Raintree County (1957)

 

The passage of time in Raintree County frequently gets marked by newspaper headlines, and by the time we get to “Lincoln Assassinated,” the film seems to have lasted as long as the Civil War itself. Much of the film covers the life of John Shawnessy, a high school senior in 1859 who’s a bit of a dreamer, an idealist, someone others describe as a poet. You could start groaning now. He’s in love with fellow high school senior Nell (Eva Marie Saint), who never loses her feelings for him even after he meets and marries Southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor). Susanna fears that she’s of mixed parentage, and her increasing mental instability and offensive racist attitudes consume much of John’s life. He’s an abolitionist, and she still keeps two slaves even when they’re living in Indiana. He’s also still in love with Nell but faithful to Susanna out of a sense of duty or obligation. When she runs away with their son Jim (weirdly named after a partly-burned doll she kept from the fire that destroyed her home and killed her father and his mistress, a slave woman), he joins the Union Army two-thirds of the way through the film in the hopes that he will cross paths with her. It’s an extremely odd decision to make, and when he has to escape from Confederate territory with his son on his back in the middle of the night, you realize how astonishingly bizarre the turns of the movie have been. By the time John finds his wife in an insane asylum, and Taylor appears made-up like the movie queen that she was, you’ll be hoping that the ending will be soon. (By the way, the famous Windsor Ruins in my home state of Mississippi stand in for Susanna’s childhood home. You never know when you might encounter a familiar place when watching a movie.) One of the themes of the film is the search for a mythical (?) golden raintree that was allegedly planted in the county by Johnny Appleseed. John is obsessed with finding the tree at the film’s beginning, and Susanna takes on the quest by the film’s end. In fact, she becomes almost as obsessive about the raintree (and what is reportedly represents) as her husband had been as a younger man. There are some hard attempts to make the raintree a metaphor for… pursuing something, I guess, but given how muddled the narrative is overall, it never fully gels. Clift is a very internal actor, prone to quiet, mannered moments, and his performance never outshines Taylor’s showier role as Susanna. It’s unsurprising that she got nominated for this role even though the racist dialogue that the script demands of her diminishes the impact of her performance. Saint is solid as the ever-faithful Nell, and a subplot involving the verbose, egotistical teacher (Nigel Patrick) falling in love with one of his married students serves as a comic highlight. Among the supporting cast, Lee Marvin gets quite the narrative arc as “Flash” Perkins, who dies as a brave soldier, quite a shift from the drunken braggart who challenges John to a race at the movie’s beginning. Agnes Moorhead plays John’s mother, and even though she has too few lines, her sharp wit is a welcome astringent to some of the sillier dialogue. What movie isn’t improved by the appearance, however brief, of the great Agnes Moorehead? And there’s even a brief appearance by DeForest Kelley, Dr. McCoy of Star Trek fame, who plays a Confederate soldier captured by Marvin’s Flash. The film does have lush production design, and the gowns worn by the actresses are amazing and spectacular. Raintree County marked a reunion for Taylor and Clift, who first appeared alongside each other in A Place in the Sun six years earlier. During the filming, Taylor saved Clift’s life after he was severely injured in a car accident after leaving her home. He endured a great deal of pain and several surgeries before he returned to filming. It is apparent which scenes were filmed before and after the accident. It’s just sad that Clift’s accident and its aftermath are among the most notable things about Raintree County.

Oscar Nominations: Best Actress in a Leading Role (Taylor), Best Art Director-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design, and Best Music Scoring