LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Raintree County
built 655 days ago
In a way, Raintree County is a dream inside a dream. The Gnostic Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who loved Shakespeare and Walt Whitman more than his contemporary Latin American colleagues, would have recognized Lockeridge's position with sympathy. The protagonist is John Wickliff Shawnessy, an aspiring poet, who only daydreams of writing a great book which would re-create a new American canon - actually meaning the work in hand, created by Lockridge. Lockridge's self-absorbed scope ... became a target of Baldwin's criticism. "Americans passionately believe in their avowed ideals, amorphous as they are, and are terrified of waking from a radiant dream," he summarized in his review. "Raintree County is a kind of ultimate defense of the dreaming and the dream."
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R[A]intree County, a first novel by Ross Lockridge, Jr., is a whale of a book in every sense. It took six years to write (after several years of research), runs to 1060 pages, has won the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer $150,000 award, is the January Book-of-the-Month Club selection and a sure best-seller. Its merits as literature are a different matter.
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Conceived as a Gone With the Wind for the CinemaScope generation, Raintree County wasn't quite as successful as its role model, but it still proved a moneyspinner for MGM. Elizabeth Taylor stars as a spoiled Southern belle who falls in love with pacifistic Indiana youth Montgomery Clift. Though Clift is engaged to Eva Marie Saint, what Taylor wants, Taylor gets, and she isn't above using the dirtiest of deceptions to win Clift's affections. When the Civil War break out, Clift, a staunch abolitionist, joins the Union, much to the dismay of true-to-Dixie Taylor. While Clift is off fighting the war, Taylor descends into a depression that deepens into insanity. At war's end, Clift tries to come to terms with Taylor's lunacy for the sake of their child.
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On May 12, 1956, while filming Raintree County, he smashed his car into a tree after leaving a party at the home of his Raintree County co-star Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband Michael Wilding. Hearing the sounds of the crash, Elizabeth Taylor raced to Clift's side and kept him from choking to death by removing two of his teeth, which had become lodged in his throat. Clift needed extensive reconstructive surgery on his face (although his broken nose was never repaired) and he returned after several weeks to finish the film, his handsome appearance permanently disfigured. The "before and after" face of Clift is apparent in the movie. By this time, Clift had become hooked on alcohol and pain pills, and his health deteriorated. Taylor and Clift remained close friends until his death.
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Raintree County, MGM's attempt at a '50s Gone With the Wind, is mostly remembered today as the film Montgomery Clift was making when he had a disfiguring, near-fatal car accident. Cineasts with a morbid streak may have difficulty pinpointing the post-crash actor due to the wide-screen transfer premiering on this laserdisc (excellent except that it reduces the overall image to a thin stripe through the center of a television screen). But in any case, the movie itself is so insufferably dull, it's hardly worth the effort. After all, what kind of Civil War epic saves its battle scenes for the last third of an overly generous 168-minute length? And how's this for a lame plot gimmick: Elizabeth Taylor's character thinks she may be illegitimate and black.
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Raintree County is ... filled with imagery about the land. Shawnessy reflects on the deforestation that took place before he was born and the former vastness of the forest. The South Field of the family farm had once been "part of the great oak forest which apparently had covered several square miles of the land around the Home Place." This forest was "itself a remnant of that legendary great forest which extended clear across the Mississippi Valley and of which there were still some dim recollections handed down from the earliest settlers and explorers" (53).
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