God's Little Acre

The jaunty title song belies what lies beneath this southern Gothic drama from the ever reliable director Anthony Mann who loads this film with various subtexts.

Robert Ryan gives a marvellous performance as patriarch Ty Ty Walden who has spent years digging up his farmland looking for gold buried by his grandfather sometime in the civil war. Maybe things would had been better if Waldens farmed the land as the family might have turned out better with tighter morals.

Ty Ty has three sons and two daughters. One of the son, jealous, hot headed Buck is married to sultry Griselda but she always had a thing for Will Thompson. He lost her but ended up marrying TY Ty's daughter Rosamund but Will has always pined for Griselda and the closed down mill in the town.

Darlin Jill the youngest daughter is a fee spirited filly who is being courted by Pluto, a fat man running for the job of Sheriff.

Jim Leslie is the son who got away, married into wealth and lives in Augusta but he also has the hots for Griselda and does little to hide it. As Ty Ty comments, some of the men in the family are far from chivalrous when it comes to handling women.

Only Shaw the youngest son tries to keep everyone together but in this pot boiler with different vignettes it is Ty Ty who eventually realises that his quest for gold and digging holes in his field has crated a chasms in his family.

Director Mann brings out fine performances from his cast and I think he had the censor sweating over some of the playful and sensual scenes.

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.

IN this era, when sex is easy, it's great to see all that inhibited lust steaming out over the screen. Aldo Ray and Tina Louise did one jam-up job of showing their passion for one another. 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. (That's true, you know. We women would rather suck out vital juices than just about anything.) Anyway, see this back to back with Tobacco Road, and you'll understand completely why all these Yankees think we're products of incest and can barely put 4 grammatical phrases together. No wonder, I am continually fighting off the prejudices of people who are amazed that I wear shoes and didn't marry my 1st cousin.

The writing in here is great: Robert Ryan plays a beautiful balance between an obsessed redneck who is trying to find his grandpappy's gold on his property, and his restrained longing for his son's daughter. His goodness screams out in his scene with his cotton broker son, who made it big. As my own evangelist cousin says, "We call him 'MMM"...our Miserable Millionaire Miser."

And Michael Landon, as the albino teen-ager, scared of the violence from these raging men who have kidnapped him to divine the gold.....what a sight!! Jack Lord, in his pre-Hawaiian Eye days is all wrathful, as he watches his beauteous wife with the NATURAL cleavage longing for the drunken Aldo Ray. Hard to believe the change, but the analogy between the tearing up the yard and sacrificing the peace of his family for the gold hunt...and today's all materialistic, 'if it ain't business, it ain't nothing', lifestyle.....is fantastic....rite smart writin'.

Check it out for a movie that SHOULD be colorized if ever there was one. And that house looks just my Aunt Mattie Seals' home in Talbot County, jawja!!!!! Boy, do I miss it!

The controversy that surrounded this movie, along with the scandal associated with the novel upon which it is based, may not have added up to box office success, but the film has become a classic nonetheless.

Author Erskine Caldwell and Viking Press, his publisher, were actually charged and tried for obscenity for releasing God's Little Acre in 1933 after pressure by a New York literary board who wanted the book censored. A quarter of a century later, in 1958, when the movie was released, it was actually banned in some theaters and audiences under eighteen years of age were prohibited from viewing what were perceived to be numerous obscene scenes throughout. The on screen sexual exploits are rather tame by today's standards, but the sexual tension of men standing and watching naked women pushed the limits in its day.

Robert Ryan stars as Ty Ty Walden, a farmer who believes there's gold buried on his land. A devout man, he has set aside a small plot of land promising God anything that comes from it. With typical human frailty, he is prone to move God's Little Acre whenever he fears it may contain his fortune, an obvious allegory for the shifting faith we all suffer.

Ty Ty has singlehandedly raised three hot headed sons and a lovely daughter, who is his treasure and, it turns out, an almost irresistible sexual force. Throw in Grisleda, the sultry wife of one of the sons, and her ex-lover, Will, and a subtext of complex sexual entanglements and betrayals lead to tragedy and eventual destruction of the family.

Caldwell, by showing Ty Ty destroying his farm in search of quick riches, meant to comment on the destructive attitudes of the South with regard to the land. Although Ty Ty could have turned a profit at any time by farming, he does everything but farm. Eventually he enlists the aid of an albino, played by a delightfully young Michael Landon, whom Ty Ty believes has magical divining powers, and demands that he find the gold, which, of course, he cannot do, since there is none. Vic Morrow, Jack Lord and Buddy Hackett round out the supporting cast, as the entire family living around the edges of Ty Ty's dream.

The real story, however, revolves around Louise, stunning in her first major role, and Aldo Ray, a classic machismo who put the "man" in leading man. Their adulterous tryst generates more heat than the oppressive dog days of the southern summer. You've got to see the water pump scene, if you can find a copy that hasn't melted from heat of it.

Originally, the novel was intended to dramatize the strike and eventual shutdown of a textile mill in Gastonia, North Carolina. Caldwell thought of the novel God's Little Acre as a proletarian manifesto that would call attention to the plight of non-unionized textile workers, lintheads, as they were called, in the Depression Era South. That the film got made at all in the age of McCarthyism is astounding. In fact, the nominal screenwriter, Philip Yordon, was actually a front for the real screenwriter, Ben Maddow, who had been blacklisted in the Hollywood Red scare.

The Marxist ideas of Caldwell's novel are mostly lost in the film adaptation, although discerning viewers will see their remains in the brutish Will's desperate attempt to seize control of and reopen the textile mill on which the entire local economy depends. Without giving too much of the story away, this is classic transgressive fiction in which following the dark side of life leads inevitably to destruction.

Although the movie is a uniquely satisfying experience, please don't let this classic prevent you from reading the book by Erskine Caldwell. The novel, one of the best selling in history, is a literary touchstone and deserves a good read, and reading is in danger of becoming extinct. But do watch this movie, when it's hot and you're feeling a bit nostalgic.

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.