Writer Erskine Caldwell, who penned bestsellers throughout the 1940s and 1950s, homed in on a backwoods Americana that few inhabitants of big urban centers ever saw. His novels were filled with an earthy sex drive and violence that barely made it past the censors. Literary critics were divided, although even pantheon director John Ford saw something in Caldwell (he filmed the author’s “Tobacco Road”). Here director Anthony Mann, master of early 1950s noir and hardboiled James Stewart westerns, takes a stab at another Caldwell classic. Robert Ryan is Ty Ty, patriarch of his hillbilly clan, who believes his grandfather’s gold is buried somewhere on his farm and has had his sons (Jack Lord and Vic Morrow) help him dig pits across his acreage in search of it. Meanwhile Lord’s wife, Griselda (Tina Louise) is in love/lust with married, out-of-work Will (Aldo Ray), something that could cause all hell to break loose. In fact, the neighboring town is chronically unemployed after the permanent shutdown of the big cotton mill. Behind the barnyard antics and steamy back alley encounters, a tragic violence bubbles just under the service, bound to erupt sooner or later. Co-starring Buddy Hackett, Fay Spain, Rex Ingram and Michael Landon (as the neighborhood albino).
