Comment

Aug 31, 2015Nursebob rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Suffering from a few too many technicolor sunsets, angelic choirs, and rivers of childhood tears, Clarence Brown’s lavish treatment of Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s pulitzer prizewinner treads a fine line between charming simplicity and bucolic overdose. However, whether taken as a straight-up heart-tugger or a pastoral metaphor revolving around adolescence and the loss of innocence, Brown’s little gem of a film does manage to captivate despite its storybook characters and overt manipulations. Peck and Wyman are perfectly paired as the frontier parents eking out a living while dropping homespun colloquialisms with every other sentence and Jarman (who received a special Oscar for his troubles) gapes wide-eyed with wonder between bouts of sobbing. In the end though, it is Arthur Arling’s grandiose cinematography which elevates the proceedings—his visions of an unspoiled idyll lying peacefully beneath improbably blue skies plays out like a series of Arcadian postcards. Overplayed for sure, but you’d have to have a heart of pure granite not to be moved at least a little bit.