Raintree County (1957)

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Best movie ever!

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

A muddled attempt to achieve a great movie that fails on nearly every level and an absolute waste of time to watch unless you are into unintentional camp failures.

This soap opera really sprawls over the years before and after the Civil War. Montgomery Clift is a quiet homegrown college graduate in mutual love with pretty young Eva Marie Saint. They seem fated for each other. They'll probably be married, raise a number of surviving children, and live in a white two-story house on the outskirts of Fairhaven in Raintree County, Indiana. But then, the luscious Southern belle, Elizabeth Taylor, visits Fairhaven. She and Clift fall in love forever after.But dark Elizabeth is Veronica to Saint's blond Betty. Or is it the other way around? No matter. Anyway they have contrasting personalities: the intensely passionate Taylor and the winsome and innocent Saint. Saint, for instance, would never dream of putting out for handsome, intelligent, and sensitive Monty, whereas Taylor does so on their second or third date and then LIES to him about having gotten pregnant. He doesn't mind one way or the other, besotted as he is.I don't know whether it's worthwhile trying to get through the plot. It's probably been done elsewhere, and I'm too tired to trace the trips, the outbursts of anger and guilt, Sherman's march through Georgia, and the finale, which no power on earth could force me to reveal. Much of it has to do with the fear of having a touch of the tar brush in one's blood.But I must say, New Orleans is given rather a bad rap as a representative Southern city. It wasn't like any of the others. It had an animated and rich multi-ethnic heritage at the time -- American, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and African. Edgar Degas visited French relatives there late in the '19th century. Slaves of course but not nearly as brutal a system as elsewhere. William Tecumseh Sherman taught at Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, later to become Louisiana State University.Others have claimed that it was easy to tell the difference between pre- and post-accident scenes of Montgomery Clift but I couldn't. As for the accident, Clift was doing booze and other substances to excess on a daily basis during the shooting. I mean, eating steaks he'd spilled on the floor and so on. After an evening at Liz Taylor's manse perched on a hill, he drove drunkenly down the winding road and didn't quite make it.Neither the accident nor the booze seemed to interfere with his acting, although the part of the pathetic loner in "A Place in the Sun" suited him better than the idealist he's forced to portray here. Elizabeth Taylor is blindingly beautiful. Many of her films cast her has a frustrated nut job. Eva Marie Saint has the more sympathetic role as the unspectacular girl from home who never manages to shrug off her love for Clift.It's long. It has an overture and even an entr'acte, evocative photography by Robert Surtees, and a lushly orchestrated but fulsome score by Johnny Green. It's no "Gone With the Wind," though, partly because it substitutes anguish for laughs.

This is a fantastic Civil War film divided before and after the War of the States. I recommend that prospective viewers catch it on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) as I note that the DVD version offered is only 1:23 in length. The actual length of the film is 2 hours and 53 minutes, so I would wonder why the DVD version is so much less in length, not even a full feature length of 1:30. Just a thought. So, having rewatched it again, this time on TCM, I find that it's truly a fantastic movie...great actors, particularly Montgomery Clift who was seriously injured during its filming in an off-set automobile accident -- the resulting injuries serving to affect his remaining life in a negative way. It's interesting to watch the camera work post-accident. That aside, all of the acting roles are precise and everyone gives their roles their all. Montgomery Clift clearly shone out in this films and warranted an Academy nomination at minimum, as well as Best Picture nomination, neither which occurred unfortunately. Thus, it sometimes is passed over. For Civil War enthusiasts, it's a must see. Just enough of the fighting and struggle is shown to make its point without going overboard. For me the film is about love, commitment, and the power of holding onto a dream, real or fictional.

