God's Little Acre (1958)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A well-made and interesting movie. Notice the use of the bizarre piles of dirt and holes as decoration for what becomes an abstract and striking set design. The movie is toned down quite a bit from the book, in which Aldo Ray's lust-maddened character rips the clothes completely off Griselda, in front of his wife and her sister! Then he drags her into a bedroom. You know, this story is ready for a remake, and I would definitely buy a ticket.I just wonder about alicecbr, who says above, "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." Robert Ryan? In "Seven Days in May?" Devil women? Can she be thinking of Sterling Hayden in "Dr. Strangelove" talking about the Commie plot to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids? I can't think of any other movie that comes anywhere near that description, but if there is, I'd love to see it.

"God's Little Acre" surprisingly defied the expectations I had after seeing the credits. I expected Robert Ryan to be corrupt and lascivious, but he instead plays the most optimistic and happy character of his career - even if he is not the brightest bulb on the tree. Actually, he is the brightest bulb on the tree - not one character (other, perhaps, than the black sharecropper played by Rex Ingram) has much brains at all. And Buddy Hackett was not the complete comic foil of the film either: he is one of the love interests, and, although ostensibly played for laughs, his love is a little too earnest for it to be a complete joke. Very interesting of Director Thomas Mann to let the actors mix it up a bit.And people always mention how Michael Landon once played the Teenage Werewolf: but this is definitely a weirder role, that of the confused and scorned albino.Anthony Mann had already made his incredible series of intense Westerns with Jimmy Stewart by this time, and so it is not surprising that "God's Little Acre"'s many tense scenes of lust and violence (and near violence) are handled so deftly and with such ease and skill by Mann.But much more interesting, I think, is Mann's decision to include in so many of his highly tense scenes other characters, who sit passively and quietly while the main protagonists battle for 5 or more minutes at a time. Watch Buddy Hackett and Fay Spain sit at a table barely moving while Tina Louise and Helen Westcott (as Rosamind) desperately try to keep a drunk Aldo Ray from going to the cotton mill to turn on the power; note Tina Louise sitting and staring, immobile, while Robert Ryan berates his spoiled rich son Jim Leslie (played by Lance Fuller) while begging him for money. The spectator-characters seem so weirdly detached in these scenes - or are they just being polite, emotionally withdrawing so as not to embarrass the speakers? Very interesting indeed.Yes, the weather in the movie is hot and steamy; and the two girls played by Fay Spain and Tina Louise are also hot and steamy; no doubt there must have been a lot of panting on the set of this film. Poor Tina can barely make it through the door with her oft-viewed bosom in the way. When did Hollywood decide to turn the South from a proud but defeated post-Confederate Lost-Cause Society into such a sleazy and seedy land full of lazy leering men and women (calling Tennessee Williams)? A great movie full of highly unusual dialogue and characters. Highly recommended.

