Tennessee sheriff Gregory Peck, vaguely dissatisfied with small-town life, runs into perky hillbilly fox Tuesday Weld, whose raggedy clan (headed by Ralph Meeker) runs moonshine under the police's nose. In no time he's sharing the young filly's bed, risking family (with wife Estelle Parsons trying to brave it through) and career (with slobbery deputy Charles Durning wising up to the affair and wanting a piece of the action). Elsewhere, weather-beaten locals brood from the porches and Johnny Cash croons thematically on the soundtrack ("I Walk the Line," "This Side of the Law," "The World's Gonna Fall On You"). Generally overlooked, this rural drama is, more than anything, another conscious attempt by director John Frankenheimer to distance himself from the action movie he had become associated with -- his handling of Peck here suggests, as with Burt Lancaster in The Gypsy Moths, a questioning of the genre's male-heroes image by concentrating almost exclusively on their weaknesses. Frankenheimer's ambiguity extends to the characters, watching over Peck's middle-aged lament, Weld's corrupting/corruptible innocence and Parson's uncaricatured wifely plight with the same merciful objectivity. In fact, the affecting absurdity of Peck's destructive infatuation with a rawboned backwoods nymph is presented with less cold derision than Kubrick's own surveying in Lolita. Alvin Sargent adapted Madison Jones' novel, An Exile. With Lonny Chapman.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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