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The title is a balladeer's spiritual over the opening credits, a widescreen pastoral (sky and trees reflected on a musty pond) that pans right and cranes up to locate the farm pockmarked by excavations. "Gold? In the state of Georgia?" Robert Ryan is the cracked Dogpatch Lear in full combat with the terrain, "strictly scientific" yet holding private chats with the Almighty in his search for buried treasure—the shaggiest of Anthony Mann's crumbling patriarchs. Shovels to keep the sons (Jack Lord and Vic Morrow) in line, for the filly in heat (Fay Spain) an Albino diviner (Michael Landon) straight out of the swamp. On the sidelines of the circus is the roly-poly suitor (Buddy Hackett) who while tearing into a watermelon gives a flash of the beady-eyed fury behind the clowning; at its center is Lord's wife (Tina Louise), pawed, squeezed and leered at while openly pining for her beefy brother-in-law (Aldo Ray). (Their combustible attraction is consumed at last inside the dormant cotton mill, a reminder, like the earlier composition of frenzied water pump and bathtub, that this is a "lusty" work about impotence.) The lay of the land and "the glory of the world" in a comic side-piece to Man of the West, every bit as psychological under the rustic surfaces. Erskine Caldwell's randy-seedy-earthy Americana, winnowed by Mann for family tensions and spacious nature: The landscape at night is downright lunar, an oil lamp illuminates the way before one of the searchers plunges into a crater. All fun and games until the weight of the Old Testament is brought down on Ryan's scarecrow shoulders, the epiphany ("stop diggin' and start farmin'") can't quite conceal the cracks in the Garden. Disprized by Godard on the pages of Cahiers but gratefully recognized by Peckinpah in Ballad of Cable Hogue. With Helen Westcott, Rex Ingram, Lance Fuller, and Russell Collins. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |