Cette terre qui est mienne

The story of This Earth Is Mine is very interesting, and it marks a new topic not yet seen in films as of 1959: wine. While Sideways has brought a new love of wine to modern audiences, back in 1959, moviegoers didn't know their way around wineries. It must have been extremely exciting and educational to see the inside of real wineries: casks, caves, tasting rooms, etc. Filmed on location, this movie brought an up close view of Napa to the rest of the country. Beringer, Stags' Leap, Paul Masson, Beaulieu, Mayacamas, Inglenook, Schramsberg, and eight other Napa Valley wineries let Hollywood add authenticity to this movie.

Claude Rains plays the patriarch owner of a Napa vineyard. I love seeing Claude in such a meaty role nearly thirty years after The Invisible Man. When he talks about his love for the land and the history in the soil, it brings tears to his eyes (and to ours). His daughter Dorothy McGuire (with an excellent, completely believable performance) is devoted to his care and to working the land, especially because her childless marriage to Kent Smith is fraught with problems. Kent has an illegitimate son with the invalid Anna Lee: Rock Hudson. And when the long-lost granddaughter Jean Simmons moves to Napa, she might go against her better judgment and fall for the rebellious Rock.

Doesn't that sound interesting? And that's just the beginning. This is one gigantic soap opera with double-crosses, deceit, forbidden love, secrets, passion, and violence. Set during Prohibition, it's fascinating to see what a family winery handles their situation. I look at it as a story of loyalty, sometimes tested, broken, and kept. If you like sweeping sagas, you've got to check this one out. 1959 was a contentious year, and the Members of the Board here at Hot Toasty Rag reluctantly didn't include This Earth Is Mine with a Best Picture nomination. It really is a wonderful movie, though, and if there were less competition, it certainly would have been honored.

"This Earth Is Mine" is a very glossy film from Universal Studios that obviously cost a lot of money. It featured some top stars and was set in lovely Napa Valley....but, sadly, the story was apparently written by chimpanzees...albeit moderately talented chimps! In other words, it looks great...but is, essentially, trash when it comes to writing.

The film begins with Elizabeth Rambeau coming to Napa to see the family she's never met. Apparently, her father ran off with her mother long ago and she was raised away from her father's extended family's influence. As for this new family, they are wealthy grape growers...the pride of the county.

When Elizabeth meets her cousin, John (Rock Hudson), she sees that he's a bit of a black sheep in the family. While the patriarch (Claude Rains) seems content to wait until prohibition EVENTUALLY ends (it's been 12 years already...so he's an insanely patient man), John is in favor of selling the grapes to the highest bidders...which, not surprisingly, are the mob who is eager to convert this grape juice into wine.

As far as John and Elizabeth go, this is a HUGE problem with the film. First, she detests him and he insists she REALLY means 'yes'...a very dangerous trope. Second, out of the blue, she DOES come to love him. Not only was this dangerous, as it lends credence to the 'she says NO when she means YES' mentality but also because she goes from hating him to loving John for no discernible reason. This makes no sense and really is bad writing. What's next? See the film...or not.

So, if this is just a bad but very slick film, why did I watch it in the first place? Well, I recently moved to California wine country and live within relatively short driving distance from Napa. And, the film is interesting in this sense. Seeing the old vineyards and what Napa was like long ago (it's set in the 1930s) was interesting. Unfortunately, the rest of the film is poorly written and dull. There are some nice story elements (such as the illegitimate child portion of the movie), but overall it's tedious and not the movie it could have been. It only earns a 4 because it is interesting historically and looks nice. Otherwise, it's a slick and glitzy bad movie.

