Lee Remick, tiny daughter in tow, arrives in rural Columbus, Texas town, hoping for a reunion with estranged husband Steve McQueen, an ex-con. Though eager to settle down with his newfound family, McQueen has little chance of making it out of town, stuck in between the rockabilly siren song of the local juke joint and the sadistic thumb of his decaying stepmother (Josephine Hutchinson). Reteaming the To Kill a Mockingbird troika of Robert Mulligan (director), Alan J. Pakula (producer) and Horton Foote (writer), this Southern Gothic downer similarly parades its care and tastefulness with what could be tagged ostentatious modesty. No stranger to Foote's gallery of arid ramblers and dewy naïfs (the story is based on his play The Traveling Lady, and an early blueprint for Tender Mercies), McQueen's troubled songbird is unique among Mulligan's misfits in that, unlike the overgrown calves of Fear Strikes Out and Love With the Proper Stranger, he has pent-up violence welled inside him -- his tenseness, picking brawls with hecklers or stabbing madly at his stepmother's freshly dug grave, is only momentarily soothed by the love of his wife and child at home. A character for Nicholas Ray or Arthur Penn, though not for Mulligan, whose dissolve-happy handling, full of carefully arranged, hatched-faced "types," trades in intensity for damp "sensitivity." With Don Murray, Paul Fix, Ruth White, and Kimberly Block. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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