RUBY GENTRY (1952) B/W 82m dir: King Vidor

w/Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, Karl Malden, Tom Tully, Bernard Phillips, James Anderson, Josephine Hutchinson, Phyllis Avery, Herbert Heyes, Myra Marsh, Charles Cane, Sam Flint, Frank Wilcox

From Variety's contemporary review of the film: "This is a bold, adult drama laying heavy stress on sex, a story of fleshy passions in the tidewater country of North Carolina.

"Vidor belts over the blatantly sensual Arthur FitzRichard story. It's a sordid type of drama, with neither Jennifer Jones nor Charlton Heston gaining any sympathy in their characters.

"Story starts with the animal attraction of Jones, from the wrong side of the tracks, and Heston, purse-poor southern gent who willingly trifles in the swamp but for marriage chooses Phyllis Avery's wealthy, properly bred girl, so he can rebuild his family fortunes.

"With a legal mating with Heston impossible, Jones turns to the friendship of Malden and his bedridden wife (Josephine Hutchinson). After the latter dies, she accepts Malden's proposal and they are married. Society refuses to accept his bride.

"Jones goes through much of the footage in skintight Levis, of which she and careful camera angles and lighting make the most."

From John Baxter's study of the director's films, King Vidor: "Vidor returned to [producer David O.] Selznick for his next film, the wild and remarkable Ruby Gentry (1952), Vidor's last great film. Due in the main to Jennifer Jones's performance as the self-destroying Southern girl who ruins the lives of those around her in a frantic attempt to achieve a satisfaction only death can bring, Vidor has called Ruby Gentry one of his favorite works. 'I had complete freedom in shooting it, and Selznick, who could have had an influence on Jennifer Jones, didn't intervene. I think I succeeded in getting something out of Jennifer, something quite profound and subtle.' Like Beyond the Forest, Ruby Gentry explores the eroticism and violence present in a small town (Braddock, South Carolina). To Vidor, the city is a battleground where an attempt to subdue nature has devitalized man and made his life futile. Only in the country, and particularly in his native South, is the battle still in full swing; there man still has a chance to prevail. Like Rosa Moline [Bette Davis' character in BEYOND THE FOREST], Ruby comes 'from the wrong side of the tracks.' Despite her love for Boake Tackman (Charlton Heston), the last survivor of a decayed aristocratic line, she marries the gentle widower Jim Gentry (Karl Malden), whom she annihilates in her affair with Boake, the lover she in turn destroys by flooding the land he has reclaimed from the swamp. But to Vidor, the swamp is eternal, unavoidable, and it is in the mud that Ruby and Boake hunt one another in perhaps the best sequence he ever filmed. Unable to afford a real location, Selznick recreated the swamp from Hallelujah on a soundstage, and the result, with its mist and shrouded, twisted trees is an apt model of the bog of human subconscious.

"Jones and Heston give a remarkable ensemble performance, meeting one another's sexuality and violence with ever greater force, kiss for kiss, shot for shot. Ruby expertly handling a shotgun in her casually erotic male clothing, Tackman making an odd contrast with the mild, self-made Gentry; all could be characters from a Gothic novel, operating on emotions possible only in the life-or-death environment of the South. Vidor later remarked that the film reminded him of Tennessee Williams, and allowing for the imposed simplicity of the material, the parallels are notable. He disliked the characters of the doctor (Bernard Phillips) and Ruby's fundamentalist bible-quoting brother Jewel (James Anderson), both forced on him by Selznick, but acknowledges their value in providing a perspective on Ruby's obsession to escape from Braddock. 'The character of the brother interested me, as did that of Ruby's father, incidentally, because he was a prisoner of his environment. Unlike her father and brother, the girl proves she can get out of it. She bears deep scars, she's marked by this environment, also by the fact that she nourishes a fierce hatred in her breast. She cannot forgive, but she can go on fighting,' --- as can all Vidor's heroines, even though it means destroying the thing they love."