The patriarch of a winemaking dynasty in 1931 Napa Valley welcomes his pretty young granddaughter from England--she thinks she's there for a visit, but her grandfather is plotting to marry her off to a cousin in order to absorb vineyard holdings and keep the winery in the family for future generations. Meanwhile, another cousin has an eye for the girl, though he's in the middle of a devil's bargain between Chicago gangsters and bootleggers ("modern dealings") due to the current Prohibition, all behind the old man's back. Wooden adaptation of Alice Tisdale Hobart's novel "The Cup and the Sword" is an exposition-heavy soaper full of hotheads spouting off, and Rock Hudson explaining everything to Jean Simmons (and to the audience) to keep her up to speed on the cast of characters, their functions and relationships to each other. If this story were to work at all, Hobart's book should have been thrown out or rethought altogether. There are too many people here with different agendas, too much conniving and manipulation, and melodrama as thick as a wine vat full of rotting grapes. Casey Robinson is responsible for the pedantic screenplay, which isn't much better than director Henry King's execrable staging (check out that welcoming dinner for Simmons, with everyone at one long table facing a swimming pool). The film, which gets off to a poor start with an awful theme song composed by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn, has been produced with considerable polish, and it certainly benefits from Claude Rains' performance as grandfather Phillipe. Otherwise, overwrought and occasionally laughable. *1/2 from ****

Soap operatic romantic tosh of an unusually high order thanks mainly to the superlative direction of Henry King working, as he so often did, with sub-standard material. The setting is the California vineyards, the period Prohibition and this film, based on a novel by Alice Tisdale Hobart, is clearly a forerunner of such television series as "Dallas" and "Dynasty" with Claude Rains as the ruler of this empire, Dorothy McGuire, his ambitious daughter and Rock Hudson and Jean Simmons his grand-children who are in love with each other, (don't ask!).

It's the kind of film that attracted star players and did the business back in the late fifties with quality usually taking a backseat to quantity but King was something of a master at this sort of thing imbuing the ridiculous plot with a seriousness it didn't warrant. Rains and McGuire and, to a lesser extent, Simmons take the acting credits while Hudson just seems to be having a good time in the sure and certain knowledge he won't be winning any Oscars if he keeps making movies like this. No classic, then, but a very sturdy entertainment nevertheless.

Set during the last years of Prohibition, This Earth Is Mine tells the story of the Rambeau family of the Napa Valley, prominent wine makers who are having a rough go of it during those years. Family patriarch is Claude Rains who through arranged marriages has gained control of a good deal of the real estate in the valley.

Rains reminds me a whole lot of Melvyn Douglas in Hud, an honorable man, possibly too honorable. Even though Prohibition is killing his business, he's surviving on selling his grapes to make jelly and grape juice, he won't sell to bootleggers to make illegal wine. Not like he's got control over what happens to his grapes once they are sold, but Rains has an exaggerated and somewhat naive morality.

Those arranged marriages aren't always the happiest ones either. Kent Smith is married to daughter Dorothy McGuire an iron willed lady, but who was in love with Anna Lee the wife of a son of Rains and the two of them had a not so discreet affair that produced Rock Hudson. He's the black sheep of the family and his parentage is just not discussed in polite company.

But all that makes it OK for Hudson to get romantically interested in Jean Simmons the daughter of another son of Rains who is over in the United Kingdom. She's come to the USA to be the arranged bride of another landed wine family Francis Bethencourt who once considered the priesthood.

Hudson has no such scruples about who the grapes are sold to. He organizes some of the smaller growers to sell their crops to bootleggers and some of those who resist get the usual gangster treatment. All this threatens to tear the Rambeau family apart and that's without going into what's going on with Rock and Jean.

I compared Claude Rains to Melvyn Douglas in Hud and truth be told Rock Hudson's part was probably better suited to someone like Paul Newman. But I don't think either of them could have lifted this story above the soap opera level. This Earth Is Mine tries for an Edna Ferber epic like quality and misses.

But for those of you who like this sort of stuff you could have seen all this and more on the Eighties prime time TV soap opera Falcon Crest where they had a matriarch of a wine growing family, Jane Wyman, who weekly was involved in some machinations trying to control all the people around her.

This Earth Is Mine does boast some beautiful scenery of the Napa Valley and Henry King as director does do his best to breathe credibility into an unbelievable story.