Customer Reviews

Raintree County [VHS]

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Raintree County was a thousand plus novel written by Ross Lockbridge Jr. published in 1948. At its time, it was regarded as the Great American Novel second only to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind and in some ways, both Raintree County and Gone With The Wind are a bit alike, although everyone generally considers Gone With The Wind to be the superior work of historic fiction. And it is. Gone With The Wind, as we all know, became a highly successful film in 1939, even winning Best Picture. It must have dawned on Hollywood producers that the novel would make a breathtaking movie. It was the 50's, the new invention of television had just entered people's homes and the movie industry was threatened. It was the time of the "epic films" (The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur). In 1957, "Raintree County" was released in theatres. The appeal to the film was its Cival War Era drama and Elizabeth Taylor.

It's no Gone With The Wind, but Raintree County is a beautiful film to look at visually. The master shots of the scenic countryside in Raintree County are incredibly lovely, the costumes look authentic to the period, the music is enjoyable but subtle, and Elizabeth Taylor is always interesting to watch on film. Elizabeth Taylor plays Susanna Drake, a vibrant Southern belle with a troubled past (her plantation home caught on fire and she had issues with her mother). Although she seems to be almost a near replica of Scarlett O'Hara in many of the scenes, she lacks Scarlett O'Hara's strength and willful nature. While Scarlett could survive anything, Susanna Drake weakens out at the end of the film, becomes mentally disturbed (she has a strong attachment to a scary looking Chucky doll) and dies a pathetic death when she seeks out the Raintree. This is not Elizabeth's finest performance. A tragic heroine is still acceptable, but this particular heroine is not as satisfying as Vivien Leigh's performance as Scarlett. Also, her "rival" and John Shawnessy's first love and childhood friend Nelle is an easily replaceable role. I was thinking she was the equivalent of Melanie Hamilton in Gone With The Wind and a role that could have been played by Olivia De Havilland once again. The women in this film are not portrayed as strongly as the men are. And even the men are not as substantial. It's just Yankee versus Rebels. The relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift's characters is not that well developed. It's not enough that they are from opposite sides of the Civil War conflict- she's at heart a Southerner and he's a Yankee. I was even disappointed in one scene in which Elizabeth says to Montgomery after an argument "You hate me because I'm Southern!". This film could have used some polishing. I'm very certain that even author Ross Lockbridge Jr. was not entirely satisfied with what they did to his book in screenplay form.

Montgomery Clift has done other worthwhile movies but in this film, his performance as John Shawnessy is wooden and lacks some substance. Although he is supposed to be portrayed as an idealist poet and writer (much like Doctor Zhivago), we never see him write anything. All we get is his desire to seek out the elusive and magic, all-healing legendary Raintree, supposedly planted by Johny Appleseed and a quest he gives up at the end of the film. Professor Jerusalem is a funny and amusing character but a bit too shallow. Again, this film is rather interesting to look at if you want to get some insight on Civil War Era America (1850's and 1860's) and the mention of such things as abolitionism, Uncle Tom's Cabin, copperheads, Abraham Lincoln, Fort Sumter and Gettysburg to the later Republican politics of the Reconstruction are very historically accurate.

This "Roadshow" version is beautiful to look at nevertheless. Out of curiosity for Civil War history, this would make a great film to watch as a history project in high school or college courses. This film is also worth watching if you're a hardcore fan of Elizabeth Taylor and don't care what role she plays or what movie she is in, whether it's "Little Women" "National Velvet", whehter she plays the tragic Susanna Drake, Cleopatra or the other Southern heroine in Tenesee William's "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" or the incredibly nasty character in "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?".

The product description does not do justice to this movie at all!

Johnny (Montgomery) gave up his high-school sweetheart, Nell (Eva Marie) to marry southern belle, Susanna (Elizabeth). However, if Johnny had really loved Nell, he would have asked her to marry him, but he never did. To say that the marriage of Johnny and Susanna was love-less is completely false. Susanna loved Johnny more than anyone she had ever loved (except for maybe her mammy, Henrietta).

Furthermore, for Johnny's part, even though he had been tricked into marrying Susanna (she told Johnny that she was pregnant), he may not have been "in love" with her in the beginning of their marriage, but he eventually did love her.

Over time, the primary problems in their marriage were a result of a devastating fire in Susanna's youth, and her constant re-living of that trauma. A Secondary problem, was the fact that Susanna was a southern belle who believed in slavery and everything that that entailed. Johnny, on the other hand, was a northern abolitionist.

Anyway, I will not spoil the end of the movie, as you should purchase this movie and find out for yourself the final result.

I will say that the movie was spectacularly produced. The acting was excellent (Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Eva Marie Saint, Agnes Moorehead), the cinematography was good, the color was vibrant and the direction flowed very well.

