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"The poetry of earth is never dead..." A shot fired in the creek gives the rift of natural beauty and human matters, blood droplets on a boulder surrounded by greenery encapsulate the Technicolor impressionism at play. Moanin' Meadow, a stretch of Ozarks land under a curse, "frogs as quiet as grave rocks and the light comin' from nowhere" or so the locals say. The clan of moonshiners cling to a reckoning, the vengeful burden falls on the scion (John Wayne) raised by the rancor-gnarled aunt (Beulah Bondi) to slay the absconding paterfamilias. A welter of revenge and superstition "like a pond dryin' up," into it wanders the healer with a mysterious past (Harry Carey). (His visit to a spectral shack brimming with objects and memories is contemporaneous with Ford's The Grapes of Wrath.) "I almost stepped on a cloud," proclaims the barefoot maiden (Betty Field) noticing the sky reflected on a puddle, such is the eccentric delicacy with which Henry Hathaway paints his Faulknerian pastoral. A tombstone carved onto a tree trunk and the indoors cosmos of a general store, the blind dowager (Marjorie Main) and the thunderstruck mute (Marc Lawrence) and the marvel and pain of senses restored. (A muddy ruggedness keeps the proceedings from getting too ethereal, a donnybrook ends with the screen swarming with sheep from a broken fence and Ward Bond contemplating his bent forefinger.) A song to offset the "sermon of hate," a conflagration and a showdown, a thread poignantly woven from Carey to Wayne throughout. A man's truth at last as clear as the sheets in a medical tent, "somethin' a he'd die for to bring him back to livin'." The closing view is from Maxfield Parrish, and down the road is Ray's Distant Thunder. Cinematography by W. Howard Greene and Charles Lang. With James Barton, Samuel S. Hinds, John Qualen, Fuzzy Knight, Tom Fadden, Dorothy Adams, and Olin Howland.
--- Fernando F. Croce |