Le Petit Arpent du Bon Dieu

Wowza! For 1958 this would have been a "must see" for any man or child past puberty just to see the lustful but married Griselda Walden (Tina Louise) in her first film role where she has three (3) horny men vying for her attention. the three (3) men who were hot and horny for Griselda were her husband Buck Walden (Jack Lord), the already married Will Thompson (Aldo Ray), and her slimey widower brother-in-law Jim Leslie (Lance Fuller).

This film had several actors/actresses who went on to much bigger A-lister stars of both television and film. Stars such as Michael Landon, Jack Lord, Tina Louise, and Vic Morrow. Additionally the film had veteran film stars such as Robert Ryan who was the widowed clan leader named Ty Ty of the misfortune Walden clan, as well as Buddy Hackett and Fay Spain.

Although the story focuses on the clan father Ty Ty Walden's fixation that he has a pile of gold buried somewhere on his farm land by his own grandfather, Ty Ty has spent the past fifteen (15) years digging crater sized holes all around his farm with two (2) of his sons who he insists they help him dig to eventually reap the benefits.

The real gold mine though really lies in the gorgeous body of Ty Ty's busty daughter-in-law Griselda Walden (Tina Louise), who has her husband seeded in deep jealously that Griselda still has eyes for her brother-in-law Will Thompson (Aldo Ray), and her other brother-in-law Jim Leslie (Lance Fuller) who has disowned his own family after marrying into money only to become a wealthy widower who tries to bully and buy the sexy Griselda away from her husband (and his own brother) Buck.

I thought the best scene in the film is late one hot and steamy night when the sexpot Griselda steps outside in a flimsy slip showing off all her curves and wares and she sponge bathes herself from the water well while her lusting brother-in-law Will Thompson cannot bear it any longer watching her from a distance and pining for her embrace, so they cautiously hide on two corners of the farm's outer walls hoping not to be discovered and then we see it...the embrace and the groping and then "the kiss". It is a lustful moment where every man and boy in the theater watching this film must have broken out in a maddening cheer, wishing they were Will Thompson groping Griselda.

Back to the gold digging and the rest of the dysfunctional Walden clan who decide they have had enough digging for some fictitious non-existent gold who finally decide to sow their farm land and grow crops and live happily ever after. But wait, while digging the soil up to plant seed father Ty Ty hits something below the land surface that tinged a metal sound. What will he find below this time?

I give God's Little Acre a 7 out of 10 IMDB rating.

Apparently, when "God's Little Acre" first came out, much of it was cut for the theatrical release. Watching the unedited version, one can see why (needless to say, it's all pretty tame to us in the 21st century). Part of it is Tina Louise's very presence - I mean, what man wouldn't want to be stranded on an island with Ginger Grant? - but there's also a scene where Buddy Hackett works a pump for a woman in a bathtub (if that scene isn't a double entendre, then I don't know what is!).

As for the movie itself, this story of a Georgia farmer (Robert Ryan) getting convinced that thar's gold in them thar holes in his garden does quite well. The idea of him tearing up his garden is an effective parallel for how the family gets torn up in the process. As for his friendship with the African-American guy, it's probably debatable whether they were sugar-coating race relations, or if they were encouraging tolerance. There could even be debates about how the movie portrays the South in general (the characters do come across as hicks).

But overall, I recommend this flick. Usually, it would sort of weaken the movie to know that some of the cast members later became famous on TV shows - especially since one was known for seducing romantically incompetent men on a certain island - but they all do very well here. This is certainly a movie worth seeing. And the theme song will probably get stuck in your head. Also starring Aldo Ray, Jack Lord, Fay Spain, Vic Morrow and Michael Landon.

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.

Never mind that the front yard has more holes than no-man's land after a WWI artillery barrage. Or that Pluto's up-and-down pump appears to drive Darlin' Jill into censored delight. Or that the rotund Pluto appears to be running for sheriff of Disneyland. No, this is not the deep South of Rhett and Scarlett; it's the cartoon South of Dog Patch and Lil' Abner. Take drop-dead sexy Griselda who delivers water to sweating boys in a see-through dress. Or, patriarch Ty-Ty, God's very own real estate agent. And, of course, mustn't forget Darlin' Jill with her own ideas about how to integrate the South. Don't get me wrong—this first half is mildly amusing with its exaggerated characters and heavy breathing, much like an R-rated cartoon.

And, had the screenplay followed through with this comedic style, a mildly memorable movie could have resulted. But it's like someone suddenly decided the movie needed to really "serious up". So, we get a second half that's more like over-heated Tennessee Williams than Al Capp's riotous Dog Patch. I don't know if all that contrived staging around the cotton mill is supposed to deliver a "message", but it's sure as heck heavy-handed and out of sync with the first half. Plus, there's that typical 50's ending that ties up every loose end in unbelievably happy fashion. I don't know which of the many versions (thanks to censors of the time) I saw, but I doubt any combination of this bi-polar disorder could work. Too bad, since it's a rare stab at departure for that strait-jacketed decade.

(In passing—I do like how Ty-Ty's manic mining for his father's gold gets resolved. We discover that despite appearances, he knows there's no buried gold. Instead, he keeps digging in order to "keep the family together" and the memory of his dad alive. He's not crazy— he just has a wacky way of expressing his "family values". Still, I don't think I'd hire him to do my gardening.)

What this and "Tobacco Road," Erskine Caldwell's other magnum opus, have in common is a portrait of the Deep South as populated by a people with a collective IQ of about 50. There's Robert Ryan as the clueless patriarch convinced that his granddaddy buried gold treasure on his land; he's a God-lovin' cuss but a hypocrite, forever changing his life rules to accommodate his avarice. There's Buddy Hackett (of all people) as a sheriff candidate who can't even paint an "N" correctly, in love with one of Ryan's nubile daughters. Characters have names like Ty Ty and Darlin' Jill, to make them more folksy, I guess, and the themes are greed and lust, most particularly between Tina Louise (the camera lovingly caressing her breasts at every turn) as Ty Ty's sassy daughter-in-law, desperately craving her brother-in-law, Aldo Ray. Tina Louise was sho' 'nuff all woman, and Aldo Ray all man, and I'll long remember their encounter at the water pump. The characters' collective idiocy gets on one's nerves, and the various conflicts resolve themselves entirely unconvincingly, but it's not a total loss. Ernest Haller's handsome black-and-white widescreen photography does capture the heat and grime of the cotton fields, and Elmer Bernstein's score is very good fake Copland.