The Sure Hand of God

Stepdad dies after spending what would have been his estate on bad poker hands, white trash mom decides to arrange for daughter to marry rich and the rest just follows along.

The casting was good, the acting was acceptable, for television, and the story kept moving. That's about all you can expect from TV these days. It's worth a couple of hours if you have nothing else to do.

I must confess to being confused by the review about the "evil Christians." It appears this guy has an ax to grind, and this isn't the place. I spent a bit of time in places such as where this story is set, and the woods are full of "Christians" like those in the film. Given Caldwell's father's vocation and after the way the author was raked over the coals early in his career by the forces of Christian Decency, it's little wonder many of his stories come off the way they do.

Well, holy moly, people, what do you expect? It's Erskine Caldwell. For those of you who know only the greatest hits from the literature of the 1920s to the 1960s, Caldwell's books "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre" put white trash misbehavior on the map and helped determine the way Yankees saw white Southerners: depraved, ignorant, and crazy, and the stereotypes haven't necessarily changed.

I enjoyed seeing Gail O'Grady and Jennifer Morrison hamming it up as just the sort of depraved, ignorant, and crazy Southerners you expect from Hollywood. I didn't see the movie from the beginning, and can only assume from the bluesy chords on the soundtrack that the movie is set in the Delta, although that's not really Caldwell country. But, of course, where this sort of movie is considered, I wouldn't be surprised to see hillbillies, Cajuns, and the Florida Everglades all in the same film.

As for the portrayal of Christians-- Every character and character type in the movie was so broadly drawn that it was tempting to see it as tongue-in-cheek parody. Definitely a movie that is so bad it's fun.