Raintree County

A film that has been written off as a pale imitation of "Gone With the Wind" and thus largely forgotten over the years, "Raintree County" is in fact a sprawling epic about love and life as seen through the eyes of one man, John Shawnessy. John is a philosopher and an unapologetic romantic and idealist, who longs to discover the meaning of life, which he associates with a mysterious golden rain tree. Pretty heady stuff for a big dumb epic. Which is why there is so much more to "Raintree County". The film chronicles John's life from his modest beginnings in the titular Indiana county, where he graduates from high school with a passion for discovering life's secrets, fueled by eccentric his eccentric professor, Jerusalem Webster Stiles, and follows him through his rocky marriage to Southern belle Susanna Drake, the Civil War and ultimately back to Raintree County. Much of the film's negative reactionary legacy is due to its then record budget (although in its defense, you can see every penny on screen, as clearly no expense was spared) and the fact that star Montgomery Clift was nearly killed in a horrific car accident in the middle of filming. The production had to shut down for three months while Clift's face was surgically repaired, but even though he was able to resume working, he and the production operated underneath a dark cloud for the remainder of the shoot. While this unfortunate accident definitely leaves its mark on the production (half of Clift's face was rendered immobile, and his speech pattern changed significantly) both literally and figuratively, the film is still incredibly impressive because it not only is a gorgeous, sprawling story filled with scenic backgrounds, beautiful music and colorful costumes and characters, but it is also grounded in profound ideas and intensely dramatic problems and situations. "Raintree County" is hardly the empty spectacle history would have you believe it is today.

As the film opens, John and Nell are two idealistic young lovers. Inspired by the legend of the raintree Johnny Appleseed was said to have planted deep in a local swamp, John attempts to find the tree, which his favorite professor tells him holds the meaning of life. After his search yields embaressing results, Nell is the only one to comfort John, who is ridiculed by the town braggarts and toughs. John is desperate to find the answers to life, and believes he can do this by acheiving greatness, which prompts him to challenge the leader of the town's scoundrels, Flash Perkins, self proclaimed "fastest man in the county", to a foot race. After winning the race, John is struck by the vision of Susanna Drake, a beautiful young woman in town to settle the estate of her aunt and uncle. Immediately forsaking the chaste love of the less attractive Nell, John falls deeply in love with Susanna, and follows her back to her home town of New Orleans. It is there he learns of Susanna's family's dark past; her parents died in a mysterious fire when she was a little girl, a horrible memory Susanna has buried underneath layers of guilt, paranoia and psychosis. She also seems to have inherited her mother's illness: extreme mental instability, as well as the South's perspective on slavery, which clashes with the abolitionist minded John. Turned off to the advances of Susanna, John returns to Raintree County, only to be followed by Susanna who tells him she is pregnant and that they must marry, which John consents to. It would prove to be the biggest regret of his life.

Soon after they are married Susanna confesses to John that she is not pregnant and that she only said that because she needs him. John is clearly upset at Susanna, but he also pities her, so they remain together and eventually do have a son. John even convinces them to move back to Raintree County with him, where he becomes a teacher. Everything is relatively peaceful until Susanna is overcome by one of her fits and makes off with their son, smuggling them across the Mason-Dixon line. The significance of that being that the Civil War has just begun and John now must face a choice: go against his pacifist ideals and join the war to get access across the border between North and South, or remain in Raintree County and never see his wife and son again. John chooses the former and sets off to the deep South, determined to find his wife and son. Eventually John does find Susanna, at an institution where she has been committed, and learns what really happened to her parents. After he mother became an invalid, her father began an affair with Susanna's maid, a slave woman. During a brief time when her mother regained her senses, she learned of her husband's lover, trapped both of them in their large house and burned it to the ground. A house slave managed to rescue young Susanna, and it is with him that John finds his son and learns the whole truth. The war now over, John returns home to Raintree County with Susanna and their son, but Susanna is beyond the point of saving. She tries to run away with their son a final time, and when the search party finds them, deep in the swamp John explored years ago, Susanna is dead. Ironically enough, John finds his son nearby, but fails to notice that he is hiding under the shade of the rain tree. The film's conclusion is extremely bleak: anyone seeking to gain complete understanding of the mysteries of life is doomed to suffer for their lofty goals. Much like Icarus, who was blessed with flight thanks to his father's invention and died when he got too close to the sun he sought to understand as no mortal had before, John's search for the rain tree only left him a broken hearted man, wondering what happened to the blissful days before he became consumed by his journey. "Raintree County" is an incredibly thought provoking film which unfortunately did not find its audience in 1957; as I said before, it was dismissed as MGM's blatant attempt to cash in on the memory of "Gone With the Wind", yet "Lawrence of Arabia" grappled with the same philosophical ideals to great acclaim only four short years later. It just goes to show that sometimes a film is unjustly maligned, and I only hope that one day this film is given its proper recognition.