This is an epic drama on par with Gone With The Wind. So, if you like those kinds of movies, you will like this movie. Be fore warned though, this is a long movie, at 3 hours and 15 minutes.

I hope this review was helpful to you.

What a great film this is. Good story and cinematography. I like it a lot. Where is the DVD?

Either you love it or you hate it. This movie isn't very satisfying, and part of it has to do with the intensely private and inward nature of the novel by Ross Lockridge from which the screenplay was taken.

There was also the question of when during the filming did Montgomery Clift suffer his terrible accident. For you always hear people saying you can point to the exact frame and rell after which you can see his face destroyed. This begs the question, surely, for aren't most big studio films photographed out of sequence to accommodate actors and technician's schedules, changing weather conditions, vagaries of location shooting, etc. That said, it would be great to have a DVD version of this film in which for once and for all, by comparison with the shooting script and MGM studio daily logs, a commentary might let us which scenes were filmed at what time and what month. To me, Clift looks more or less the same in all stages of the film, but that might be makeup I guess. There's something eerily withdrawn about his character in the first place, and his underplaying might have been his own way of getting into the role; on the other hand, it does horribly resemble the zombie-like movements of someone who's on a lot of painkilling medications. As John Shaughnessy is supposed to be suffering from the multiple traumas of the Civil War, it's fitting he looks a little "not there."

I can best compare the lackluster effect of watching this film to another more recent film that has similar storyline and mixed results, COLD MOUNTAIN. Jude Law is playing the Monty Clift part this time around, while Nicole Kidman tries her best at playing the Eva Marie Saint "Nell" good girl waits at home part. The colorful wacko that Elizabeth Taylor essays here went to Renee Zellweger, who was also channeling Betty Hutton in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN. Both RAINTREE COUNTY and COLD MOUNTAIN had some remarkable battlefield scenes, but both of them drag on interminably, and fail to keep our interest as much as the filmmakers hoped they would do.

I got the item immediately in very good shape-the movie is awesome!!!thank you... m,k,

I LOVED the book! It is very long but I think, compelling, and very educational about the Civil War. Even though it is fiction, as far as the war goes, the writing about it is based in fact.
Trying to make a movie from this book just seems impossible. To do it, liberties were taken and the story changed in some major ways, including how it all ends. There are few movies that can do justice to a great book, so the movie was pretty good considering the enormity of the undertaking, but it did not do as good a job as was done with Gone With the Wind. That movie is my all-time favorite movie. However, this movie is quite good and the actors are perfectly cast, so I would definitely like to own it for that reason.

I like RAINTREE COUNTY. I rate it in my top 10 or 20 films. (If you rank films it often seems we need more space in our top 10 doesn't it?) Essentially the film seems magical for me. It is a somewhat offbeat and disturbing epic that seems to captivate the viewer. In one instance it demonstrates tried and true Hollywood conventional storytelling at its best. Yet at other times it goes off into a nether land of the mysterious wonderment of what the beautiful side of life holds for the passionate seeker of such exquisite bewilderment. And still yet it juxtaposes this quest for seeking the secret of such profound and beautiful emoluments of nature to a darker and mysterious side the human psyche that befuddles and hinders the quest and ability to appreciate these wonders. All this set against the backdrop of the Civil War the film seems to somehow mirror and metaphorically explain the complexities of the conflict without truly stating in strong visual terms the sentiments of the North and South. The Civil War was a conflict characterized initially as one of nobility to a cause, clouded by dreams of glory that eventually came to a realization that all the death and destruction and waste of human energies was neither noble and certainly was not characterized by ideals of glory or other such aspirations.

I suppose I could go on at length and talk about many of the esoterically interesting aspects of RAINTREE COUNTY but one scene really comes to mind and continues to captivate me. Late in the film during the Civil War sequence Lee Marvin gives one of the most wonderful lines in the film that sort of sums up the realization of what RAINTREE COUNTY really means. He yells out across to a band of rebels behind the thick brush, "I come from Raintree County." And then he speaks softly to himself in fond memory "I come from Raintree County." He has come full circle. The Raintree means many things to those that believe. This one tender moment of reflection by Marvin, "Flash" Perkins, affirms that. On a personal note Montgomery Clift's real life disfiguring accident during this film only heightens the enigmatic quality that this film holds. We truly don't know what could have been. We can only wonder and believe that something greater was at work on this production. Johnny Green's low-key emotionally fervent and almost unearthly score beckons the viewer to imagine greater things that can be only be inspired from some spiritual notions from the heavens. Both Elizabeth Taylor's and Eva Marie Saint's competition for Montgomery Clift's affections take second place to Clift's yearning for truth and understanding spurned by the expressive performance of Nigel Patrick as Professor, Jerusalem Webster Stiles, who has continually mystified Clift's yearning for life's answers. And so it happened long ago in RAINTREE COUNTY.