"Murder, My Sweet" director Edward Dmytryk's "Raintree County" is a tragic love story set against the American Civil War. Everything about this prestigious MGM production had tragedy attached to it. Not only did the story conclude on a tragic note, but also Montgomery Cliff lost control of his car on a twisting road and crashed it into a telephone pole. The facial and cranial injuries that Cliff suffered were so critical that MGM briefly contemplating scrapping the production. Indeed, Dmytryk did have to stop production until Cliff recovered from his injuries. The handsome young star of "River Red" was never the same after the car accident. After the film premiered, Cliff told "Newsweek" magazine that "the audience spends too much time trying to figure out which scenes were made after my accident." Tragedy had struck already because the massive novel upon which the film was based was written by Ross Lockridge, Jr. The book was a Book of the Month Club bestseller in 1948, but writing this epic drove Lockridge to commit suicide. The last tragedy of this 'lost' movie is that the copyright owner has not issued an official DVD release. The only copies of "Raintree County" are available in the now largely defunct VHS format. An Asian company called Castaways has released a DVD, but the DVD is abysmal. Instead of the widescreen letterboxed format of the VHS version, the Castaway's version truncates the picture and the film no longer has an intermission and some copies are unreadable in a DVD player.This sprawling soap opera occurs over a period of six years before, during, and after the American Civil War. The film and the county both drew its name from an exotic Chinese tree that Johnny Appleseed planted in a swamp on his way through the wilderness sewing apple orchards. During an outdoor lecture, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles (Nigel Patrick) regales his class with the story of the raintree. Stiles tells them that anybody who finds the raintree will find the secret of life. Unfortunately, nobody knows where the raintree is located. Idealist Indiana poet/scholar Johnny Wickliff Shawnessy (Montgomery Cliff) plunges into the swamp and searches for the raintree. He becomes an object of ridicule for his impulsive behavior. About a half-hour in the action, Johnny accepts a challenge to compete with the fastest runner in Raintree County, Flash Perkins (Lee Marvin of "The Big Heat"), but the professor intervenes before they can start. Stiles convinces all parties involved to have the foot race delayed until July Fourth. He wants to bet a hundred dollars on Johnny.Later, Johnny runs into the dark-haired, North Orleans-bred, Havana-born southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor) when he goes to have his photograph taken. He accompanies her to her house and their romance begins. Miraculously, Johnny beats Flash in the race. After the race, Johnny and Susanna joint Professor Stiles on a picnic in the woods with his girlfriend. Eventually, Johnny winds up marrying Susanna because she informs him that she is pregnant with his child. This ruins the love that our protagonist shared with his golden-haired childhood sweetheart Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint) and they drift apart.Actually, Susanna was never pregnant. Later, he learns that she lied to him because she wanted him so much. The hero visits the south with his wife and learns about a mysterious fire that she was involved in and the tragic circumstances surrounding it. Susanna thinks that the worst thing that can happen to a white woman is to have tainted African-American blood. She remembers the night that their mansion burned. As it turns out, her father had to leave his post as a Congressman to tend to his ailing, hysterical wife. Since he could not have a meaningful, child-bearing relationship with her wife, he resorted to an extramarital affair with a slave and Susanna was the product of their union. The Congressman's wife shoots both the slave and her husband and set the mansion on fire. Susanna blames herself for the incident because she left a nasty note for her in her scrapbook album.MGM Studios spared no expense in the production of "Raintree County." After lensing interiors in Hollywood, producer David Lewis took the company on location in Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee to finish the picture. According to "Raintree County" historian Stephen V. Russell, the film boasted 119 speaking roles, 72 interior studio sets, and 34 exterior location scene. "Quo Vadis" cinematographer Robert Surtees does an outstanding job lensing this movie. "Raintree County" was the film shot in an entirely new photographic process called Camera 65 that was designed to enhance pictorial detail. Indeed, the only other movie to employ this process was the Charlton Heston classic "Ben-Hur." Not surprisingly, Surtees shot that movie, too. The cast is fantastic, but this MGM spectacle is no match for "Gone With the Wind." "Raintree County" is related from a Northern perspective, and the Montgomery Cliff hero is nothing like Clark Gable. The Elizabeth Taylor character has a mentally unstable history, keeps a massive collection of dolls, one with a half-burnt face, and she is supposed to symbolize the irrationality of the South. The actual Civil War scenes take place after the intermission, but they cannot compete with "GWTW." The dialogue of "Bad Day at Black Rock" scenarist Millard Kauffman does not contain anything like the immortal Rhett Butler line at the end of the movie. Sumptuous set designs distinguish this film along with a fine, sensitive performance by Taylor that netted the London-born actress her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Lee Marvin, who had specialized in villain roles before "Raintree County," played a sympathetic character for a change. Marvin's performance is predictably agile, especially in the barroom scenes when he flexes his body for the upcoming race. Rod Taylor plays a slimy, Copperhead politician. Agnes Moorehead is cast as Ellen Shawnessy the mother of our hero.Altogether, "Raintree County" qualifies as a classic.