Watched this yesterday on TCM. I had seen this 1958 adaptation of Erskine Calwell's controversial 1933 novel (he was actually arrested and tried for obscenity) many years ago when I was a young teenager, and not cared for it. Part of my distaste was undoubtedly due to my being a Southerner annoyed by the sexed-up Li'l Abner stereotypes.But watching it again after all these years, and in a different frame of mind, it strikes me as almost a minor classic, for all its many flaws. This can be credited to the direction from -- of all people -- Anthony Mann (surely this is the odd-man-out in his filmography) and photography by Ernest Haller. Despite the rural setting, most of the film takes place at night, with key scenes in a deserted cotton mill and on the street outside a honky-tonk beer joint during a trip to the "big city" (Augusta Georgia).This gives the film a noirish look that is superficially at odds with its Beverly Hillbillies characters, and adds to its unique ambiance. Because instead of noir cool we get raucous black comedy and wildly over-the-top caricatures. In fact, GLA is so flamboyantly larger than life that it comes across as a musical that has had all its songs cut.(Idea for you theatrical types. Get the musical rights to GLA. It seems to be crying out for an adaptation).Some of the casting is unsurprising: Jack Lord (in his butch leading man phase) and an already paunchy Aldo Ray as the hunks, Vic Morrow as Lord's loyal puppydog little brother (ironic since Morrow despised Lord -- allegedly they even got into a fistfight on the set).Tina Louise plays the supposed sexpot that the various males fight over. Since Louise never did anything for me (I was always a Mary-Ann man) she not only looks wrong but seems almost schoolmarmish in her repressed manner. Fay Spain is a lot more fun as the nymphomaniacal sister.Buddy Hackett plays a spoof of the fat redneck sheriff cliché. Rex Ingram is a friendly black sharecropper, Michael Landon has a small role as an albino (!!) and one Lance Fuller plays the rich brother from Augusta. He's the one cast member who makes no impact at all.The central role, Ty Ty the obsessed farmer, is played by the surprisingly cast Robert Ryan. Ryan is expert as psychos and villains, but he's not the first actor you'd think of for this kind of larger-than-life "fool" role, one that might suit Burt Lancaster or Jimmy Cagney better. However, he's generally quite effective, making up in gravitas what he might lack in esprit.The script by the blacklisted Ben Maddow (although credited to perennial front Phillip Yordan) has some exposition and other problems. One example. The film is more than half over when Ty Ty needs money and decides to borrow it from his son in Augusta -- a son we've never heard mentioned before. His existence should have been worked into dialogue earlier.Maddow's script seems divided in theatrical style scenes, often separated by fades to black. This may have been necessitated by heavy editing (censorship?). Scenes that you expect to see are curiously missing. DLA is essentially two plots fused together: Ty Ty desperately searching for gold on his farm, and Will Thompson (Ray) desperately trying to open the cotton mill that supports the town's workers.This latter, proletarian storyline seems added-on, a leftover from the novel's original publication in 1933. It ensures GLA a place in that group of films (A Place In The Sun, Lonelyhearts, The Film Flam Man, Fitzwilly) that are set in contemporary times but really should take place in the 1930s.Elmer Bernstein's score, full of pastoral horns and strings, is very good, even if it is the most blatant imitation of Aaron Copland I've ever heard. In fact it's so similar Copland fans may want to track it down for comparison purposes. The title song is an interesting gospel pastiche, although the use of an all-too-obviously lily-white chorus blunts its impact.I don't know where the auteurists rank GLA in the Anthony Mann canon, but it definitely deserves a look.

For whatever reason the producer's decided that God's Little Acre should be set in no specific time rather than in the dust-bowl thirties where and when it belongs, it kept the film from being a great film. It's still a good film to watch, but it misses greatness by a length.Erskine Caldwell wrote this and set in firmly the Depression. And for rural America, the Depression did not begin when the stock market crashed. It began after World War I when the demand for our farm produce dropped with the coming of peace. Agriculture had no price support system then, it was the beginning of the end of the family farm, be it corn or cotton. The stock market crash just exacerbated the situation.But this Walden family has its own set of problems starting with the head of the family, Robert Ryan. As Ty Ty Walden, he's digging up the farm rather than working it, looking for some buried gold left from Civil War days. He's got three sons and two daughters and one fetching daughter-in-law, Tina Louise who is married to one son, Jack Lord, but has her heart set on her sister Helen Westcott's husband Aldo Ray.Before she was movie star Ginger Grant and a castaway, Tina Louise was quite the sex object, she's also got another son, Lance Fuller all hot and bothered over her. He's gotten away from his family of rustics, he married a wealthy widow who up and died and left him well fixed. Of course he has the least amount of character among the whole bunch.Jack Lord and Vic Morrow are the other sons. Lord in his days before he was telling Danno to book 'em played a lot of nasty types on screen. Here he's not nasty, but he's one powerfully jealous fellow. Fay Spain had a brief career as a young sex pot due to this film as the youngest in the family and one flirtatious young thing. This film was loaded with TV stars in the making. Michael Landon has a very nice part as an albino these rustics believe has special powers that can divine where gold is. He's captured by them and put to work tramping all over Ryan's acres looking for the buried gold. He's a true innocent that Fay Spain seeks to seduce while she's still being courted by Buddy Hackett who's a local politician running for sheriff. Michael Landon or Buddy Hackett? I mean, really, who would you choose?Though some of the left-wing polemics were drained from the film, this was the fifties, Anthony Mann still managed to get his cast to deliver a powerful and entertaining film. I will say this about the ending, the audience gets the message for sure about what's important in life, but it looks Ryan never will.