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The debt is to Renoir's The Southerner, visible even before Jo Van Fleet in geriatric makeup updates Beulah Bondi. Tennessee in the '30s, deep-rooted and segregated, into it lands the TVA supervisor (Montgomery Clift), "we're new, we don't have any customs yet." The island is to be submerged, the recalcitrant octogenarian is the holdout in the evacuation: "I'm agin dams of any kind." The agent wonders about the old lady's sanity and gets dunked by her brood, her widowed granddaughter (Lee Remick) is more receptive, by and by. Elia Kazan's masterpiece on themes going back to The Sea of Grass, a breathtaking mix of intensity and delicacy. The opening (newsreel footage reformatted for the CinemaScope rectangle) and the closing (iris-out on a landscape out of Charles Krutch) give the heterogeneity of the style, in between there's a hamlet like a Ronald Ginther watercolor where the mayor doubles as barber. The return to the disused home finds the young widow caressing the imprint on the bed before shaking the dead leaves off the sheets, a hummed hymn aboard a drifting ferry harmonizes Clift's alien diffidence and Remick's quiet ardor. "Did you ever really need anybody?" Incongruous in his gray three-piece suit, the stiff bureaucrat thaws enough to stumble drunkenly on Van Fleet's porch, "first and only time I ever liked you." (Before that he faces local bigot Albert Salmi in a hotel room, a prime slice of genial intimidation that cuts away right before the scuffle.) Necessity and pain of change, electric reservoir and floating graveyard, Kazan never loses sight of what's gained and what's lost. Peckinpah in Straw Dogs vividly recalls the hollering rustics in the nocturnal raid, the battered aftermath doubles as offhand punchline for the protagonists' complicated courtship. "It all goes under the general heading of progress." Ritt chases the dilemma's hangover in Hud. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks. With Jay C. Flippen, James Westerfield, Barbara Loden, Frank Overton, Malcolm Atterbury, Bruce Dern, Big Jeff Bess, and Robert Earl Jones.
--- Fernando F. Croce |