough. Nobody wants John Wayne, but just someone with a little more masculine heft. Clift is fine being clobbered by Salmi in a fist fight, though, and getting drunk afterward.
Elia Kazan directs the story from William Bradford Huie's novel. Huie, as most Southern writers of the period were doing, showed us the human side of the isolated Southern redneck stereotype. It's more complicated than you outsiders seem to think. Kazan honors the intent. The incidents we witness -- the politeness pregnant with violence -- is thoroughly convincing. It's about as far from "To Kill a Mockingbird" and its humanistic platitudes as you can get. Salmi's character is despicable, true, but also reasonable and practical given his subculture. He doesn't beat his black worker because the guy is black, but because he's breaking the rules. We got our own kinda rules around here, Mister. John Wayne would have approved.
Anyway, if you can put up with the absence of a clear distinction between what the rest of us consider "good" and "bad", if you can put yourself in the shoes of someone very different from the kind of people most of us are, you'll get a lot of help from Elia Kazan and you'll understand that social change doesn't take place without some kind of sacrifice.