Freaktana A Major Disappointment

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

bobvonb I kept waiting for the brilliant moments and they never came. The only scene that actually had any impact on me was Lee Marvin's death scene. Oh well.

bandw Montgomery Clift plays Johnny, a sensitive school teacher in antebellum Indiana, Raintree County. Johnny is in love with Nell (Eva Marie Saint) until southern belle Susanna (Liz Taylor) shows up to settle some estate matters. It doesn't take much encouragement from Susanna for Johnny to take up with her and forsake the saintly Nell. Johnny marries Susanna and they move to New Orleans where Susanna is comfortably ensconced in a wealthy family where slavery is not questioned. Johnny gets a gut load of the slave south and forces a move back to Raintree County where Susanna is out of her element and uncomfortable. She continues to be haunted by an incident from her childhood involving her father, her mother, a slave, and a fire. The symbol of a golden rain tree is central. It appears that if anyone finds this mythical tree, the meaning of life would be revealed and all problems would be solved (or some such thing). I guess we have to accept the search for this tree as metaphor, since early on Johnny takes off into the woods wandering around aimlessly searching for it with no apparent hint of where it might be. Almost drowning, he fails on this attempt. Later, as Susanna starts to slip into madness, she flees home to embark on a similarly random search for the fabled tree. I will not spoil the story by revealing whether the rain tree remains undiscovered by the end of the movie.Johnny joins the Union Army where it is implied that he does so to search for his missing wife, which seems to be an odd way to execute such a search. Maybe he was conscripted? The movie misses an opportunity here to discuss conscription during the Civil War.Hard to believe that this movie did not win an Oscar for best costume design. Some of the set pieces in the south are exquisitely filmed. Of course Liz is costumed to take advantage of her beauty.The A-list actors never created characters that seemed real to me. Eva Marie Saint was wasted in playing the sweet, good girl. Liz Taylor seemed to be acting more than getting into her role. From her work here you would never guess that she had it in her to give us her Oscar winning performance as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Montgomery Clift is fine as the sensitive, morally upright Johnny, but he can play those parts without breaking a sweat. The generic score is suitable for a 1950s big budget Hollywood movie.

TheLittleSongbird Considering the cast and that it is thought as having similarities with Gone With the Wind, Raintree County really did have potential to be a great film. Unfortunately, while it is as bad as some have said it to be it was one of those films with undeniably great things but missed the mark. Raintree County is a wonderful-looking film, the photography has that epic sweep and the costumes and sets are sumptuous and colourful(just look at Elizabeth Taylor's gowns here). Johnny Green's score is hauntingly beautiful with a discordant quality in the darker parts(like the scene in the burnt-out mansion) and a welcome degree of orchestral schmaltz in the strings without over-powering in any way. The song sung by Nat King Cole is highly emotive and Cole gives it even more of an emotional quality. Elizabeth Taylor really does smoulder here and gives some of her finest screen work, giving a very unsympathetic character a good amount of colour. The supporting cast fare well too mostly, Lee Marvin and Neil Patrick especially who look as though they're thoroughly enjoying themselves and steal every scene they feature in. Rod Taylor is fine too. However, Montgomery Clift is too wooden and stoic and spends about half the film looking on edge, understandably admittedly though due to his near-death experience. Eva Marie Saint had a very underwritten character and poor dialogue to work with but she doesn't succeed in bringing charm or colour to the role and instead comes across as bland and annoying. Agnes Moorhead is quite good but has very little to do considering her calibre. Raintree County is one of those films where it's beautiful and glossy on the surface but under it it's underwhelming. The script is rather leaden in flow with some very clumsy dialogue(especially Saint's and some of Taylor's, the more insane Taylor gets the more uncomfortably over-heated the film gets too). Few of the characters are interesting, Susanna is a colourful character but Nell is both grating and underwritten(like the other woman from hell but in an over-familiar way) and Johnny is even blander and too overly-idealistic, almost at times too perfect as well. The story could have done a much better job with the complex, ahead-of-its-time issues and themes- with better dialogue and characterisation-(Giant also had even more daring issues and themes and incorporated them much more compellingly) and crawls limply along with a particularly long-winded and dramatically passionless first 45 minutes and a lot of overlong padding throughout the film, making the already long length seem longer. This viewer does not have a problem with long lengths or slow pacing, films and TV series have worked with both, but it is highly dependent on how the quality of the writing is which was for me and a lot of others where Raintree County fell short. The direction is rich in spectacle but with not much enthusiasm elsewhere. In conclusion, wonderful-looking but dull, a case of (no meanness intended) the off-screen drama- Clift's car accident/near death experience- being more absorbing than the film itself. The masterpiece that is Gone With the Wind(as this has been compared to) Raintree County is not. 5/10 Bethany Cox

