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The need, as Frost would have it, "of being versed in country things," a scrupulous foundation for Our Daily Bread. The octogenarian patriarch (Lionel Barrymore) steps outside to toss a plate of cereal into the chicken coop and fry himself some eggs, the in-laws awkwardly await at the breakfast table, "the cat, the pig and the donkey." The granddaughter (Miriam Hopkins) is a New York divorcée who attributes her sturdy arms to "lifting highballs and a little tennis," she promptly hits it off with the coot by not being afraid of him. The neighbor (Franchot Tone) is described as "a litigating, contentious young upstart," in reality he's an aspiring writer turned aspiring teacher and vaguely dissatisfied rural husband, their not-quite affair is grist to the local gossip mill. City girl, farm boy, farm girl, city boy. "Strange pattern it makes, doesn't it?" Tensions and harmonies and desire and grace, nothing is simple and everything is fluid to King Vidor. Harvest workers put the heroine through her paces and get a pie in the face, the illicit kiss on the hammock is followed by a son's shock and a busybody's chortle. "Sometimes I think the big things that are past are more real than the little things that are right here," or is that the other way around? Ancestral squabbles over fences, the wandering pooch that finds a spot under a pew during Sunday's sermon, the delicate sketching of insinuation and revelation around porch swings or butter churners. Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is mentioned, the old warrior sits peacefully at last on his front steps, "my house is in order." (The hush at the table gives way to the roar of field threshers in a signature Vidor moment.) Ozu is a great admirer, so is Kazan (Wild River, Splendor in the Grass). With Stuart Erwin, Irene Hervey, Beulah Bondi, Grant Mitchell, Aileen Carlyle, Tad Alexander, and Joe Sawyer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |