Le Petit Arpent du Bon Dieu

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.

I have to weigh in on the errors in alicecbr's review, since it's featured here on IMDB. I refer to the first paragraph. Robert Ryan wasn't in "Seven Days in May." And there's no lecture in that movie about women sucking juices out of soldiers. The closest thing I can think of is Sterling Hayden in "Dr. Strangelove," who tells Peter Sellers about the Commie plot to sap and impurify our bodily fluids by fluoridating the water. Nothing in it about women, though, just Commies. I'm voting it...unhelpful!

Underrated actors Aldo Ray and Robert Ryan are outstanding in this eccentric bit of Americana from the novel by Erskine Caldwell, which was banned in some towns. The setting on the farm with random holes and piles of dirt is almost surreal in appearance. And there's Tina Louise, and Little Joe Cartwright plays an albino.

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.

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.