Load of rubbish!!

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

One of those movie experiences that is so good it makes you realize you've been grading everything else on a curve.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

A muddled attempt to achieve a great movie that fails on nearly every level and an absolute waste of time to watch unless you are into unintentional camp failures.

This soap opera really sprawls over the years before and after the Civil War. Montgomery Clift is a quiet homegrown college graduate in mutual love with pretty young Eva Marie Saint. They seem fated for each other. They'll probably be married, raise a number of surviving children, and live in a white two-story house on the outskirts of Fairhaven in Raintree County, Indiana. But then, the luscious Southern belle, Elizabeth Taylor, visits Fairhaven. She and Clift fall in love forever after.But dark Elizabeth is Veronica to Saint's blond Betty. Or is it the other way around? No matter. Anyway they have contrasting personalities: the intensely passionate Taylor and the winsome and innocent Saint. Saint, for instance, would never dream of putting out for handsome, intelligent, and sensitive Monty, whereas Taylor does so on their second or third date and then LIES to him about having gotten pregnant. He doesn't mind one way or the other, besotted as he is.I don't know whether it's worthwhile trying to get through the plot. It's probably been done elsewhere, and I'm too tired to trace the trips, the outbursts of anger and guilt, Sherman's march through Georgia, and the finale, which no power on earth could force me to reveal. Much of it has to do with the fear of having a touch of the tar brush in one's blood.But I must say, New Orleans is given rather a bad rap as a representative Southern city. It wasn't like any of the others. It had an animated and rich multi-ethnic heritage at the time -- American, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and African. Edgar Degas visited French relatives there late in the '19th century. Slaves of course but not nearly as brutal a system as elsewhere. William Tecumseh Sherman taught at Louisiana State Seminary of Learning & Military Academy, later to become Louisiana State University.Others have claimed that it was easy to tell the difference between pre- and post-accident scenes of Montgomery Clift but I couldn't. As for the accident, Clift was doing booze and other substances to excess on a daily basis during the shooting. I mean, eating steaks he'd spilled on the floor and so on. After an evening at Liz Taylor's manse perched on a hill, he drove drunkenly down the winding road and didn't quite make it.Neither the accident nor the booze seemed to interfere with his acting, although the part of the pathetic loner in "A Place in the Sun" suited him better than the idealist he's forced to portray here. Elizabeth Taylor is blindingly beautiful. Many of her films cast her has a frustrated nut job. Eva Marie Saint has the more sympathetic role as the unspectacular girl from home who never manages to shrug off her love for Clift.It's long. It has an overture and even an entr'acte, evocative photography by Robert Surtees, and a lushly orchestrated but fulsome score by Johnny Green. It's no "Gone With the Wind," though, partly because it substitutes anguish for laughs.

Montgomery Clift plays Johnny, a sensitive school teacher in antebellum Indiana, Raintree County. Johnny is in love with Nell (Eva Marie Saint) until southern belle Susanna (Liz Taylor) shows up to settle some estate matters. It doesn't take much encouragement from Susanna for Johnny to take up with her and forsake the saintly Nell. Johnny marries Susanna and they move to New Orleans where Susanna is comfortably ensconced in a wealthy family where slavery is not questioned. Johnny gets a gut load of the slave south and forces a move back to Raintree County where Susanna is out of her element and uncomfortable. She continues to be haunted by an incident from her childhood involving her father, her mother, a slave, and a fire. The symbol of a golden rain tree is central. It appears that if anyone finds this mythical tree, the meaning of life would be revealed and all problems would be solved (or some such thing). I guess we have to accept the search for this tree as metaphor, since early on Johnny takes off into the woods wandering around aimlessly searching for it with no apparent hint of where it might be. Almost drowning, he fails on this attempt. Later, as Susanna starts to slip into madness, she flees home to embark on a similarly random search for the fabled tree. I will not spoil the story by revealing whether the rain tree remains undiscovered by the end of the movie.Johnny joins the Union Army where it is implied that he does so to search for his missing wife, which seems to be an odd way to execute such a search. Maybe he was conscripted? The movie misses an opportunity here to discuss conscription during the Civil War.Hard to believe that this movie did not win an Oscar for best costume design. Some of the set pieces in the south are exquisitely filmed. Of course Liz is costumed to take advantage of her beauty.The A-list actors never created characters that seemed real to me. Eva Marie Saint was wasted in playing the sweet, good girl. Liz Taylor seemed to be acting more than getting into her role. From her work here you would never guess that she had it in her to give us her Oscar winning performance as Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Montgomery Clift is fine as the sensitive, morally upright Johnny, but he can play those parts without breaking a sweat. The generic score is suitable for a 1950s big budget Hollywood movie.

I feel really guilty because my partner of 40 years, who is an avid film collector, fished this tape out of his vast repository (5000 films) and set it up so I could watch it. Since his media center is in one room and our eating space in another (the kitchen)I was running back and forth between the movie and my breakfast lasagne waiting breathlessly for La Liz's entrance which I caught just in time between bites of food and of course she was ravishing as always and utterly the center of attention in every shot, everyone else fading into the woodwork - there will never be a star to equal her! But alas the script is a muddled mess and there is no question the studio (MGM)could not have found a worse writer than they did - I looked him up here and he did nothing to warrant being asked to adapt Raintree County from the book which he did along with the book's author. Right off the bat both the story and the central character (The Professor) are just plain silly with heartthrob Clift running off into a swamp in his Sunday Best for absolutely no reason and the professor running off with some man's wife. What all this has to do with the main storyline is anyone's guess, but after reading the synopsis of the story here I realized that poor MGM in its quest to film a sequel to GWTW failed miserably with this pathetic attempt. As the old saying says, you can't go home again!