Raintree County

Eva Marie Saint is TCM's Star of the Month for July 2024, and one of her movies that's been on my DVR and that I haven't posted about before is Raintree County. It's on TCM again tonight at 10:00 PM, so I made a point to watch the movie to do a review on it now for the upcoming showing.

Once again, Eva Marie Saint is only a supporting actress here, although she shows up a lot earlier than the actual lead actress. The movie opens up in 1859 in Raintree County, Indiana, which is partly a sign that the Civil War is about to hit the US and change everybody's life. Everybody is about to graduate high school, and this being 1859, it's a huge deal that the class is going to be... photographed. Head of the class is John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), who is a bit of a dreamer. He's kinda-sort going steady, at least by 1859 standards, with fellow student Nell (that's Eva Marie Saint if you couldn't tell), and everyone expects them to get married relatively soon since younger marriages were much more common in those days.

Except that one of their teachers, Prof. Stiles (Nigel Patrick), tells the class the legend Johnny Appleseed, He went through the midwest planting trees, and supposedly he planted on specific raintree after which the county is named, somewhere in the county's forbidding swamp. Find the tree, and you'll find the secret of life. It's a ridiculous idea, but this is the 1850s when there was more ignorance in the world, and young John is impressionable. So he blows off his girlfriend to go into the swamp looking for the tree.

Visiting the county for some reason is southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor). Johnny is immediately taken with her looks, and continues to blow off Nell in order to spend time with Susanna. Enough time alone with each other, in fact that there might be the opportunity for Johnny to knock up Susanna before she leaves to go back home. Indeed, they must have had sex because some time later Susanna shows up back in town to tell Johnny that she's with child and he's the father of the child. I'd guess Johnny knew enough about sex to know that if he hadn't done it with Susanna, there's no way she could be bearing his child.

Johnny does the honorable thing and marries Susanna before heading south with her to live in her part of the country. The two stop in a plantation where Susanna grew up, at least before the place burned down in a fire. Johnny, in talking to the people who still live there, learns that Susanna's mom went insane, and Susanna may in fact be inheriting her mom's mental state, not that they quite understood genetics at the time. But it's the reason for the insanity that's a problem: The woman who went insane might not have been Susanna's biological mother, and that Susanna is in fact the product of a relationship between Dad and one of the family's slaves!

Oh, the movie is going to get a lot more ridiculous. John and Susanna move back north, and the Civil War breaks out. Johnny doesn't volunteer, at least not until Susanna runs off with their child to someplace in the south, leaving Johnny to join the Union Army just so he can spend all his time looking for Susanna, which I'd think might involve a bit of desertion. Meanwhile, Nell is still around, and still pining away for poor Johnny.

Raintree County was based on a novel publised a few years after World War II that was a commercial success. It's not hard to see why MGM would want to buy the rights and think that this sort of melodramatic material that has shades of Gone With the Wind would be a big hit. But the movie wound up in production hell in part because the novel's writer killed himself. And then when it finally did get made, nobody seemed to undertand just how wacky the material is. It also didn't help that this is the movie Clift was making when he had the very serious car crash that nearly killed him and delayed production for months.

Raintree County is certainly not the best film for anybody involved in the production, I'm sorry to say.