"Raintree County" has been part of my psychic since I first saw it in theatrical release in 1956. I was only ten years old at the time and was completely 'star struck' by the stunningly beautiful and captivating 25 year old Elizabeth Taylor as Susanna. I have been in love with her screen presence ever since. Professional film reviewers were, and remain, unjustifiably un-kind to this noteworthy film. The root cause for much of this 'echo chamber' carping is that other noteworthy romance centered around the American Civil War, "Gone With The Wind". 'How dare MGM try to 'plagerize' "Gone With The Wind"', they seem to say. All objectivity and fairness is lost. The fact of the matter is that the story lines of these two film epics are completely different. Their only similarity is the transcending scope, and the historical setting. Both are consumately great films. Both need to be seen and appreciated on their own merits. "Raintree County" is a wonderful film, a classic, by any measure. Young Elizabeth Taylor gives one of her very best performances. She was nominated as best actress for her role as Susanna and should have won that year. The motion picture academy was mad at her at the time for matters entirely off screen. Taylor is wonderfully supported by the memorable performances of Montgomery Clift (as John Shawnessy) beautiful Eva Marie Saint (best known for her performance in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest"). Nigel Patrick, Lee Marvin, Rod Taylor and Agnes Moorehead fill out the very strong supporting cast with memorable characterizations. Location shooting, costumes and sets are sumptious and meticulous in detail. The depictions of battle and war are on a vast scale and credibly done, espically those of Sherman's March through Georgia. Johnny Green composed a musical accompanyment for "Raintree County" that is now widely recognized as one of ther best film scores ever composed. The film works on multiple levels. It is a deep psychological drama about a troubled young woman with a dark past. Its a story about racism. Its a love story (actually several love stories). Its an account of a young man's quest for meaning in life. Punctuated with humor and tradgedy, it is a story of life on a grand scale, life disrupted by the catclysm of war and personal pain, and life rebuilt and redeemed through tenacity and strength of spirit. A timeless classic for the ages. I still carry the film's images and Nat King Cole's rendering of title song ("Song of Raintree County") in my head fifty years since first seeing the film. One of the very best films ever made.

but I think it was because he just loved the title song sung by the great Nat King Cole. And that song is indeed the best part of the movie, so you could probably save yourself about four hours by turning it off after the last note. But perhaps that is a little harsh. "Raintree County" is actually one of those, "You know what they should have done instead?" kind of movies that you re-write with your friends during dinner afterwards. My brothers and I have all come up with better plot developments than the screenwriters, or so we think. For instance, Johnny Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift) is a, uh-oh, frustrated writer who longs to write Something Great. His father (Walter Abel), his mother (Agnes Morehead), his childhood sweetheart Nell (Eva Marie Saint), and even his HS teacher (Nigel Patrick) are always commenting on this throughout the movie at different times. But of course, we never see him write a darn thing, so where's the evidence, y'know? Well, during the Civil War, he decides to enlist to find his missing wife and child (never mind about how that happened, it's not important right now) and runs into that HS teacher who's now a battlefront artist a la Winslow Homer. Well, tarnation, why didn't the scriptwriter think to make Johnny a war correspondent? Then he could finally write SOMETHING and look for the family at the same time. Duh! Now about that missing wife. Susannah is played by Elizabeth Taylor in one of her Southern belle roles. There's trouble, you see, because she's also insane. But is she really insane, like in her genes, or is she making herself crazy with all these self doubts of hers? Her self-doubts are caused by Her Secret, which is that she was the innocent cause of her mother going crazy and burning down the plantation after shooting her husband and his negro mistress. Thus, her mother was definitely insane. But Susannah had secretly wished that the negro mistress--who was also her nurse--was her real mother. Now, here's the problem: if she is really her mother's daughter, then she will probably have heriditary insanity. If she is really the daughter of Henrietta the nurse, why then she's part black, which is too much for her to cope with. So which is better, to go crazy or be half black if you're a bigoted Southern belle? Your call on that one. And all throughout "Raintree County", Johnny keeps waffling between his two loves, sexy crazy Susannah and "from my roots" Nell, who's not all that sexy but at least she's not crazy. I've always found this to be the most annoying part of the movie because he never seems to have any clarity on that point. In the end, Fate intervenes to solve Johnny's problems for him. So, if you've got an entire afternoon with nothing to do and you like to watch technicolor hoop skirts, then "Raintree County" may be for you. Special note to Star Trek fans: Check out DeForest Kelley in a pre-Bones performance as a Confederate general Lee Marvin bandies words with.

This movie is not the best and the sets are awful!I would recommend the book though. However, it does have an interesting behind the scenes story. Like, did you know that this was the beginning of the end of Montgomery's career. During the middle of the film he was in a horrible car crash that destroyed his face and took away his gorgeous looks. In which Elizabeth Taylor saved his life. They tried to cover up Montgomery's appearance after the accident but the film suffers.