Mann and blacklisted writer Ben Maddow (here fronted by Philip Yordan) apply an extremely broad stroke in their adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s novel of a white-trash family and its patriarch’s fruitless quest for gold. Robert Ryan chews the dry scenery in giant mouthfuls as TyTy, a hapless widower barely reining in his two daughters (played to buoyant perfection by Tina Louise and Fay Spain) while simmering in the background is a potential workers’ reclamation of the shuttered local mill, led by his hard-headed son-in-law (Aldo Ray). Butchered over the decades by regional censors, we present a fully restored print from the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Peter Conheim
Written by Philip Yordan [front for Ben Maddow], based on the novel by Erskine
Caldwell. Photographed by Ernest Haller. With Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Tina
Louise, Buddy Hackett. (110 mins, B&W, 35mm, From UCLA Film and Television Archive, permission Hollywood Classics. Preservation funded by the Packard Humanities Institute)
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