zardoz-13 "Murder, My Sweet" director Edward Dmytryk's "Raintree County" is a tragic love story set against the American Civil War. Everything about this prestigious MGM production had tragedy attached to it. Not only did the story conclude on a tragic note, but also Montgomery Cliff lost control of his car on a twisting road and crashed it into a telephone pole. The facial and cranial injuries that Cliff suffered were so critical that MGM briefly contemplating scrapping the production. Indeed, Dmytryk did have to stop production until Cliff recovered from his injuries. The handsome young star of "River Red" was never the same after the car accident. After the film premiered, Cliff told "Newsweek" magazine that "the audience spends too much time trying to figure out which scenes were made after my accident." Tragedy had struck already because the massive novel upon which the film was based was written by Ross Lockridge, Jr. The book was a Book of the Month Club bestseller in 1948, but writing this epic drove Lockridge to commit suicide. The last tragedy of this 'lost' movie is that the copyright owner has not issued an official DVD release. The only copies of "Raintree County" are available in the now largely defunct VHS format. An Asian company called Castaways has released a DVD, but the DVD is abysmal. Instead of the widescreen letterboxed format of the VHS version, the Castaway's version truncates the picture and the film no longer has an intermission and some copies are unreadable in a DVD player.This sprawling soap opera occurs over a period of six years before, during, and after the American Civil War. The film and the county both drew its name from an exotic Chinese tree that Johnny Appleseed planted in a swamp on his way through the wilderness sewing apple orchards. During an outdoor lecture, Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles (Nigel Patrick) regales his class with the story of the raintree. Stiles tells them that anybody who finds the raintree will find the secret of life. Unfortunately, nobody knows where the raintree is located. Idealist Indiana poet/scholar Johnny Wickliff Shawnessy (Montgomery Cliff) plunges into the swamp and searches for the raintree. He becomes an object of ridicule for his impulsive behavior. About a half-hour in the action, Johnny accepts a challenge to compete with the fastest runner in Raintree County, Flash Perkins (Lee Marvin of "The Big Heat"), but the professor intervenes before they can start. Stiles convinces all parties involved to have the foot race delayed until July Fourth. He wants to bet a hundred dollars on Johnny.Later, Johnny runs into the dark-haired, North Orleans-bred, Havana-born southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor) when he goes to have his photograph taken. He accompanies her to her house and their romance begins. Miraculously, Johnny beats Flash in the race. After the race, Johnny and Susanna joint Professor Stiles on a picnic in the woods with his girlfriend. Eventually, Johnny winds up marrying Susanna because she informs him that she is pregnant with his child. This ruins the love that our protagonist shared with his golden-haired childhood sweetheart Nell Gaither (Eva Marie Saint) and they drift apart.Actually, Susanna was never pregnant. Later, he learns that she lied to him because she wanted him so much. The hero visits the south with his wife and learns about a mysterious fire that she was involved in and the tragic circumstances surrounding it. Susanna thinks that the worst thing that can happen to a white woman is to have tainted African-American blood. She remembers the night that their mansion burned. As it turns out, her father had to leave his post as a Congressman to tend to his ailing, hysterical wife. Since he could not have a meaningful, child-bearing relationship with her wife, he resorted to an extramarital affair with a slave and Susanna was the product of their union. The Congressman's wife shoots both the slave and her husband and set the mansion on fire. Susanna blames herself for the incident because she left a nasty note for her in her scrapbook album.MGM Studios spared no expense in the production of "Raintree County." After lensing interiors in Hollywood, producer David Lewis took the company on location in Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee to finish the picture. According to "Raintree County" historian Stephen V. Russell, the film boasted 119 speaking roles, 72 interior studio sets, and 34 exterior location scene. "Quo Vadis" cinematographer Robert Surtees does an outstanding job lensing this movie. "Raintree County" was the film shot in an entirely new photographic process called Camera 65 that was designed to enhance pictorial detail. Indeed, the only other movie to employ this process was the Charlton Heston classic "Ben-Hur." Not surprisingly, Surtees shot that movie, too. The cast is fantastic, but this MGM spectacle is no match for "Gone With the Wind." "Raintree County" is related from a Northern perspective, and the Montgomery Cliff hero is nothing like Clark Gable. The Elizabeth Taylor character has a mentally unstable history, keeps a massive collection of dolls, one with a half-burnt face, and she is supposed to symbolize the irrationality of the South. The actual Civil War scenes take place after the intermission, but they cannot compete with "GWTW." The dialogue of "Bad Day at Black Rock" scenarist Millard Kauffman does not contain anything like the immortal Rhett Butler line at the end of the movie. Sumptuous set designs distinguish this film along with a fine, sensitive performance by Taylor that netted the London-born actress her first Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Lee Marvin, who had specialized in villain roles before "Raintree County," played a sympathetic character for a change. Marvin's performance is predictably agile, especially in the barroom scenes when he flexes his body for the upcoming race. Rod Taylor plays a slimy, Copperhead politician. Agnes Moorehead is cast as Ellen Shawnessy the mother of our hero.Altogether, "Raintree County" qualifies as a classic.