Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8598 in VHS
• Released on: 1997-03-04
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of tapes: 2
• Running time: 160 minutes

Customer Reviews

A Gorgeous Historic Film "a la" Gone With The Wind
Raintree County was a thousand plus novel written by Ross Lockbridge Jr. published in 1948. At its time, it was regarded as the Great American Novel second only to Margaret Mitchell's Gone With The Wind and in some ways, both Raintree County and Gone With The Wind are a bit alike, although everyone generally considers Gone With The Wind to be the superior work of historic fiction. And it is. Gone With The Wind, as we all know, became a highly successful film in 1939, even winning Best Picture. It must have dawned on Hollywood producers that the novel would make a breathtaking movie. It was the 50's, the new invention of television had just entered people's homes and the movie industry was threatened. It was the time of the "epic films" (The Ten Commandments, Ben Hur). In 1957, "Raintree County" was released in theatres. The appeal to the film was its Cival War Era drama and Elizabeth Taylor.

It's no Gone With The Wind, but Raintree County is a beautiful film to look at visually. The master shots of the scenic countryside in Raintree County are incredibly lovely, the costumes look authentic to the period, the music is enjoyable but subtle, and Elizabeth Taylor is always interesting to watch on film. Elizabeth Taylor plays Susanna Drake, a vibrant Southern belle with a troubled past (her plantation home caught on fire and she had issues with her mother). Although she seems to be almost a near replica of Scarlett O'Hara in many of the scenes, she lacks Scarlett O'Hara's strength and willful nature. While Scarlett could survive anything, Susanna Drake weakens out at the end of the film, becomes mentally disturbed (she has a strong attachment to a scary looking Chucky doll) and dies a pathetic death when she seeks out the Raintree. This is not Elizabeth's finest performance. A tragic heroine is still acceptable, but this particular heroine is not as satisfying as Vivien Leigh's performance as Scarlett. Also, her "rival" and John Shawnessy's first love and childhood friend Nelle is an easily replaceable role. I was thinking she was the equivalent of Melanie Hamilton in Gone With The Wind and a role that could have been played by Olivia De Havilland once again. The women in this film are not portrayed as strongly as the men are. And even the men are not as substantial. It's just Yankee versus Rebels. The relationship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift's characters is not that well developed. It's not enough that they are from opposite sides of the Civil War conflict- she's at heart a Southerner and he's a Yankee. I was even disappointed in one scene in which Elizabeth says to Montgomery after an argument "You hate me because I'm Southern!". This film could have used some polishing. I'm very certain that even author Ross Lockbridge Jr. was not entirely satisfied with what they did to his book in screenplay form.

Montgomery Clift has done other worthwhile movies but in this film, his performance as John Shawnessy is wooden and lacks some substance. Although he is supposed to be portrayed as an idealist poet and writer (much like Doctor Zhivago), we never see him write anything. All we get is his desire to seek out the elusive and magic, all-healing legendary Raintree, supposedly planted by Johny Appleseed and a quest he gives up at the end of the film. Professor Jerusalem is a funny and amusing character but a bit too shallow. Again, this film is rather interesting to look at if you want to get some insight on Civil War Era America (1850's and 1860's) and the mention of such things as abolitionism, Uncle Tom's Cabin, copperheads, Abraham Lincoln, Fort Sumter and Gettysburg to the later Republican politics of the Reconstruction are very historically accurate.

This "Roadshow" version is beautiful to look at nevertheless. Out of curiosity for Civil War history, this would make a great film to watch as a history project in high school or college courses. This film is also worth watching if you're a hardcore fan of Elizabeth Taylor and don't care what role she plays or what movie she is in, whether it's "Little Women" "National Velvet", whehter she plays the tragic Susanna Drake, Cleopatra or the other Southern heroine in Tenesee William's "Cat On A Hot Tin Roof" or the incredibly nasty character in "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?".

An epic film!
The product description does not do justice to this movie at all!

Johnny (Montgomery) gave up his high-school sweetheart, Nell (Eva Marie) to marry southern belle, Susanna (Elizabeth). However, if Johnny had really loved Nell, he would have asked her to marry him, but he never did. To say that the marriage of Johnny and Susanna was love-less is completely false. Susanna loved Johnny more than anyone she had ever loved (except for maybe her mammy, Henrietta).

Furthermore, for Johnny's part, even though he had been tricked into marrying Susanna (she told Johnny that she was pregnant), he may not have been "in love" with her in the beginning of their marriage, but he eventually did love her.

Over time, the primary problems in their marriage were a result of a devastating fire in Susanna's youth, and her constant re-living of that trauma. A Secondary problem, was the fact that Susanna was a southern belle who believed in slavery and everything that that entailed. Johnny, on the other hand, was a northern abolitionist.

Anyway, I will not spoil the end of the movie, as you should purchase this movie and find out for yourself the final result.

I will say that the movie was spectacularly produced. The acting was excellent (Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, Eva Marie Saint, Agnes Moorehead), the cinematography was good, the color was vibrant and the direction flowed very well.

This is an epic drama on par with Gone With The Wind. So, if you like those kinds of movies, you will like this movie. Be fore warned though, this is a long movie, at 3 hours and 15 minutes.

I hope this review was helpful to you.

Mixed Results
Either you love it or you hate it. This movie isn't very satisfying, and part of it has to do with the intensely private and inward nature of the novel by Ross Lockridge from which the screenplay was taken.

There was also the question of when during the filming did Montgomery Clift suffer his terrible accident. For you always hear people saying you can point to the exact frame and rell after which you can see his face destroyed. This begs the question, surely, for aren't most big studio films photographed out of sequence to accommodate actors and technician's schedules, changing weather conditions, vagaries of location shooting, etc. That said, it would be great to have a DVD version of this film in which for once and for all, by comparison with the shooting script and MGM studio daily logs, a commentary might let us which scenes were filmed at what time and what month. To me, Clift looks more or less the same in all stages of the film, but that might be makeup I guess. There's something eerily withdrawn about his character in the first place, and his underplaying might have been his own way of getting into the role; on the other hand, it does horribly resemble the zombie-like movements of someone who's on a lot of painkilling medications. As John Shaughnessy is supposed to be suffering from the multiple traumas of the Civil War, it's fitting he looks a little "not there."

I can best compare the lackluster effect of watching this film to another more recent film that has similar storyline and mixed results, COLD MOUNTAIN. Jude Law is playing the Monty Clift part this time around, while Nicole Kidman tries her best at playing the Eva Marie Saint "Nell" good girl waits at home part. The colorful wacko that Elizabeth Taylor essays here went to Renee Zellweger, who was also channeling Betty Hutton in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN. Both RAINTREE COUNTY and COLD MOUNTAIN had some remarkable battlefield scenes, but both of them drag on interminably, and fail to keep our interest as much as the filmmakers hoped they would do.