And so the environmentalist shall lie down with the swamp rat under the shelter of Protest. Such, at least, is my takeaway from the best scene in this flawed but interesting 1958 Nicholas Ray film where the Man From The Audubon Society and the King Of The Crackers are drunkenly united in their dislike of modern, urban civilization and, in so doing, anticipate the 1960s counter culture by at least eight years.
It's fashionable in film circles to disparage this Ray work and cast as the villain producer/writer Budd Schulberg who fired his Genius Director toward the end of shooting and took his place behind the camera. I somewhat subscribe to this view although with the fairly large caveat that The Genius was injesting heroin at the time, a rather significant detail the auteurists tend to omit. Whoever is to blame, there is no getting around the fact that large swaths of the film involving the early settlement of Miami and the love affair between Christopher Plummer and Chana Eden are as dull as a Marlins double header and that Burl Ives' performance is over the top pretty much throughout rather than in just certain parts of the film that Schulberg may have helmed. So let's give it a generous B minus for the Great Protest as well as other good red neck stuff like the elemental fight for sleeping quarters and the Everglades floozies who Ives so admires.
PS...I notice that Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter, who did the music, did not get a credit. Anti Schulberg Protest?
PSS...An early Peter Falk performance does not make a strong impression. Gypsy Rose Lee, however, does, especially from the neck down.
