Published in 1933, Erskine Caldwell’s novel “God’s Little Acre” caused a censorious stir with its sweaty depiction of Deep South lust. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice (mercifully dissolved in 1950) took dead aim at the novel, and, as is par for the suppressive course, that only made it more of a must-read. It was a popular book in the U.S. Armed Forces (there’s a joke in 1955’s wildly uncontroversial “Mister Roberts” about Jack Lemmon’s Ensign Pulver having “underlined” and “added exclamation points” to every risqué passage), and it seemed destined to become a movie, provided its creatives could work around the onerous production code. Director Anthony Mann made it happen by leaning into the politics of the piece.
He also cast the hell out of the movie. Western legend Robert Ryan stars as Ty Ty Walden, a mentally unwell, destitute farmer who’s squandered potentially prosperous farm land by digging for a buried fortune left to him by his grandfather. Ty Ty’s got two sons in Buck (Jack Lord) and Shaw (Vic Morrow), and a daughter named Darlin’ Jill (Fay Spain). Just about everyone’s hot to bed someone who isn’t their spouse, and the crown sin of the flesh is Buck’s wife Griselda, played by Tina Louise in her movie debut.
Indeed, Louise was a sensational performer long before she boarded the S.S. Minnow as the movie star Ginger Grant on “Gilligan’s Island.” She followed up “God’s Little Acre” with another Ryan-led film (Andre de Toth’s must-see bleak 1959 Western “Day of the Outlaw”) and made noise on Broadway in the Carol Burnett vehicle “Fade Out — Fade In.” You can’t knock her for taking a steady paycheck on a network sitcom, but she could have done so much more.
United ArtistsAnthony Mann was an expert director when it came to Westerns, and many of his entries in the genre starred James Stewart (e.g. “Winchester ’73,” “Bend of the River,” and “The Man from Laramie”). Still, I think he was at his best when he worked Robert Ryan into the mix (see also: “The Naked Spur,” which brought Ryan and Stewart together).
Whether he was starring in Sam Peckinpah’s history-making “The Wild Bunch” (itself a Western that failed to impress Clint Eastwood, so make of that what you will) or Robert Aldrich’s mold-setting antiheroes-on-a-mission war thriller “The Dirty Dozen,” Ryan was a wild card. He could be a scoundrel (be they of the wild-eyed or more calculating variety), but he could just as easily pass as a flawed yet all the same deeply sympathetic hero. When I wrote about the greatest character actors of all time for /Film, I considered including Ryan. The thing is, though, you just can’t pin that man down. It’s what made him so special.
One needn’t look any further than “God’s Little Acre.” As far from sympathetic as his character is in the film, Ryan’s out-of-control king act is utterly absorbing. And while Tina Louise is essentially playing an object of low down dirty desire in the film, she imbues Griselda with a strange kind of tawdry grace. When the Walden family survives their full-scale implosion, you buy the notion that they can bring their farmland back to life. That’s not in the cards, however, and it’s a tragedy drilled home by the amazing performances from Ryan and Louise.
