Contentar
Best movie of this year hands down!
RipDelight
This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.
Lachlan Coulson
This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.
Robert J. Maxwell
This soap opera really sprawls over the years before and after the Civil War. Montgomery Clift is a quiet homegrown college graduate in mutual love with pretty young Eva Marie Saint. They seem fated for each other. They'll probably be married, raise a number of surviving children, and live in a white two-story house on the outskirts of Fairhaven in Raintree County, Indiana. But then, the luscious Southern belle, Elizabeth Taylor, visits Fairhaven. She and Clift fall in love forever after.But dark Elizabeth is Veronica to Saint's blond Betty. Or is it the other way around? No matter. Anyway they have contrasting personalities: the intensely passionate Taylor and the winsome and innocent Saint. Saint, for instance, would never dream of putting out for handsome, intelligent, and sensitive Monty, whereas Taylor does so on their second or third date and then LIES to him about having gotten pregnant. He doesn't mind one way or the other, besotted as he is.I don't know whether it's worthwhile trying to get through the plot. It's probably been done elsewhere, and I'm too tired to trace the trips, the outbursts of anger and guilt, Sherman's march through Georgia, and the finale, which no power on earth could force me to reveal. Much of it has to do with the fear of having a touch of the tar brush in one's blood.But I must say, New Orleans is given rather a bad rap as a representative Southern city. It wasn't like any of the others. It had an animated and rich multi-ethnic heritage at the time -- American, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and African. Edgar Degas visited French relatives there late in the '19th century. Slaves of course but not nearly as brutal a system as elsewhere. William Tecumseh Sherman taught at Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, later to become Louisiana State University.Others have claimed that it was easy to tell the difference between pre- and post-accident scenes of Montgomery Clift but I couldn't. As for the accident, Clift was doing booze and other substances to excess on a daily basis during the shooting. I mean, eating steaks he'd spilled on the floor and so on. After an evening at Liz Taylor's manse perched on a hill, he drove drunkenly down the winding road and didn't quite make it.Neither the accident nor the booze seemed to interfere with his acting, although the part of the pathetic loner in "A Place in the Sun" suited him better than the idealist he's forced to portray here. Elizabeth Taylor is blindingly beautiful. Many of her films cast her has a frustrated nut job. Eva Marie Saint has the more sympathetic role as the unspectacular girl from home who never manages to shrug off her love for Clift.It's long. It has an overture and even an entr'acte, evocative photography by Robert Surtees, and a lushly orchestrated but fulsome score by Johnny Green. It's no "Gone With the Wind," though, partly because it substitutes anguish for laughs.
getreel-54732
There may be a spoiler or two in this review.There are times when my judgment and my emotions do not coincide when it comes to movies, and Raintree County is a case in point. The plot is bloated. somewhat disjointed and too lengthy. The acting is not great, despite the fact that Elizabeth Taylor received an Oscar nomination for this film. Nevertheless, after I sort of forced myself to watch the entire film, I discovered that it captivated me, emotionally.What got to me was the quality of the musical scoring and the essential story (love story and love triangle, set during the Civil War), and the indefinable connection to the land and the mystical Raintree, that the lead characters had. The Liz Taylor character's progressive mental problems, and confusion about her own childhood and racial background all added to my interest in this film. Some reviewers have commented that the Liz Taylor character was supposed to be part black, and yet this is not true. A black slave who delivered Liz Taylor clearly states in the movie that she is born to a white mother and father. Watch the film to discover where her own racial confusion comes from... this is also an interesting twist to the plot.I would say, the film is well worth watching, if you can get yourself to sit through the entire 2 hrs. and 50-some minutes.
bandw
Montgomery Clift plays Johnny, a sensitive school teacher in antebellum Indiana, Raintree County. Johnny is in love with Nell (Eva Marie Saint) until southern belle Susanna (Liz Taylor) shows up to settle some estate matters. It doesn't take much encouragement from Susanna for Johnny to take up with her and forsake the saintly Nell. Johnny marries Susanna and they move to New Orleans where Susanna is comfortably ensconced in a wealthy family where slavery is not questioned. Johnny gets a gut load of the slave south and forces a move back to Raintree County where Susanna is out of her element and uncomfortable. She continues to be haunted by an incident from her childhood involving her father, her mother, a slave, and a fire. The symbol of a golden rain tree is central. It appears that if anyone finds this mythical tree, the meaning of life would be revealed and all problems would be solved (or some such thing). I guess we have to accept the search for this tree as metaphor, since early on Johnny takes off into the woods wandering around aimlessly searching for it with no apparent hint of where it might be. Almost drowning, he fails on this attempt. Later, as Susanna starts to slip into madness, she flees home to embark on a similarly random search for the fabled tree. I will not spoil the story by revealing whether the rain tree remains undiscovered by the end of the movie.Johnny joins the Union Army where it is implied that he does so to search for his missing wife, which seems to be an odd way to execute such a search. Maybe he was conscripted? The movie misses an opportunity here to discuss conscription during the Civil War.Hard to believe that this movie did not win an Oscar for best costume design. Some of the set pieces in the south are exquisitely filmed. Of course Liz is costumed to take advantage of her beauty.The A-list actors never created characters that seemed real to me. Eva Marie Saint was wasted in playing the sweet, good girl. Liz Taylor seemed to be acting more than getting into her role. From her work here you would never guess that she had it in her to give us her Oscar winning performance as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Montgomery Clift is fine as the sensitive, morally upright Johnny, but he can play those parts without breaking a sweat. The generic score is suitable for a 1950s big budget Hollywood movie.
Nazi_Fighter_David
Liz is a disturbed New Orleans belle with a vision that she's part black… She's the beautiful femme fatale to Eva Marie Saint's inevitable cowardly heroine… As in "A Place in the Sun," Liz is used as the symbol of a particular social class and a particular kind of woman… She sets her mark on an idealistic young man John Wickliff Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift) who's looking for the mythical rain tree that contains the secret of the meaning of life… Trapping him into marriage with the lie that she's pregnant, and then proceeding to lose her hold on her sanity, Susanna detains the good and helpless John for eight years… He is released, able to return to his magnificent dream and to his pure childhood sweetheart, only after tragic events… Retaining the essence of Ross Lockridge, Jr. best-seller, the movie states the equality of the unhappy romance with the Civil War: the personal drama is therefore a reflection of the nation's wounds… According to the top-heavy symbolism, Susanna Drake represents the South, corrupting and dragging down the North; she's the Body contaminating the poet's Soul… Taylor plays Susanna Drake's character with an intensity that exceeds all her earlier work… Montgomery Clift as the unlucky poet and Eva Marie Saint as his high school sweetheart and true love are on the remote side, but the scenes with Liz strike fire in a wonderfully brilliant way… With its battles and its formal balls, its magnificent riverboats and decayed mansions, its bordellos and madhouses, its childbirth and deathbed scenes, and its evacuation of Atlanta, Edward Dmytryk's "Raintree County," like its source, has undeniable epic dimension
